Latigo • User Guide
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English
The Play Page
The first page you’ll see when you start Latigo is the Play
Page. On this page you will find most of the general
controls for the whole percussion instrument, the types
of controls that affect all or most Tracks being played in a
Style. Let’s take a deeper look at what’s possible and what
might be useful when making music with Latigo.
Speed
The Speed control allows you to run Latigo at normal, half
or double your song tempo. This can be very useful in
some situations:
Maybe you’re working on a slow groove masterpiece that’s 80 beats per minute but running your host
application at 160, you’ve been working for months and you realize that the last thing you need is some
Congas in the middle eight, you load a Style in anticipation and your lovely delicate middle eight is now full of
drummers on Guarana, the cat gives birth, light bulbs explode..... Never fear, we at Wizoo value our cats and
our light bulbs, with a casual flick of the Speed switch to Half the world will become normal again and hey the
Latigos sound pretty good in there too.
Speed control can also be quite a useful creative tool, allowing you the flexibility to play a nice syncopated 80
BPM groove over a 160 bpm Drum’n’Bass track or an interesting half time groove over a 110 bpm pop song. It’s
up to you, Latigo has no tempo limits.
Variance
Variance is a sophisticated feature with a very simple control. What it does is replace percussion hits within
each Track with other percussion hits that sound similar from within the Style, in effect adding variation to each
Track. A setting of Max replaces a lot of hits with similar hits and the Off setting plays the groove exactly as the
original percussionists played it.
Timing
The Timing control might also be called humanize or even quantize. Setting Timing to the center value of fifty
percent plays the percussion grooves with all the natural anticipations and feel of the real players, increasing
the value towards Tight quantizes the timing to strict machine like precision, and decreasing towards Loose
exaggerates the natural live timing.
Quantize
Quantize sets a maximum musical timing resolution. Any percussion hits that fall outside of this timing grid
are removed. For example you may like a particular Style but there are a lot of 32nd and 64th note rolls and
fills and what you’d really like is for the groove to be simpler. Try setting Quantize to a value of 1/16th, all of the
busy fills are removed and only the notes that fall close to a 16th note in the bar remain, in effect simplifying
the groove. Of course you can simplify Styles quite a lot, right down to a1/4 note value.
Experimenting with combinations of the Tempo and Quantize features can lead to interesting and useful
rhythmic variations.
Swing
Swing is a feature most are familiar with. This control pushes the timing of all Tracks in a Style from their original
position in a groove towards a triplet timing. In some cases a Style is already naturally playing a triplet feel in
which case the Swing control pushes the triplet beats to an even later position in the bar.
