PercX Manual

FAQ

This page will address some of the questions that have been raised by PercX customers and people who are interested in PercX. It'll be updated regularly.

How to download PercX

After you've set your password (via the e-mail you automatically get after purchase, please also remember to check your spam folder), you'll be redirected to your Auddict Account in order to download the installers for Windows / macOS. You can also access your Auddict Account after setting your password to re-download PercX at any time.

How to get the PRO collections

If you've bought PercX PRO, you've acquired all 5 collections currently available in PercX. However on the first install, it will just install the Core Kit by default. So if you ask yourself where the remaining stuff is, just head over to the store and press the SYNC button on the left. It will download the missing content in the background and soon you'll be able to enjoy the full content.

You can activate and use PercX on up to 8 computers with a single license. If you install PercX on a new system, press SYNC to download all you acquired collections.

Where is the SOLO Button

TLDR: Double click on the power button of each track.

Until now there is no SOLO button. We've designed the UI to keep the redundancy as low as possible, so we've coallascated the solo button and the power button functionality in one UI element. Since this is something that many people have stumbled over in the first reviews or feedback, we'll think about adding a solo button.

Why did you build a DAW inside a plugin so you can put a DAW inside a DAW? Are you crazy?

Excellent Question, dawg. We've started the development of PercX with one goal: we want to make an engine for percussion instruments that can play any percussion loop perfectly in sync in any tempo without artifacts and retain the ability to completely deconstruct them and rebuild them in an effective workflow. Most percussion sounds have a really simple genesis: somebody takes a wooden stick, beats something with it and lets it ring off. This procedure results in a "hit" with a decaying sound and you can just take the hit and place it where you want it in your music.
However, there are some kinds of sounds which to not have a 100% perceivable "hit": for example shakers produce a sound as soon as you move them, but you'd expect the "musical" accent to be somewhere where the movement reaches terminal velocity. And if you take processed sounds (eg. reverse cymbals or build ups that should end on a beat), this problem gets worse, because these kind of sounds have a really long "preroll", which, in PercX, looks like this:

If you want to edit a rhythm that uses one of these sounds in your DAW, you would have to deactivate quantisation, and move the notes somewhere before the beat in a trial and error manner until it matches the rhythm you expect to hear (and we all know the joy of doing this, then playing the sequence, stopping playback, move the note a litle bit more to the left and repeat). This is tempo dependent so as soon as you change the tempo, you need to reevaluate the "predelay" (also the preroll varies between RR variations, so the timing will get sloppy).

The engine of PercX - unlike a DAW which communicates with a plugin like a black box via MIDI - has knowledge of the preroll of every single sample and can adjust the predelay dynamically during tempo change and use it to snap the notes to their real "musical" position, so you can still rely on the quantisation raster in your editing workflow.

TLDR: Supporting percussion instruments with prerolls is the reason why we've went through the extremely tedious procedure of building a feature complete MIDI editor inside PercX, so you can modify the existing rhythms as well as create your own patterns without loosing the information of the prerolls.

Another major feature of PercX is the ability to scale down the dynamics of a loop by reducing the velocity of each note. Since this would also result in timing differences because of varying prerolls, this feature also only works if the pattern data is being created inside the plugin.

Can I change the time signatures

The content in PercX uses different time-signatures to match a broad range of musical genres, however if you like a certain kit, but it doesn't fit in the time signature you want it to be, you can always change that. On the Edit Tab, you can change the time signature to any arbitrary type. However since all we've done right now is a mathematical change, the actual rhythm of the music will still be the old time signature (so in case of a 15/16 time signature, it'll just truncate the last sixteenth note). In this case you need to experiment with changing the rhythmic structure in the EDIT tab to match your new time signature.

I accidentally chose a too high plugin resolution. How can i reset the interface?

No worries. You can open PercXs settings in a file editor. In the Appdata folder (win: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Auddict\PercX\ ) (macOS: ~/Application )
you can find a GeneralSettings.xml file in which you can reset the scale factor back to "1", to reset the interface to 100%.