How-to Guide: Captain Deep.

Captain Deep is designed to integrate with Captain Chords to create bass-lines which complement the chord progressions created in Captain Chords. As such, Captain Deep should be opened while there is an instance of Captain Chords connected in your DAW.

Opening Captain Deep in your DAW

Select ‘Captain Deep’ from your AU or VST Instruments folder in your DAW. Add it to a new MIDI channel.

Connecting to Captain Chords

• Choose option to ‘CONNECT’ to Captain Chords.

Setting tab to link with Captain Chords

Captain Deep is designed to follow the chord progression created in Captain Chords for each individual tab, ‘VERSE’, ‘PRE CHORUS’, ‘CHORUS’ or ‘DROP’. Therefore, changes in Captain Chords’ Pre-Chorus tab will affect the notes in Captain Deep’s Pre-Chorus tab, too.

Jamming live with Captain Deep’s Play tab

Similar to Captain Chords, Captain Deep can also be played live using the Captain Play tab.

To start recording, press Space-bar. You can clear your recoring by pressing Clear next to the MIDI window.

• Use keys A – J to trigger individual notes (pitches) within your chosen key & scale.
• Keys above and below row A – J will trigger the notes an octave above or below.
• Bracket keys [ ] will move the four octave range up or down.

There are additional features within the Play tab in Captain Deep:

• Key and Scale. You can choose any key and scale, unrestricted by Captain Chords.
• Quantize. You can set the degree of quantization applied to your recordings in Play. Choose a quantization amount, the step-ratio and whether Note Start, Note End or both are affected.

Octave, shape and rhythm

When working inside tabs ‘VERSE’, ‘PRE CHORUS’, ‘CHORUS’ or ‘DROP’, the octave, shape and rhythm can be modified to taste.

• ‘OCTAVE’ – Use the arrow keys to select the desired octave between 1st & 7th.
• ‘SHAPE’ – Shape allows control over the progression of the bassline relative to the chords being triggered in Captain Chords. ‘FOLLOW THE CHORDS’ will force Captain Deep to play the bass-notes of each chord played in Captain Chords. ‘OPPOSITE MOVEMENT’ will force Captain Deep to play an alternative bassline progression based other notes within each chord and the key & scale. ‘MINIMUM ADJUSTMENT NECESSARY’ will play the bassline using only small leaps and minimal changes of note. ‘DON’T CHANGE MELODY’ Captain Deep will play only the root note of the key with no changes throughout the progression.

Rhythm

The Rhythm menu contains dozens of rhythmic patterns for your bass-line. Many have been taken from hit tracks across a range of genres. Rhythms are categorized Basic, Simple, Complex or New.

Choose a rhythm, and Captain Deep will play the root notes from Captain Chords in the selected rhythm template.

Sound presets and effects

Captain Deep has numerous sound presets and effects to choose from.

Using Melody with 3rd party instruments

In Captain Deep 5, we introduced native 3rd-party plugin hosting. Since Plugin Hosting is a brand new feature, we have deliberately only allowed certain plugin instruments to work in this feature as they have been tested and shown to cause no issues. 

We will be adding more features within plugin hosting and also whitelisting more 3rd party instruments as we develop the feature.

To enable 3rd party hosting, simply open Captain Deep, and select Plugins > VST Instrument, and press Scan. Captain Deep will scan your directories and add all whitelisted plugins to the VST Plugins menu inside Captain Deep.

Once the scan is complete, you will find all whitelisted plugins available in the VST Plugins menu. Simply press ‘Select Plugin’ to open the menu window.

3rd-party Plugin Hosting requires plugins to be located in the following locations on Windows machines: (On Mac OS, file location is not important.)

• C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VSTPlugins
• C:\Program Files\VSTPlugins
• C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST2 
• C:\Program Files\Common Files\Steinberg\VST2

If your VST instruments are not in any of these locations then they will not be found, regardless of whether they are supported.

3rd-party Plugin Hosting: General operation.

Once you have selected your 3rd-party plugin, whatever you have composed in Captain Deep will be played directly through your selected plugin. Any adjustments you make in your 3rd-party plugin will be instantly reflected.

Dragging your MIDI clip to the Captain Deep channel timeline in your DAW will now result in the bassline being played via your 3rd-party plugin.

To change plugin, simply click in the name of your currently selected plugin to open the plugins menu.

‘Hide Plugin’ will close the 3rd-party plugin window without disabling the instrument itself.

‘Show plugin’ reopens the plugin interface.

Captain Deep’s Reverb, Delay, Filter and Volume controls can be engaged at any time while using 3rd-party plugins, and will be applied on top of any effects inside the 3rd-party interface.

Should you need to disable or enable ‘Keep Playing Audio When Closed’, click ‘Audio’ next to the ‘VST Instruments’ tab, and toggle the button.

Note: When ‘Audio’ is selected, the 3rd-party Instrument will cease to be engaged, and sound will revert to the selected sound in Captain Deep’s sound library. However, to re-enable the 3rd-party instrument, re-select ‘VST Instruments’ after toggling the ‘Keep Playing Audio When Closed’ button.

lightbulb_outline Tip: We have added compatibility with most well-known VST Plugin Instruments, from manufacturers such as Arturia, Native Instruments, U-He and more. This list will continually reviewed, so if a plugin of yours isn’t displaying, please email us at [email protected] and we’ll look into it.

3rd-Party Plugin Hosting will be refined and improved in due course. In the meantime, if you have any issues please use the legacy method, detailed below:

• Similar to Captain Chords, Captain Melody can also use the generated MIDI to allow the sound source to come from a 3rd party soft-synth, or external hardware instrument.

Using Captain Deep with 3rd party instruments

You can route any MIDI-enabled software or hardware synth through Captain Deep. This allows you to use Captain Deep’s MIDI generator to playback sounds from 3rd party synths.

To achieve this, set Captain Deep to VST Output instead of Audio. Then, create a new MIDI channel for your 3rd-party synth, and set Captain Deep as the MIDI source. The exact procedure for this varies between DAWs.

NB: To route 3rd-party synths through Deep, you must use Captain Deep as a VST, not AU. For Logic users, use Captain Deep as a MIDI FX unit.

Using the MIDI Input tab

You can use Captain Plugins’ on-board sounds as a soft-synth by using the MIDI Input tab. Incoming MIDI signals, whether from a MIDI clip or keyboard, will trigger Captain Plugins’ sounds. You can choose the sound, adjust FX, volume and filter. However you cannot use Captain Plugins’ core functionality.

Troubleshooting

If your Captain Deep has any issues connecting to Captain Chords, double-check that it is still connected in Settings. The top menu marked ‘Connected To’ reveals whether or not you are connected to Captain Chords. Furthermore, if you have used more than one instance of Captain Chords at any time in your project, and Deep is not playing the right notes, check to see if it is connected to the correct instance of Chords.

If you have any functionality issues, check you are on the latest version, also in Settings.

Drop us an email any time at [email protected] for all support enquiries.

lightbulb_outline Tip: If one of your bass-lines is playing unexpectedly, while you have Captain Deep closed, check that you have ‘Keep Playing Audio When Close’ disabled – if you’re using a 3rd party plugin, you’ll need to return to the Audio window, disable the button, and go back to your 3rd party plugin tab.