Classic view
Classic view is designed to discover the depth and power of Kontakt's engine over time, as you explore building your own instruments.
The Classic view in Kontakt is designed to discover the depth and power of its engine over time. It can be configured in a variety of ways to best suit your needs and preferred workflows. You can load instruments, combine them in multis with flexible MIDI and audio routing, and explore building your own instruments. The building blocks that make up your instruments are hierarchically organized to turn MIDI data into sound. Additionally, the Classic View offers you the infrastructure to perform a wide range of peripheral management, configuration, and monitoring tasks.
Classic view contains the following main areas and elements:
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Header: Lets you open the Library browser, show or hide elements in the user interface, and access options in the File menu. Additionally, the displays and meters keep you informed about the software status. For more information, refer to Header.
Side Pane: Provides functions for managing your collection of Kontakt-relevant files. In the screenshot, it’s currently switched to the Libraries tab, which contains easy access to your Kontakt libraries. For more information, refer to Side Pane (Classic view).
Master Editor: Contains global controls that affect the behavior of all Instruments in your Multi, as well as some common utility functions. For more information, refer to Master Editor.
Rack: Displays all Instruments in the current Multi. The Rack area is where one or more Instruments are loaded into the Multi. For more information, refer to Instrument Rack.
Instrument Header Contains the Instrument’s name and various parameters, such as MIDI input channel, output level, panning position, and tuning. For more information, refer to Instrument header.
Outputs Section: Displays a channel strip for each configured Output Channel, plus four Aux Channels. For more information, refer to Outputs Section.
On-screen keyboard: Displays a virtual on-screen keyboard that you can use to play instruments with your mouse, and visualize key ranges. For more information, refer to On-screen keyboard.
Info Pane: Displays details of the selected Instrument file below the Side Pane, and a brief explanation of the control at the mouse position below the Rack. For more information, refer to Info pane.
Building blocks
The full functional range of Kontakt’s sampling environment is split into smaller sections, which allow you to focus on specific tasks in your musical process. This functional division is also reflected on the user interface, with elements relevant to each other or a specific task kept within a distinct area, pane, tab, or dialog window.
Beginning with the smallest element and working upwards:
A Sample is a simple audio file on your hard disk. Samples may occasionally carry additional metadata, but in their purest form, they don’t provide anything other than a recorded audio signal. An example of a Sample would be the digital recording of a single piano note. Samples can appear in various formats, such as WAV, AIFF, or REX.
A Zone is Kontakt’s way of putting a Sample into a playable context. Think of a Zone as a wrapper around a single Sample; in addition to the Sample itself, the Zone contains information about which MIDI data will make Kontakt trigger this Sample, at what pitch the sample was recorded, and a few other details. An example of a Zone would be the aforementioned piano Sample, with the attached information that it should be played without any transposition whenever Kontakt receives an F3 note with a velocity value between 64 and 95. As Zones don’t contain much additional data, they only exist within a larger context and can’t be saved and loaded separately.
A Group is a container that allows you to combine a number of Zones. As every Zone belongs to a Group (and only one), each Instrument will contain at least one Group; usually, you’ll add several more Groups in order to combine your Zones by means of distinctive aspects — the aspects you choose are entirely up to you, but there are some common approaches. All Zones that belong to a specific Group will share a number of common parameters and signal flow modules; for instance, their Samples will be played by the same sound Source Module. Consequently, if you want some of your Zones played by a Source Module with different settings, you’ll need to separate them into their own Group first. In the course of this manual, modules that pertain to a Group are being referred to as “Group-level modules”. A typical example of a Group would be “all Zones in my Instrument that should be played at mezzoforte level”. Groups can be saved and loaded separately as files with an .nkg extension.
An Instrument is the entity you’ll encounter most frequently when you’re working with ready-made Kontakt libraries. As its name suggests, it’s the virtual equivalent of an acoustic instrument — when being played, it produces a specific range of sounds, possibly at different timbres, dynamics, and articulations. Technically, a Kontakt Instrument is a wrapper for a number of Groups, whose output signals will be mixed and pass a common signal chain; the modules in this chain are said to reside on the “Instrument level”. A typical example of an Instrument would be “a piano”. Instruments can be saved and loaded separately; native Kontakt Instrument files have an .nki extension.
An Instrument Bank is the only optional element of Kontakt’s core hierarchy; in other words, you don’t have to use this feature if you don’t want to. Instrument Banks allow you to combine up to 128 Instruments into a container that responds to a single MIDI input channel; you can then switch the active Instrument by sending MIDI program change messages on this channel. This allows you to create General MIDI-compatible sound sets, or combine Instruments that contain various articulations of the same acoustic instrument into one slot. A typical example of an Instrument Bank would be a number of violin Instruments that contain legato, detaché, staccato, and pizzicato Samples, respectively, with the different articulations and playing techniques being switchable via program change messages. Instrument Banks can be saved and loaded separately as files with an .nkb extension.
Finally, a Multi lets you freely combine up to 64 Instruments into a production setup. The Multi is the topmost element of Kontakt’s core hierarchy. Each Instrument in a Multi responds to a specific MIDI channel and will send its output signal to a specific Output Channel, where the signals from all Instruments will be mixed and passed on to a physical output of your audio interface or, alternatively, to your host program. A typical example of a Multi would be “a jazz trio ensemble”. Multis can be loaded and saved as files with an .nkm extension.
Infrastructure
In addition to the individual building blocks that make up your instruments, Kontakt offers infrastructure that will simplify your everyday work:
The Side Pane is located on the left side of your Kontakt window and can optionally be hidden to save screen space; it provides a convenient way to organize and access all Kontakt-relevant files on your system, such as Instruments, Multis, or Banks. The Side pane also offers a number of additional utility functions. For more information, refer to Side Pane (Classic view).
The Rack occupies the largest amount of space in your Kontakt window; it operates in one of two different modes. In Multi Instrument mode, the Rack will provide an overview of all Instruments that are currently in your Multi, along with some general parameters. Clicking on the wrench icon on the left side of an Instrument Header will switch the Rack into Instrument Edit mode, which provides a flexible and adjustable view of the contained module panels, editors, and modulation tables of this Instrument. For more information, refer to Instrument Rack.
The Outputs section is a mixer-style environment in which you can adjust output levels, assign Output Channels to physical outputs, and use signal processing modules that operate on the output signals of all Instruments in your Multi. For more information, refer to Outputs Section.
The virtual on-screen keyboard, the Master Editor, the Info Pane and the Options dialog provide various utility functions and are being explained in detail within their respective sections of this manual. For more information, refer to Header.
The Library Browser provides access to all your your Kontakt Factory Libraries, Instruments, Snapshots and Multis, as well as your custom User content and presets. For more information, refer to Browser and presets.
Instrument Rack
Learn about the functionality of the Rack Multi Instrument Mode in Kontakt, which includes the Performance View, Purge menu, and Instrument Headers.
The Rack is where you will spend most of the time when working with Kontakt. It operates in one of two modes: the Multi Instrument mode allows you view and edit your Multi and the Performance views of the Instruments in it, while the Instrument Edit mode lets you edit the inner workings of a single Instrument.
In Multi Instrument mode, any Instrument in the Multi will be shown as a horizontal Instrument Header, which contains the Instrument name and related settings. Your Multi can contain up to 64 Instruments, which will be spread across 4 pages of up to 16 Instruments each.
Rack header
At the top of the Rack section is the Rack header, which is always visible as long as the Rack is in Multi Instrument mode. Use the header to switch between the four Multi pages, show or hide Aux send controls, and resize all Instrument Headers.
The Rack header contains the following features and controls:
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Multi Name: A text field contains the name of your currently loaded Multi; if you have just started Kontakt, this will read New (default), as this is the default Multi file that will be loaded on startup. To change the name, click the text field and enter a new one.
Multi Browse (<> icons): The left and right arrow buttons will replace your Multi with the previous or next one from the same directory, if there are any.
Pages: Four page buttons allow you to switch between the four Instrument pages. Each Multi can contain up to 64 Instruments, arranged across four pages of 16 Instruments each. You can use these pages to keep your Instruments in separate categories when your Multi is very large, or you can just switch to the next page when the 16 available Instrument slots of your current one are occupied.
Multi Workspace Buttons: These three buttons alter the workspace in some way, displaying or hiding certain controls, or minimizing all Instruments at once.
KSP: Toggles the visibility of a global Script Editor pane, where you can create, edit and manage Multi Scripts that operate on a higher level than normal Instrument Scripts.
Aux: Toggles the display of Aux send controls that enable you to adjust the signal level at which each Instrument is routed to the Aux Channels. For more information, refer to Working with Aux Channels.
Minimize/Maximize all Instrument Headers: Toggles all Instrument Headers in your multi between their minimized and maximized size. At their normal size, Instrument Headers contain more information, but also occupy more screen space. Use this feature to see an overview of all Instruments on a page or to save screen space when you're not planning to adjust any Instrument parameters. For more information, refer to Instrument header (minimized)
Note
Another option is to assign all Instruments on a page to channels of the same MIDI port; if you have four ports at your disposal, this method lets you easily keep track of your MIDI assignments in large Multis. However, assigning several Instruments to the same MIDI channel is a quick way of creating layered sounds.
Instrument header
Whenever you open a new Instrument, it will appear in the Rack as an Instrument Header. Each Instrument Header can be optionally reduced in size. At regular size, as shown below, the header displays parameters that describe how the Instrument will work in the context of the current Multi. It also provides some controls to adjust parameters like the Instrument’s output volume, panning position, and solo/mute status.
The Instrument Header contains the following settings and controls:
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Instrument Options (cog icon): Opens the Instrument Options dialog, where you can access features that affect the whole instrument such as voice stealing, MIDI transposition, and key/velocity range.
Quick-Load Menu: Opens a dropdown menu that gives access to your Quick-Load Browser.
Instrument Name: Displays the Instrument's name. Edit the name by clicking on it and entering a new one. The name displayed here will be identical to the file name (without the .nki extension) when you load and save the Instrument.
Instrument Icon: Kontakt Instrument creators can choose from a range of icons that indicate the general category of their creation. Some libraries will also use custom icons. Clicking this icon will toggle the Instrument’s Performance View on or off, if available.
MIDI Channel: Indicates the currently assigned MIDI input channel that the Instrument will respond to. Clicking it will open a drop-down menu that allows you to select a new MIDI channel for this Instrument. The Omni setting will make it respond to MIDI data on any channel; below it, the available ports of your MIDI interface will appear as sub-menus, each one containing the 16 channels of the respective ports. Note that the maximum number of distinct MIDI channels that you can use is 64 in the stand-alone version of Kontakt, and 16 when using Kontakt as a plug-in.
Output Channel: Displays the currently selected Output Channel that will receive the output signal from this Instrument. Clicking on the channel name will open a drop-down menu with all currently defined Output Channels, where you can assign the Instrument to a different channel.
Memory: Indicates how much system memory is currently being used by the Sample data of this Instrument.
Max Voices: Defines the maximum number of voices that the Instrument may use at any time. Change this value by clicking on it, then dragging the mouse up or down. If you notice that the number of currently used voices rises to the Max Voices value during play and you hear that voices are being cut off, try increasing this value.
Purge: This button opens a drop-down menu that lets you execute the functions related to Kontakt’s purge mechanism on a per-instrument basis. The purge facility is explained in section Purge menu.
Voices: This number indicates how many voices are currently being used by the Instrument.
Previous / Next buttons: The left/right arrow buttons exchange the Instrument with the previous or next one from the same directory, respectively.
Snapshot View: Provides access to Snapshot features including loading, saving and deleting Snapshots. For more information, refer to Using Snapshots.
Info View: Provides access to the Instrument's Audio and MIDI configuration, as well as Voices and Memory consumption.
Solo button: When activated, all other Instruments in the Multi are muted, and the output signal can be heard in isolation. How Kontakt will handle multiple Solo selections is determined by the Solo Mode setting, refer to Handling.
Mute button: When activated, the current Instrument is muted, thus temporarily removing its output signal from the Output Channel.
Pan: Adjusts the panorama position of the Instrument’s output signal.
Volume: Adjusts the output volume of this Instrument. Select whether the default value of Volume sliders will be -6 dB or 0 dB in the Options dialog.
PV: Toggles the Performance View panel on and off, if PV is available in the instrument. For more information, refer to Performance view.
Aux: Shows and hides the row of Aux send sliders below this Instrument Header.
Minimize View: Minimizes the Instrument Header. This allows you to adjust the display sizes of headers individually.
Remove Instrument: Removes the respective Instrument from the Multi.
Level Meters: LED-style bar graph meters indicate the current output levels across all channels of this Instrument.
Tune: Adjusts the pitch of the Instrument. Turning the knob left or right will increase or decrease the pitch, respectively. The control covers a range of +/- 3 octaves and moves in semitone increments. Hold [Shift] while adjusting the control for fine tuning.
Purge menu
The purge mechanism in Kontakt keeps track of which Samples in an Instrument have been actually triggered since the Instrument was loaded, and gives you the option of removing all other Samples from the Instrument. This way, you can reduce the number of Samples that are being kept in memory to the subset that you have actually used in your arrangement.
Using the purge facility, you can play your part once — this will allow Kontakt to gather which Samples are actually being used — and then eliminate all unused Samples from the memory. The Instrument will work as it did before, but notes or velocity ranges that didn’t occur during the analyzing phase won’t play anymore. If you change your mind later, you can reload all Samples with one mouse click.
Notice
Using purge functions like this can cause problems with instruments that randomly trigger samples, or use round robin options. Check the library specification before you use these options.
A purge menu is available for each Instrument; this allows you to use the purge feature on Instruments whose parts are already finished, while keeping others that are still in active use loaded in their entirety. You can access the local purge menu of an Instrument at the right side of the Instrument Header.
The Purge menu contains the following functions:
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reset markers: Deletes all flags, thereby resetting all data that Kontakt has gathered about Sample usage so far. Whenever Kontakt plays a Zone in your Instrument, it will flag the respective Sample as being used. After you have finished working on a part, you should select this function once and then play your part; this way, only the notes that have actually made it into the final part will be flagged as used. Afterwards, you can proceed by choosing the update sample pool function described below.
update sample pool: Removes all Samples that are not currently flagged as being used from memory, and reloads any currently purged Samples that have been triggered since the last purge operation. In other words, it brings the sample pool in sync with the Sample usage flags it has gathered since the last purge operation.
purge all samples: Unloads all Samples from RAM. This allows you to reverse the usual purge process: you can play your arrangement in a “silent run”, and then load only the Samples that are actually being used via the Update Sample Pool command afterwards.
reload all samples: Reloads all Samples, reverting any previous purge actions.
Instrument header (minimized)
If you want to save screen space, you can switch all (or a selection of individual) Instrument Headers to a minimized view, which contains only the most important parameters and controls.
In this mode, the Instrument Header includes only the Instrument Options button, the Instrument Name field, Solo and Mute buttons, Output Volume, Pan sliders, Level Meters, and buttons for removing this Instrument from your Multi and switching the header back to its normal size. For more information on the related controls, refer to Instrument header.
To minimize all Instrument Headers:
Click the Minimize All Instrument Headers button, on the right side of Rack header.
All Instrument Headers in the Multi Rack are minimized.
To minimize individual Instrument Headers:
Click the Minimize Instrument Header button, on the right side of the Instrument Header.
The selected Instrument Header in the Multi Rack is minimized.
Performance view
Using Kontakt’s internal scripting language, an Instrument can provide a custom control panel called a Performance View. This feature provides Instrument-specific settings in a user-friendly way that doesn’t require access to Instrument Edit mode.
All Instruments included in the Kontakt library provide Performance Views, with various styles, controls, and features. Some Instruments include performance controls, sound editing parameters, marcos, and settings relating to Kontakt's operation and playback.
In Performance View, an Instrument's custom panel will appear below the Instrument Header in the Rack.
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Notice
Note that Performance Views appear only below Instrument Headers at normal size, not below minimized headers. Also, you can turn control panels of Scripts in your Instrument into Performance Views yourself. For more information, refer to Editing and Saving a Script.
Instrument Edit Mode
This chapter covers all the different functions to manipulate a Kontakt instrument in the Instrument Edit Mode.
Whenever you edit an Instrument, the Rack will switch into Instrument Edit mode. In this mode, all other Instrument Headers will no longer be visible. You can still access them via the Instrument Navigator pane of the Side pane, refer to Instrument Navigator Pane. Instead, the whole Rack space will be dedicated to the editors, control panels, and modulation tables of your selected Instrument.
When in Instrument Edit mode, the Rack header allows you to manage your Groups, Undo or Redo your most recent actions, save the Instrument, or switch the edit view to the previous or next Instrument in your Multi.
To edit an Instrument:
Click the wrench icon of its Instrument Header when the Rack is in Multi Instrument mode.
The Rack Header
When switching to Instrument Edit mode, the header at the top of the Rack pane will change. In Instrument Edit mode, the Rack header contains the following controls:
Exit button: Reduces the Instrument and returns to the Multi Instrument view.
Displayed Group: Indicates the name of the Group whose parameters are currently being displayed by the Group level modules. When you click it, a drop-down menu that contains all Groups in your Instrument will appear. Choosing one of these Groups will select it for display and editing.
Edited Groups: Indicates whether parameter adjustments on the Group level will affect just one or multiple Groups. If it reads Group, any parameter changes will only affect the current Group; Multi indicates that multiple Groups are currently selected for editing, and All warns you that all Groups of your Instrument are currently selected for editing.
Edit All Groups button: Toggles the selection of all Groups for editing, with the same function as the Edit All Groups button in the upper left corner of the Group Editor.
Undo button: When you click the circled arrow of this button, your last action will be undone. As Kontakt keeps a log of your actions, you can revert more than one action to return to a specific point in your editing history. Clicking on the small down arrow icon at the right of this button will open your edit history in a dialog window; selecting an action will take you back to this point in your edit history. Note that the Undo and Redo facilities are only available when you’re working in Instrument Edit mode. To enable the Undo function, open the Handling tab in Global Options and select the Enableundo option.
Redo button: If you reverted one or more actions via the Undo button and change your mind, you can restore parts of your changes by clicking on the circled arrow of the Redo button. Note that you have to do this right after using the Undo function; if you perform any other actions after using Undo, your edit history cannot be restored. Just like the Undo button, the Redo button will open a history list dialog when you click the small down arrow at its right side.
Quick-Save: Saves your Instrument in its current state; if you haven’t saved it before, a Save dialog will appear, otherwise Kontakt will overwrite the last version right away. Use this button generously when you’re in the middle of complex editing tasks; this way, you can always revert to the last saved version if something goes wrong.
Previous / Next Instrument buttons: Switches the Instrument Edit view to the previous or next Instrument in your Multi.
Instrument Edit Mode
Below its own header, the Rack displays the Instrument Header of your edited Instrument (this is identical to the one that’s being displayed in Multi Instrument mode), a row of buttons that will show and hide editors for various aspects of your Instrument, and a flexible vertical view in which you can access all editors, modulation and routing tables, control panels, and signal processing chains of your Instrument. The four sections at the bottom of the Rack — labeled Buses, Insert Effects, Send Effects, and Modulation — can be optionally hidden from view by clicking the button next to their titles. When you choose to show all details, the Instrument Edit view of a full-sized, complex Instrument might look similar to this:
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This is the Instrument Edit rack, with all editors and panels open; you don’t have to know every panel inside out before you can create useful Instruments or edit existing ones. Conquer the interface one step at a time and refer to this manual and the Info Pane whenever you are unsure of a specific knob, button or menu function
The Instrument Edit rack contains the following panels and features:
Instrument Header: This is the same header that is displayed when the Rack is in Multi Instrument mode. You can switch back to the Multi Instrument mode by clicking on the wrench icon. For more information, refer to Instrument header
Editor Buttons: These buttons toggle the display of various editor panels in the Instrument Edit view. The Mapping Editor and Wave Editor buttons have an arrow icon on their right sides; clicking on this when you’re running Kontakt in stand-alone mode will open the respective editor in a separate window. The leftmost button, labeled Instrument Options, is special and will be explained below.
Script Editor (visible if the Script Editor button is activated): In this editor, you can load Scripts, access their user interfaces, and edit their source code. For more information, refer to Script Editor.
Group Editor (visible if the Group Editor button is activated): This is where you select, edit, and manage the Groups in your Instrument. For more information, refer to Group Editor.
Mapping Editor (visible if the MappingEditor button is activated): This editor lets you add Samples to your Instrument, map them to the keyboard, assign them to velocity ranges, and manage the Zones in your Instrument. For more information, refer to Mapping Editor.
Wave Editor (visible if the WaveEditor button is activated): This is where you work on the Sample level to create loops, define Slice markers for rhythmic Samples, create Zone Envelopes, and perform destructive audio editing operations. For more information, refer to Wave Editor.
Source Module: This core module takes care of the Sample playback mode for the Group. For more information, refer to Source Module.
Source Modulation Router: In this table, you can define modulation assignments, which change parameters of the source module over time in a variety of different ways.
Group InsertEffects: This chain consists of 8 slots, each of which can take up a signal processing module. Each Group has its own Insert Effects chain, which will operate polyphonically (i.e. on the signal of each voice that originates in this Group separately). For more information, refer to Group insert effects.
Signal Processor Controls (visible if the Edit button on the chain module above is activated): This panel contains the controls of a signal processing module in the Group Insert Effects chain. For more information, refer to Group insert effects.
Amplifier Module: This module will shape the volume, pan, and phase of the source signals in each Group. For more information, refer to Amplifier Module.
Modulation Router (visible if the ChannelRouting button on the Amplifier panel is activated): This matrix allows you to configure the signal handover between the Group and Instrument signal flow level.
Instrument Bus Effects Chain: In this area you can apply different effect chains to up to 16 different buses. Buses can be used to apply effect chains to different collections of Groups. In the same way a Group processes a collection of Zones, a Bus will process a collection of Groups (however Bus level effects are not polyphonic and cannot have modulation assignments like Group level effects). For more information, refer to Bus insert effects.
Signal Processor Controls (visible if the Edit button on the chain module above is activated): This panel contains the controls of a signal processing module in the Instrument Bus Effects chain.
Instrument Insert Effects chain: This chain could be considered the master effects of the instrument, affecting all signals that pass through the instrument’s main output. For more information, refer to Instrument insert effects.
Signal Processor Controls (visible if the Edit button on the chain module above is activated): This panel contains the controls of a signal processing module in the Instrument Insert Effects chain.
Send Effects Slots: These slots take up signal processing modules which act as send effects; they can be fed individually with signals from various points of the signal flow. They are routed in parallel to each other and to the Insert Effects chain. For more information, refer to Instrument send effects.
Signal Processor Controls (visible if the Edit button on the Send Effects slots module above is activated): This panel contains the controls of a signal processing module in one of the Send Effects slots.
Modulation Sources: This section contains a panel for each modulation source that you have defined in the displayed Group. For more information, refer to Modulation.
Instrument Options Dialog
When you click on the leftmost button below the Instrument Header while editing an Instrument, the Instrument Options dialog will appear. It allows you to adjust parameters that affect this Instrument’s playback behavior, MIDI response, and appearance in the Rack. The Instrument Options are divided into four categories; you can access these by clicking on the respective tabs on the left side of the dialog window.
Instrument Tab
The Instrument tab of the Instrument Options dialog contains general options that affect the playing behavior of the respective Instrument.
Key Switch default Key: If you have defined any keyswitches for your Instrument, this value specifies the default switch that will be active right after the Instrument has been loaded.
MIDI Transpose: This parameter allows you to apply a transposition offset to all incoming MIDI notes. In contrast to the Tune knob in the Instrument Header, which alters the pitch of the sample playback, this value will change the MIDI notes only; for instance, a setting of 12 will have the same effect as playing an octave higher.
Key Range: The keyboard range to which this Instrument will respond. Setting this parameter to different ranges across multiple Instruments is a quick way to create keyboard splits.
Velocity Range: Limits the velocity range to which this Instrument will respond.
Instrument Wallpaper: To give your Instruments a distinctive appearance in the Rack, you can create your own skins. This parameter lets you choose an image file in TGA or PNG format that will be used instead of the default panel background of the Instrument Header at its normal size. The image needs to have a color depth of 16, 24, or 32 bits and should be 633 pixels wide — larger widths will be cut off, smaller widths will be filled with black. We have included some sample skins in the Kontakt installation.
After you have added a skin to your Instrument, we recommend that you save it once with samples; this will put the skin image file into a “wallpaper” sub-folder inside the Instrument’s sample folder.
Resource Container: Now that Kontakt libraries can link to many different types of files, the Resource Container was designed as a tool for library developers to help them keep all of these files in a convenient location. In this area you can Create a Resource Container, or attach an nki to an existing one via the browse button.
Repack: Only shows when a resource container is assigned to the loaded instrument. Allows you to repack your resource container if you have made changes to the instrument within Kontakt.
Voices Handling Tab
Voice Stealing
This section contains options for setting how the instrument should react when it starts to exceed its voice limit.
Mode: This sets the default way in which Kontakt will free up voices when the Instrument’s maximum voice count has been reached. These options are explained in section Voice Groups.
Fadeout Time: When Kontakt has to recycle a voice, it won’t just cut it off abruptly, but apply a short fade-out; this eliminates clicking noises. This parameter adjusts the length of the fadeout in milliseconds.
Time Machine Pro
In order to produce high quality time and pitch manipulation, the Time Machine Pro machine mode uses more resources than the other machine modes. As such, the number of voices it can process at any one time have their own limits, separate from the main Instrument voice limit. These limits are set in this section.
Standard Mode Voice Limit: Sets the voice limit for groups using the standard quality Time Machine Pro mode.
HQ Mode Voice Limit: Sets the voice limit for groups using the HQ Mode option in Time Machine Pro.
DFD Tab
In the DFD Tab you can access the options for Direct From Disk streaming. This allows Kontakt to read samples directly from the Hard Drive, and only load a small section of the sample in RAM, reducing the overall RAM usage of the Instrument.
DFD Preload Buffer Size: With this slider, you can adjust the size of each Sample portion that will be buffered in memory for instant playback. This value applies only to Samples that belong to Groups whose Source Module is operating in DFD mode. If any Group in DFD mode causes drop-outs which disappear when you put the respective Source Module into Sampler mode, you might want to try increasing this parameter.
Background loading: The Background loading option Allow instant playback for samples which are not loaded yet is available here. Enable this option to have Kontakt play every triggered note during Background Loading. Under certain special circumstances, playing notes while loading samples in the background may cause ’flam’-like glitches or other unexpected audio artifacts as Kontakt attempts to play a sample it has not yet loaded. Disable this option to avoid such artifacts.
Controller Tab
This tab contains the options for how the instrument should react to certain standardized MIDI controller messages.
MIDI Controller #64 (Sustain Pedal) acts as: You can choose how Kontakt should interpret and handle incoming MIDI controller #64 messages, which are usually being sent by sustain pedals:
Pedal + CC will keep the Instrument in its sustain phase as long as the sustain pedal is depressed, and also treats the message like a normal MIDI controller (which allows you to use it as a modulation source).
Sustain Pedal without Controller will keep the Instrument in its sustain phase as long as the sustain pedal is depressed, but the message will not be available as a normal MIDI controller.
Controller Only: Kontakt won’t use sustain pedal messages for sustaining notes, but you will be able to access them as MIDI controllers for your own purposes.
Accept all notes off / all sounds off: When activated, Kontakt will interpret and adhere to incoming “all notes off” MIDI messages.
Accept standard controllers for Volume and Pan: When activated, you can change the output volume and pan settings of an Instrument by sending MIDI CCs #7 and #10, respectively. These are the standard controller numbers for volume and pan.
MIDI Controller #7 (Volume) range: This drop-down menu lets you choose how the value range of MIDI CC #7 controller messages will be mapped to the output volume slider if the previous option is activated. The selected range endpoints correspond to the volume levels at MIDI values 0 (minimum) and 127 (maximum), respectively. The default setting is negative infinity .. 0dB, which mutes the Instrument at controller value 0 and puts it at unity gain at controller value 127.
Snapshot Tab
Snapshots are a way of saving any processing related information associated with an Instrument, without the need to save the whole instrument. For example, if you want to create an Instrument with some synthesizer samples, and then save a version of that same Instrument with a low pass filter applied, you can save that filtered version as a Snapshot.
In the Snapshot Tab you can view the locations of the Snapshot files associated with the Instrument.
Snapshot Saving Location: This area will display the location on your computer where the user Snapshots for this Instrument will be saved to and loaded from. Clicking on the Show button will open this folder in your operating systems file browser.
Factory Snapshots: Some 3rd Party libraries will come with their own Snapshots, which cannot be overwritten. These Snapshots are stored in a separate location, which you will be able to see here. You can toggle the availability of factory Snapshots by clicking the button to the right of this section.
Info Tab
The Info tab of the Instrument Options dialog contains information about the selected instrument and provides editable parameters to document additional information. If the Instrument is from a third-party library, then it will display information about the library and will not be editable.
Instrument Icon: Kontakt allows you to assign icons to your Instruments; these will be displayed within normal-sized Instrument Headers in the Rack and provide visual hints about the Instrument category. The rightmost icon in the list, labeled new, is the default icon for newly created Instruments. Note that Kontakt will assign special icons to Instruments that were imported from third-party formats; these don’t appear in this list.
Instrument Info: Use this text field to enter any information, credits, or production notes you’d like to be attached to your Instrument.
Author: When you have created an Instrument and want to distribute it, you can enter your own or your company’s name here.
Weblink: This field lets you provide a web location where people can find more information about you and your Kontakt creations.
Loading, creating, and saving Instruments
This chapter covers the basics of loading existing Kontakt instruments or creating your own.
Loading, creating, and saving instruments can be done in a number of ways. Drag and drop workflows help you load instruments quickly, while the File menu enables you to also create, save, and manage instruments.
Loading Instruments
You can also load an Instrument to your Multi, either in Kontakt format (.nki) or in one of the supported third-party formats from the Side pane. You can either:
Drag the Instrument into a blank space of the Rack to add it to the Multi.
Drag the Instrument onto an Instrument already loaded in the Rack to replace it with the new one.
Alternatively, you can choose the Load command from the Files menu; a file selection dialog will appear that lets you locate and select any Instrument, Multi, or Instrument Bank file on your system.
Tip
If you have activated the Side pane Double click loads instrument option in the Options dialog, you can also load Instruments by double-clicking them in the Side pane.
After the Instrument has been loaded successfully, it will appear in the Rack. If required, you can now change its Output and MIDI channel assignments from the controls in the Instrument’s Header. Once these are correctly set, you should be able to play the Instrument via your MIDI keyboard or the virtual on-screen keyboard.
Creating Instruments
If you would like to create an Instrument from scratch, you have the following options:
Use the New Instrument command in the Files menu to add an empty Instrument that’s based on the default Instrument template. You can change this template by creating a default Instrument of your choice and saving it via the Save as Default Instrument command in the Files menu.
Alternatively, start out with a Sample or a set of Samples and let Kontakt do the work of combining them into an Instrument. Locate and select the Sample files that you want to use in the Side pane, then drag them into an empty space in the Rack. Kontakt will create a new Instrument based on the default Instrument template and spread the Samples across the keyboard. If you do this with a WAV file that contains Slice markers or with a REX file, Kontakt will switch the new Instrument to Beat Machine mode, so that you can play your Sample in sync to your song tempo right away.
In Classic view the File menu contains the following additional options for creating new instruments:
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New instrument: Adds a new Instrument to your Multi. Whenever you create a new Instrument, Kontakt will use a default Instrument file as a template, which is usually empty. Overwriting this file with your own version allows you to define your own default settings. For example, you might want new Instruments to contain a Send Levels module in their Instrument Insert Effects chain by default. To set this up, create a new Instrument, insert the module into its chain, and select Save as default instrument from the Save menu while the Instrument is open for editing.
New instrument bank: Adds an empty Instrument Bank to your Multi. Instrument Banks are described in detail in section Instrument Banks.
Saving instruments
The entry Save as in the Header's File menu allows you to save any Instrument in your Rack as an .nki file for later reuse. When you select this entry, a sub-menu will open that contains a list of all Instruments in your current Multi. Selecting one of them opens a Save dialog that allows you to choose a location and change the name of the Instrument. Note that the file name, without the .nki extension, will be used as the Instrument name that is displayed in the Instrument Header.
Below the file selector, the dialog lets you choose how Kontakt should handle the Samples that are being referenced by the Instrument. When you have added these Samples to your Instrument during your current session, they’re still in their original location, and the Zones in your Instrument reference them via their full paths; the various options in the save dialog allow you to fine-tune this behavior before your Instrument is written to disk.
The file dialog offers the following options for saving samples along with the instrument:
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Patch Only: Keeps samples in their original locations and only saves file references in the instrument file. This achieves small file sizes, however moving references samples on the hard drive will result in missing samples. For more information, refer to Samples Missing dialog.
If you activate Absolute Sample Paths for the Patch Only option, the Sample files will be referenced by the Instrument with their absolute paths. In this case Kontakt will find he files even if you move the Instrument file to a different location. When deacticated, the samples must stay in the same path relative to the instrument in order to be found.
Patch + Samples: Saves the .nki file and copy the contained Samples to a new location, changing the file references within the Instrument to the copies in the process. If you leave the Sample Sub-Folder option below set to its Use Default value, Kontakt will save the Sample files to a Samples folder inside the destination location of your Instrument file; this folder will be created if it doesn’t exist yet. That way, the Samples will be kept close to the Instrument, which helps you keeping track of them when doing backups or moving directories. You can also specify a different Sample location, though; for example, you might want to use a common Samples folder that resides in the directory of your project.
Monolith will combine the Instrument and its referenced Samples into a single, large file. This is the safest option to choose in terms of keeping Sample references intact, as the Samples cannot accidentally get separated from the Instrument later. This is also a good way to create Instruments that should be distributed to other users of Kontakt.
Should you choose to save the referenced Samples along with your Instrument data by selecting either Patch + Samples or Monolith, you further have the choice to save them in a Below the file selector, the dialog lets you choose how Kontakt should handle the compressed format by checking the box below the sub-folder field. In this case, Kontakt will write the Samples using a proprietary, lossless audio codec that typically yields compression rates between 30% and 50%. This will not only improve access performance when streaming the Instrument from disk, but will also reduce its memory footprint, as Kontakt will decompress the Samples on-the-fly from memory with very little CPU overhead. The downside of using compressed Samples, however, is that you cannot use external wave editors to access them directly anymore.
When you are using Kontakt as a plug-in inside your host program and save your session, all Multi and Instrument data will be included in this session file. Sample references will be saved in an absolute fashion, so you may get a Samples Missing dialog when you open the session after you have moved your Samples. In the Loading tab of the Options dialog, you can specify a base path for your Non-Player content, and also choose if you want to store referenced paths relative to the base path. When a host project is saved with this option selected, Non-Player content will be able to resolve without the Missing Content dialog, if the libraries are located on the computer’s path as defined in the base path field. This makes it easy to share session files with Kontakt instances across platforms. For more information, refer to Loading.
Note
It’s important to keep track of the ways the Sample and Instrument files on your hard disk relate to each other; this protects you from unpleasant surprises when you move files around, delete them, or recover Kontakt data from a backup.
Saving instruments when editing
When you edit an instrument, the following options are available in the File menu:
Save edited instrument "instrument name" as...: Opens the file dialog for saving the currently edited instrument.
Save as default instrument: This command is only viewable when you are editing an instrument. It saves the selected Instrument as your default one so whenever you create a new Instrument, either via the New Instrument command of the Files menu, or by dragging Samples from the Side pane into the Rack, Kontakt will use this Instrument as a template.
Batch resave
Kontakt Instruments that include references to external Sample files can cause problems if either the Instrument or the Sample files are being moved to a different location. In such cases, you will be presented with a Samples Missing dialog that asks you in which places Kontakt should look for the missing files. While it’s not a big problem to let Kontakt locate the Samples of one or two Instruments via this dialog, and then re-save them afterwards in order to make the changes permanent, the described effect will be worsened by an order of magnitude if it occurs with a whole library. This can happen if you move the library folder or its contained sub-folders around, and makes it very tiresome to access the library, as every attempt of loading an Instrument will be answered with a Samples Missing dialog.
To fix the problem manually, you would have to load each Instrument, locate the missing Sample files via the Samples Missing dialog, and re-save the Instrument to its original location within the library folder. For large libraries, this is unfeasible. The Batch Re-save function automates this process; when you select it, a selection dialog will appear, asking you to choose a folder. After clicking Choose, all Instrument, Multi, and Bank files in this folder and its sub-folders will automatically be scanned for unresolved Sample references; if any are found, the Samples Missing dialog will appear once, allowing you to specify which places should be searched to resolve the references. Once Kontakt has successfully located the Samples, the affected Instrument, Multi or Bank files will be re-saved with corrected references, so afterwards, you’ll have a consistent library again.
Notice
As the Batch Re-save process will overwrite the Instrument, Multi, and Bank files within your selected folder, it’s recommended to make a backup of this folder before you execute the command.
Collect samples / Batch compress
Collect samples/Batch compress: If you are working with a library of NKIs that are referencing samples in multiple locations, or you wish to compress (or even de-compress) the samples of a library, this function allows you to compile samples, instruments, banks and multis into a single location.
When you select this option, a dialog box will appear. Here you must select a source folder (where your nki, nkb and nkm files are currently located) and a destination to which you wish to have these files compiled and copied to.
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There are two different strategies for creating folders:
Mirror source folder structure in the destination location: This mode keeps the folder structure of the source folder when generating the destination folder structure, so there are no explicit "Instruments" and "Collected Samples" subfolders in the destination folder when using this mode. When batch-compressing a source/library folder and there is an Instrument in the library folder that references a sample outside the source/library folder (and its subfolders), a "Collected Samples" subfolder will be generated for saving the samples in the destination folder.
Collect Samples and create new destination folder structure: In this mode the folder substructure of the target folder will be different from the source folder’s structure: Instrument files will be saved in an "Instruments" subfolder, while all samples are saved in "Collected Samples". This prevents having to resave the same sample more than once (if it was referenced by more than one Instrument in the source folder for instance).
Tip
Whichever strategy you choose, samples and Instruments in the source folder will neither be deleted nor updated. Impulse Response samples and wallpapers of the source Instruments will be re-saved as well, but without compression.
You can choose between two options for the destination sample format:
For converting uncompressed samples to lossless compressed .ncw-files select Lossless compressed NCW.
For converting compressed .ncw-files back to an uncompressed format select Uncompressed WAV / AIF.
Notice
Note that Batch Compress does not work for copy-protected libraries.
Samples Missing dialog
Kontakt uses different ways to reference the Samples that are being used by an Instrument. When Instruments are being saved in a monolith, the Sample data gets embedded in the file itself, and thus can’t be accidentally separated. In a lot of cases, though, you will encounter Instruments that reference external Sample files on your system via their respective paths and file names. It’s obvious that while this method creates small Instrument files and avoids unnecessary duplication of Sample data, it’s not as bullet-proof as combining Instrument and Sample data into a monolith; whenever you move referenced Sample files to a different location, Kontakt won’t be able to find them anymore in the location that’s being specified within the respective Instrument files. Depending on whether Kontakt used a relative path for referencing Samples, this can even happen when you move Instrument files while keeping their referenced Samples in their original locations.
Whenever you attempt to load an Instrument whose Samples cannot be found in their expected location, Kontakt will open a Content Missing dialog. This window offers various options that help Kontakt locate the missing files on your system. Once it has found them, you can then re-save the Instrument with the corrected references in order to make the changes permanent.
The Content Missing dialog contains the following options and features:
File Display: In its upper half, the Content Missing dialog displays a list of all Sample files that were referenced within the Instrument file, but couldn’t be found in the expected locations; these locations are shown in the right column. Whenever you’re not sure which action might have caused the Content Missing dialog to appear, study the locations displayed in the assumed at column carefully; you might recognize a folder that you’ve moved to a different location at some point in the past.
Resolve Automatically: In the lower half of the dialog, Kontakt provides a number of commands that will either search for the missing files automatically (left side), or allow you to specify the new location manually (right side). If you’re not sure where the missing Samples could be located, choose one of the automatic options on the left side:
Search Filesystem: This will search for the missing Samples on all file systems of your hard disks. Depending on the size and speed of your hard disks, the scanning process might take a considerable amount of time, but if the Sample files have not been renamed or deleted, they will eventually be found.
Search Spotlight: Spotlight in macos’s indexed “search” function built into the OS. (Unless disabled) it’s always running in the background updating file locations which means that if you use the search spotlight feature it resolves missing sample conflicts immediately
Check for Duplicates: By default, all these options search for the missing Samples by their file names only; in some cases, two or more different Samples on your hard disk might share a common name. This can cause Kontakt to load the wrong Sample; if you notice this in your Instrument, don’t save it. Instead, remove it from your Multi, load it again, and repeat the search process after you’ve activated the Check for Duplicates option at the bottom of the Samples Missing dialog. This will make Kontakt examine any files with matching names more thoroughly, which will sort out duplicates, but take more time than searching without this option.
Resolve Manually: If you already know where the missing Samples are located on your system, there is no need for an automatic search. Instead, choose one of the options on the right side, which allow you to locate files manually:
Browse for Folder: When you click this button, a folder selection dialog will appear. After you’ve located and chosen a folder, Kontakt will look for the missing Samples inside this folder and all of its sub-folders.
Browse for Files: This option will ask you to locate each missing file manually, one at a time, via a file selection dialog. During this process, the name of the currently searched file will be displayed in the title bar of the selection dialog window.
If the resolve all possible option is activated, Kontakt will look for all missing Samples in each location that you specify via the Browse for Folder or Browse for Files option. If it’s deactivated, you will be asked to provide a location for each missing file separately.
Once you have selected the appropriate search action, Kontakt will start the file scanning process. During this scan, the missing Sample list will shrink whenever a Sample has been successfully located. Once all Samples have been found, the dialog will disappear and the Instrument will be loaded into your Rack. You should now make sure that it works correctly and then re-save it to its original location with the Save as… command in the Files menu.
Tip
If you have moved a whole library, and the Samples Missing dialog appears each time you attempt to load an Instrument from this library, you don’t need to click through the Samples Missing dialog and re-save the Instrument each time; the Batch Re-Save command in the Files menu allows you to locate the referenced Samples of all Instruments below a folder at once and re-save all of them automatically. This command is explained in section Handling of this manual.
If there are still missing Samples after the scanning process, the Content Missing dialog will reappear, which allows you to try another search option. If each attempt to locate the missing Samples fails, they either don’t exist on your system anymore, or have been renamed. In such cases, you can choose to either abort loading the Instrument by clicking the right button at the bottom of the dialog, or load the Instrument without the missing Samples with the left button.
Allow alternate file types: This option allows you to ignore the audio file extension and resolve missing samples with alternative file types with the same name. For example, if you had an instrument which referenced uncompressed WAV files, but at some point you compressed the files to NCW format, you can reference the NCW files in place of the WAV files.
Keep search mode and selected folders for the current session: If you are opening multiple Instruments that could require searching for Samples in the same location, checking this option will tell Kontakt to repeat the search mode for any newly opened Instrument while you are still running the same session. Closing and reopening Kontakt will reset this option.
Instrument Banks
Instrument Banks allow you to combine up to 128 Kontakt Instruments into one slot of you Rack.
An Instrument Bank allows you to combine up to 128 Kontakt Instruments into one slot of your Rack. Only one of the Instruments in a Bank can be active at any time, and you can switch between them by sending MIDI program change messages. All Instruments in a Bank will share the same MIDI channel, Output Channel, maximum note count value, output and pan settings, and Aux send levels. You can adjust these settings in the Bank Header, which appears in the Rack and resembles an Instrument Header in structure.
As an example, an orchestral sampling library provides numerous articulations and playing techniques for each instrument, which are split up into a number of Kontakt Instrument files. For instance, the “Solo Flute” folder might contain the four files “Flute sustain.nki”, “Flute staccato.nki”, “Flute halftone trill.nki” and “Flute flutter tongue.nki”. Although you could just add these Instruments to your Rack and assign them to different MIDI channels, this is not the most efficient option if you are planning to use only one Solo Flute in your arrangement. You do not require multiple articulations at the same time, and you are wasting three MIDI channels and three of your 64 available Instrument slots. Instead, you could create a “Flute” bank and insert all articulations you will need into its slots; this allows you to switch between these articulations by sending MIDI program change messages. This workflow is closer to the way you’d interact with a real flutist; in order to get him to adapt his playing style to your music, you need to add expression, dynamic and articulation marks, as well as playing directions, to your sheet music.
Some notation programs allow you to specify how different articulation, expression, dynamic, and playing direction marks in your score will be translated when played back via MIDI. Assigning these items to MIDI program changes that correspond to the respective Instruments in your bank allows you to create very sophisticated setups and produce realistic mock-ups from your scores instantly without any further MIDI optimization. Refer to the manual of your notation program to find out whether it supports this method. Similarly, you can create MIDI program changes at specific places of your sequences in any MIDI sequencer program.
Creating Instrument Banks
To add a new, empty Instrument Bank to your current Multi:
Select New instrument bank from the Files menu.
A new Bank Header will appear in the Rack.
The Bank Header controls are similar to that of an Instrument Header, but apply to all contained Instruments. In its name field, the Bank Header will display the name of the currently active Instrument.
To assign Instruments to a Bank:
Click the wrench icon in the upper left corner of the Bank header to open the Instrument slot list. A list of 128 Instrument slots will appear.
Drag an Instrument (.nki) file from the Side pane into a slot of the Instrument Bank to load the Instrument into this slot.
Set the number in the slot field to indicate the program change number that will switch to this Instrument; in the example shown above, incoming notes on the Bank’s MIDI channel will trigger the Dirty Saw Lead Instrument in slot 001 (this is being indicated in the name field of the Bank Header); sending a MIDI program change with a value of 2 will switch over to the Innocent Lead Instrument, which will then stay active until the Bank receives a new program change message. Alternatively, you can click on the Instrument names in the Bank to change the selected Instrument.
To edit an Instrument inside a Bank
Double-click on the respective slot to put your Rack into Instrument Edit mode.
Make your adjustments, then return to Multi Instrument mode by clicking the wrench icon in the upper left corner of the Rack. Clicking the x button in the upper right corner will remove the whole Bank from your Multi. Also note that the modified Instrument can only be saved within the Bank file; there’s no way to save it to a separate Instrument file.
Loading and Saving Instrument Banks
Instrument Banks and their contents will be loaded and saved along with your Multi, but you can load and save them separately as well. Kontakt Instrument Bank files are indicated with the extension .nkb. You can load these in the same way as you load Instruments.
To load an Instrument Bank:
Double-click the Instrument Bank or drag it from the Side pane into an empty space of your Rack,
Alternatively, use the Load command in the Files menu.
Global purge
Global purge keeps track of which samples in an instance have been actually triggered in a session, and gives you the option of removing all other samples from the Instrument. This way, you can reduce the number of samples that are being kept in memory to the subset that you have actually used in your arrangement. Place your mouse over this entry in the Files menu to open a submenu with options for sample purging and loading.
The Global purge sub-menu contains four entries:
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Reset markers: Whenever Kontakt plays a sample in any of your Instruments, it will flag the respective sample as being used. Using this function, you can delete all of these flags, thereby resetting all data that Kontakt has gathered about sample usage so far. After you have finished your work on a part, you should select this function once and then play your part; this way, only the notes that have actually made it into the final part will be flagged as used. Afterwards, you can proceed by choosing the Update sample pool function described below.
Update sample pool: This function removes all samples that are not currently flagged as being used from memory, and reloads any currently purged samples that have been triggered since the last purge operation. In other words, it brings the sample pool in sync with the sample usage flags it has gathered since the last purge operation.
Purge all samples: Unloads all samples from RAM. This allows you to reverse the usual purge process: you can play your arrangement in a “silent run”, and then load only the Samples that are actually being used via the Update sample pool command afterwards.
Reload all samples: Reloads all Samples, reverting any previous purge actions.
Tip
You can also purge samples per Instrument using the Purge menu in the Instrument Header. See Purge menu for more information.
Snapshots
Snapshots are an easy way to create your own preset sounds of any Kontakt instrument for quick recall.
Snapshots save the state of Kontakt instruments for easy recall. Using Snapshots, you can create your own preset sounds, save them in the .nksn file format and use them in other projects, across computers or even share them with other users.
To access Snapshot view in the Instrument Header, click the camera icon. You can switch back to Info View by clicking the i icon.
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Snapshots Overview
Snapshots contain the following key features:
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Load Snapshot: Opens the Snapshot menu where you can load a Snapshot from the Factory and/or User library. For more information, refer to Loading a Snapshot.
Snapshot Name: Displays the name of the currently selected Snapshot.
Snapshot Previous/Next (<> icons): Enables you to quickly browse and load Snapshots. Pressing an arrow icon will load the previous or next Snapshot in the selected category. If no Snapshot is active, the first Snapshot on the list will be loaded. For more information, refer to Loading a Snapshot.
Save Snapshot (floppy disk icon): Enables you to save changes made to a sound. When a User Snapshot is saved, the setting and parameter controls are stored within it and can be accessed at any time via the User library. For more information, refer to Saving a User Snapshot.
Snapshot View (camera icon): Provides access to the Snapshot features described above; saving, loading, browsing, and deleting. When Snapshot View is selected, configuration settings and features relating to the Info View are replaced in the display.
Loading a Snapshot
Snapshots are loaded from the drop-down menu in the top header of the instrument. You can also use the Browse arrows to load the previous or next preset. Some Instruments contain a collection of Factory Snapshots, while other Instruments only facilitate User Snapshots.
Loading a Factory Snapshot
Factory Snapshots are only available for Kontakt Player Libraries, so this section only applies if you own Komplete 9 or a Kontakt Player library released after Komplete 9. Some of the Komplete Libraries seem minimalistic at first glance, but the true sound design potential can be tapped by tweaking the parameters available on the Instrument's user interface. Our sound designers aim to create inspiring Snapshots that showcase the range of sounds available from just one instrument.
To load a Factory Snapshot:
Click the Snapshot View (camera icon) to open Snapshot view.
Click the arrow icon next to the Snapshot name field to open the Snapshot menu.
Select the Factory category to load a Factory preset (if available), or select the User category to load one of your own snapshots.
Select an instrument category (if available).
Click a Snapshot to load it.
The loaded Snapshot is displayed in the instrument header.
Loading a User Snapshot
To load a Snapshot from the menu:
Click the Snapshot View (camera icon) to open Snapshot view.
Click the arrow icon next to the Snapshot name field to open the Snapshot menu.
Select the User category (if available).
Click a Snapshot to load it.
The loaded Snapshot is displayed in the instrument header.
Note
Note that the User category will not appear until you have first saved a Snapshot.
Loading the previous or next Snapshot
To load the previous or next Snapshot in the list:
Click the Snapshot View (camera icon) to open Snapshot view.
Click the arrow icons (<>) in the Snapshot header to browse through the Snapshots list.
The previous or next Snapshot will load immediately each time an arrow icon is clicked.
Loading a Snapshot from the file system
Kontakt supports two ways of loading Snapshot files (.nksn) from your file system. This enables you to use your favorite Snapshots without altering the installation on the studio computer.
Note
A Snapshot is not automatically saved to the default location when you open it, so it will not be available in the Snapshot menu.
Using drag and drop
To load a Snapshot from any disk:
Open Kontakt .
Locate an .nksn file in your file system.
Drag the file from its current location onto an empty area of the Rack.
If you drag a Snapshot onto an active Instrument in the Rack, it will be replaced by the Instrument loaded from the Snapshot.
Kontakt will load a new instance of the corresponding Instrument with the selected Snapshot.
Using double-click
Open Kontakt.
Locate an .nksn file in your file system.
Double-click the Snapshot file in the Finder (Mac OS X) or File Explorer (Windows).
A new Instrument instance is inserted in Kontakt and the Snapshot is loaded.
Saving a User Snapshot
Snapshots can be saved at any time while you are working on them. By loading a Factory Snapshot and adjusting some of its parameters, you can then save a User Snapshot. The Kontakt Factory Library does not come with Snapshots, so in order to demonstrate the full feature set, first save a Snapshot.
Tip
You can transfer any of your Snapshots to another computer by copying the respective Snapshot files.
Saving a User Snapshot
To save a Snapshot:
Click the Snapshot View button (camera icon) to open Snapshot view.
Click the Save button (floppy disk icon).
Enter a name for your new Snapshot in the Save dialog box.
Click Save to finish the process and close the dialog box.
Your Snapshot .nksn file is saved to the User Snapshot Library. It appears in the User Snapshot list.
User Content folder
All User Snapshots are automatically stored in the default User Content folder:
Mac OS X: | Macintosh HD/Users/<User Name>/Documents/Native Instruments/User Content/Kontakt Factory Library/Electric Grand/Triple Peaks.nksn |
Windows: | C:\Users\<User Name>\My Documents\Native Instruments\User Content\Kontakt Factory Library\Electric Grand\Triple Peaks.nksn |
Note
Make sure you include your Documents/My Documents folder in your regular data backups.
Deleting a User Snapshot
User Snapshots can be deleted using the bin icon in the Instrument header. Snapshots are saved on a per-Instrument basis, so in order to delete a Snapshot in Kontakt, you first have to load it.
To delete a User Snapshot:
Click the Snapshot view (camera icon) to open Snapshot view.
Load the User Snapshot you wish to delete, and click the Delete button (bin icon).
Confirm deletion of the Snapshot by selecting Yes in the dialog box.
The User Snapshot .nksn file is deleted from the folder on your hard disk as well as removed from the Snapshot Menu.
Note
You can only delete User Snapshots. All Factory Snapshots are read-only.
Saving and Loading Presets
Presets allow you to save your settings in any part of Kontakt and recall them in another context. The Kontakt environment is split up into modules, and most of these offer a preset drop-down menu that allows you to manage presets for the respective module. Loading a preset in a module doe not affect the other modules in your Instrument, allowing you to freely combine different presets into your own Instruments.
Presets are saved in files (file extension: .nkp) which reside in a series of sub-folders within a “presets” folder. Kontakt creates two of these preset folders on your system: one contains the factory presets and is located in a directory which is not writable by normal users; the other one resides within your home directory and will be used to store your own custom presets. Kontakt will create this user presets folder when you first start it up.
Factory and user preset folders will be created in the following folders:
Windows Factory | C:\Program Files\Common Files\Native Instruments\Kontakt 7\presets |
Windows User | C:\Users\[username]\Documents\Native Instruments\Kontakt 7\presets |
Mac OS X Factory | Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Native Instruments/Kontakt 7/presets |
Mac OS X Users | Macintosh HD/Users/[username]/Documents/Native Instruments/Kontakt 7/presets |
Kontakt provides a large number of ready-made presets for most of its modules, which are good starting points for your own settings. Browse the Factory preset list of a module when you have a specific task in mind and don’t know where to begin.
Preset management in Kontakt takes place within each module’s preset drop-down menu. You can access this by clicking on the drop-down menu labeled Pre or Preset, which is located on the left side of each module. It contains all preset files that were found in the respective preset folders on your hard disk, with further subdirectories (if any) appearing as sub-menus. The Save Preset entry at the bottom of the menu will open a dialog, which asks you for a filename. Enter a descriptive name and click Save, and your settings will be available within the User submenu of the presets drop-down menu. This will not work, however, if you change the path in the save dialog, so it is recommended that you always save your presets to the default path.
Classic view reference
The following chapter describe all the different sections and modules that you can find in Kontakt's Classic View.
User Interface Elements
This page offers a comprehensive overview of all Kontakt user interface elements and their function.
There are a number of common interface elements that are used throughout Kontakt's Classic view. The handling of these common elements is always the same, but the context in which they appear will vary. The following overview highlights the main elements and explains how to interact with them using a mouse.
Name | Example | Description | Interactions |
|---|---|---|---|
Unipolar Knob with Value Field |  | Used to adjust parameters in the range of 0% to 100% from left to right. |
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Bipolar Knob with Value Field |  | Used to adjust parameters in the range of -100% to +100% from left to right. The center position is 0%. |
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Unipolar Slider |  | Used to adjust parameters in the range of 0% to 100% from left to right. |
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Bipolar Slider |  | Used to adjust parameters in the range of -100% to +100% from left to right. The center position is 0%. The value is displayed above the slider control. |
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Unipolar Slider and Meter display |  | Used to adjust parameters in the range of 0% to 100% from bottom to top. The meter displays the signal as determined by its respective slider. |
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Dropdown Menu Arrow |  | Used to open a dropdown menu relating to the respective control or setting. |
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Dropdown Menu Button |  | Buttons with arrows indicate a dropdown menu. Click the button to open a menu that provides options relating to the respective section or function. |
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Dropdown Menu and Sub-menus |  | Some menus have additional sub-menus; these will be indicated with a small right arrow next to the name of the menu item. Moving the selection bar to one of these items will open the respective sub-menu. |
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Sync Tempo Menu |  | Synchronizes time-related parameters to the song tempo. |
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Function Button |  | A button represents a parameter that can be switched on and off. Each click on a button toggles it between those two states. The current state of a button is being indicated by its background color; if a parameter is activated, its button will be highlighted. |
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Option Button |  | Opens a menu or dialog with additional options. |
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Tab Button |  | Switches between two options. Each click on a button toggles between those two states. |
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Banks Tabs |  | Used to select one of four pages of banks. |
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Value Field |  | Some controls contain editable numeric fields that allow you to manually enter values. |
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Value Arrows |  | Hovering over a value field can display small up/down arrows on right side of the value. Click the arrows to increase or decrease the value incrementally. Only available for some controls. |
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Search Field |  | Enter names or key words to help search libraries and databases. |
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Scroll Bar |  | Scroll through content using the horizontal and vertical scroll bars. |
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Checkbox |  | Used to select and unselect various options and settings. |
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Close Button (x icon) |  | Used to clear a search field, or close a window or module |
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Master Editor
Modify the behavior of all Instruments in your Multi and access common utility functions through Kontakt's Master Editor.
The Master Editor panel contains a number of global controls that affect the behavior of all Instruments in your Multi, as well as some common utility functions. To display the Master Editor panel, select the Master option in the Workspace menu.
The Master Editor panel contains the following features:
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Master Vol: Adjusts the volume of all Output and Aux Channels. The default setting is 0.0 dB, which leaves the output levels unaffected.
Master Tune: Adjusts the master reference tuning from its default value of A4 = 440 Hz. This is especially useful in situations where Kontakt will be combined with the sound of orchestras, historical ensembles, or folk music, which frequently use different reference tunings.
Master Tempo: Displays the current global tempo in beats per minute, as well as sync options and song position controls.
Ext: In stand-alone mode, the Ext button allows you to sync Kontakt to an external MIDI clock.If running as a plug-in in your host program, Kontakt will use and follow your song tempo by default. Deactivate the Ext to specify the tempo manually.
Tap: The Tap button offers a more intuitive way to adjust the Master Editor tempo. Tap the button rhythmically in quarter note values and Kontakt will measure the time between taps, adjusting the tempo value accordingly. As a plug-in, the Tap button is active only when the Extern Sync. parameter is turned off.
Play/Re-wind: The play and re-wind buttons adjust Kontakt’s internal song position. This is necessary for instruments that require song position information, like a drum machine.
Tempo: Located below the BPM label, this value affects the playback speed of sliced loops and all time-related controls that can be synchronized to the tempo. In stand-alone mode, adjust the Master Tempo by clicking the value and entering a new one, or by tapping a new tempo using the Tap button.
Metronome: Provides a simple metronome that can be switched on and off at any time by clicking the metronome icon. The value readout allows you to adjust the volume of the metronome click.
Reference Tone: Provides a reference tone that allows you to tune other instruments in accordance to Kontakt’s current reference tuning.
On/Off: Activate the reference tone by clicking the tuning fork icon.
Pitch: Change the pitch of the reference tone by clicking and dragging on the note readout to the right of the tuning fork.
Volume: Adjust the volume of the reference tone by clicking and dragging the Vol readout, or double-clicking the field and entering a value.
Side Pane (Classic view)
In addition to loading instruments, Kontakt's Side pane allows you to quickly organize and navigate through any number of files.
The Side pane in the Classic view allows you to quickly organize and navigate through any number of files that can be used in Kontakt. It display a convenient overview of various aspects of the currently selected Instrument. The Side pane be used to navigate through your file system to locate and load Kontakt Instruments, and also manage and browse the contents of your Libraries. It allows you to assign host and MIDI automation sources to Instrument parameters and to drag and drop items from the Side panel into the Rack.
To display the Side pane:
Click the Minimize icon from the Control panel to expand the Rack.
The Side pane will appear on the left side of the Rack.
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The Side pane
Libraries Tab
The Libraries Tab provides direct access to all Kontakt libraries installed on your computer.
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Refresh: Reloads the list of libraries.
Manage Libraries: Opens the Library tab in the Options dialog. There you can hide or show libraries, open Native Access to install new libraries, and manage existing installations. For more information, refer to Libraries.
A-Z: Sorts the libraries alphabetically. When deactivated, the Library tab reverts to the previous custom sorting.
Search field: Allows you to enter a search string in order to find particular libraries within the Library tab.
Instr Nav (Instrument Navigation): Shows or hides the Instrument Navigator pane at the bottom of the Browser.
Instruments: Displays all Instruments included in the library.
Function Menu: Opens a drop-down menu with additional library options. For more information, refer to Function Menu.
Loading and Saving Instruments and Multis
To load an Instrument or a Multi, click the Instruments or Multis button and navigate through the library structure like in the lower pane of the Files tab.
When using Kontakt Player libraries, you can save your own Instruments and Multis to the original library or to any custom location. When saving your own variations to the original location of your library, these Instruments and Multis will also appear in the Libraries tab.
Function Menu
The Function menu provides access to important resources like the library readme file and manuals, and maintenance tasks such as locating a library and hiding a library box. The Function menu is located at the bottom right of the Library box. Click the arrow to open the drop-down menu.
The Function menu contains the following options:
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The Function menu
Open containing folder: Opens the location of the library on your hard disk, in your operating system's file browser.
Hide library: Removes the library from the Library tab. Note that this does not delete or uninstall the library. If you want the library to appear in the Libraries tab again, you can do this via the Libraries tab in the Options dialog. For more information, refer to Libraries.
Readme.txt: If the library folder contains a readme text file, it will be displayed here. Clicking this option will open the file.
License Agreement: Contains a list of the licenses for the selected library.
Online Documentation: Clicking this option will open the user manual.
Library Activation
Libraries are activated through Native Access, but it is possible to quickly open Native Access to activate a specific library from the Kontakt Side pane.
After installing a library, open Kontakt.
Locate the library in the Libraries tab of the Side pane.
Click on the Activate button on the respective library and a log-in screen will open.
Native Access will open and prompt you to enter a serial number for the library.
Enter a serial number and click Activate.
Your library will now be activated and ready to play.
Files Tab
This section of the Side pane allows you to navigate your file system in a tree-based way, which will be immediately familiar if you’re accustomed to your operating system’s file browsers and selectors. It consists of two main panes and an audition toolbar at the bottom of the section. There is an optional third pane, the Instrument Navigator, which you can toggle via the InstrNav button just below the tabs. This pane is also available on the Libraries tab, refer to Libraries Tab.
Click the horizontal splitter bars that separate the panes and drag them up or down in order to change the height of the respective panes.
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The Files tab of the Side pane provides a file system navigator
Upper (Container) Pane
The upper pane shows all container objects on your computer in a tree structure. The term "container" encompasses all items that contain other objects, such as volumes (like hard disks, CD-ROMs or network places), folders and monolithic sampler files that serve as "virtual folders" (more on this later). A + icon next to an object indicates that there are further objects contained within, which are not currently being shown. Display those by clicking the + icon. Conversely, clicking the - icon next to an object hides all its contents from the tree view.
The upper pane of the File Browser displays a navigable tree structure of your file system.
Middle (Objects) Pane
Whenever a container object that you have selected in the upper pane contains items which can be used in Kontakt, these will show up in the middle pane. In contrast to the multi-dimensional tree structure of the upper pane, this list is always flat and does not span multiple folders. In addition to relevant files, folders (if any) will also show up in this list and can be navigated to via double-clicking. The first item of the list will usually be the parent directory, indicated with an arrow icon. This means you don’t need to use the upper pane to navigate through folders, although it’s usually faster and more convenient.
The middle pane of the File Browser, displaying a number of Samples, their file sizes, native tempos, and modification dates.
Information on the displayed items is spread across four columns; in addition to the file name, size and modification date, there’s also a tempo column that indicates the native tempo of sliced loops. You can change the width of these columns by clicking and dragging the separator bars between their labels. Clicking on a column label will change the sort order of the list according to the respective value and clicking on the same label again will reverse the ordering direction.
Once you have found one or more items that you want to use in Kontakt, there are several ways to load them:
Double-click a Multi file (.nkm) or drag it from the Side pane into the Rack to load it; Kontakt will ask you whether you want to replace your current Multi or merge the one you’ve selected with the existing Multi.
Double-click an Instrument file (.nki) or drag it from the Side pane onto a free space in the Rack to add it to your current Multi. Kontakt will assign a MIDI channel according to the MIDI channel assignment for loaded patches setting in the Options dialog. This also works with multiple Instruments.
Drag an Instrument onto an existing Instrument Header in your Rack to make it replace the respective Instrument. Kontakt will keep the MIDI channel setting of the previous Instrument.
Double-click a Sample (i.e. an audio file) or drag it onto a free space in the Rack to create a new Instrument (based on your default Instrument) that contains a Zone with this Sample spread across the whole keyboard range. If you do this with multiple Samples, Kontakt will still only create one instrument, but with a corresponding number of adjacent Zones. Note that this does not work with 8-bit Samples, as Groups created in this way will be set to DFD mode by default, which does not support 8-bit data.
Click and drag a Sample into the Mapping Editor of an existing Instrument to create a Zone and place it on the key or key range you’re pointing at. While dragging, move the mouse pointer up and down in the Mapping Editor to enlarge or shrink the target key range. This also works with multiple Samples, in which case Kontakt will create a number of adjacent Zones. If you want to create multiple Zones above each other (thus combining a number of Samples into a velocity switch that’s placed on a single key), move the mouse pointer all the way down to the keyboard.
There are two ways to select multiple items in the object pane: contiguous ranges of items in the list can be selected by clicking the first item and then, while holding your [Shift] key, the last one in the range. Non-adjacent items can be selected with [Ctrl]-click, or [Cmd]-click on Mac OS.
Tip
The sort order of the Side pane's object pane determines in which order multiple Samples will be used in Kontakt. For instance, if you’re planning to create a velocity switch from a number of Samples, but realize after placement that the velocity assignment ended up being upside down, just reverse the list order in the Side pane and try it again.
Instrument Navigator Pane
The Instrument Navigator shows a list of all Instruments in the Rack, which is updated at all times. It is divided into 4 pages of up to 16 Instruments each, and displays the Instrument names along with M (mute) and S (solo) indicators. It provides a good way to keep the bigger overview when you’re editing an Instrument, when the Rack does not convey any information about Instruments other than the currently edited one.
The Instrument Navigator list will keep in sync with the page and Instrument selection in the Rack and vice versa. To switch to one of the four Instrument pages, you can either use the page buttons in the Rack header (if it’s in Multi Instrument mode), or click the page numbers at the top of the Instrument Navigator list. Similarly, you can select an Instrument by clicking on either its header in the Rack, or its entry in the Instrument Navigator pane. If an Instrument that you select is not currently visible in the Instrument Navigator list, it will automatically scroll to its list position. Double-clicking an Instrument in the Instrument Navigator list will open it for editing in the Rack.
To display the Instrument Navigator pane, click on the InstrNav button at the top of the Side pane.
The Instrument Navigator pane, displaying a number of loaded Instruments in the Multi.
Tip
The Instrument Navigator is not strictly specific to the Files tab, but rather a utility window that’s available in various tabs in the Side pane. It’s explained here for sake of consistency, and referenced briefly in sections about other places where it’s available.
Audition Strip
The Audition Strip allows you to listen to audio files prior to loading them. This feature works with audio files and sliced loops that you select in the lower section of the Side pane. Note that when auditioning sliced loops, they will not be played in their native tempo (which is being displayed in the Side pane list), but in the current tempo of your host or, if you’re running Kontakt in stand-alone mode, the tempo that’s set in the Master Editor.
The Audition Strip contains the following controls:
The Audition Strip allows you to play any Sample that you select in the Side pane.
Volume slider: This slider adjusts the sample playback level.
Play button: This button plays the selected sample once or, if a sample is currently being auditioned, stops the playback.
Auto button: When activated, Kontakt will automatically play a sample once when you click it.
Refresh Button
Just below the Side pane tabs, you will find a series of function buttons and drop-down menus that are specific to the currently visible tab. On the Files tab, this row starts on the left side with a Refresh button, depicted by a circled arrow.
Whenever the File Browser has not yet picked up changes that recently occurred in your file system, such as newly installed or removed sample libraries, you can force an update of the file display by clicking this button.
The View Menu
The View menu in the Files tab contains options and functions that alter the way in which information will be shown in the File Browser panes.
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The view menu of the File Browser contains options that determine which items will be shown.
The first two items in this menu, labeled Show network drives, and Show removable drives, are toggle options; selecting them will switch them on, indicated with a small diamond next to their label. With these, you can adjust whether the File Browser should include mounted network volumes, and removable drives.
Below the options, you’ll find multiple slots labeled Quick-jump and numbered 1 to 10. Quick-jumps are location memories that you can use to conveniently access a number of frequently-visited places in your file system without the need to navigate there using the container pane each time. The handling is simple: any location you navigate to in the File Browser gets immediately saved to the currently selected Quick-jump entry. Once you switch to another Quick-jump location, the previously selected one will keep its value. Switching back to it will bring you to the saved location, but watch out — if you navigate any further now, the Quick-jump memory will be changed accordingly. If you don’t want this, activate the Lock current quick-jump option at the bottom of the View menu to freeze the saved location. Instead of using the pull-down menu each time, you can also use [Ctrl] + [F1] through [Ctrl] + [F10] (Windows) or [Alt]-[F1] through [Alt]-[F10] (Mac) to access the respective Quick-jump locations via your keyboard.
Monitor Tab
When editing a complex Instrument with various Groups and Zones, it’ is easy to get lost in KONNTAKT's editing facilities. The Monitor tab counteracts this by providing a useful overview of various aspects of your currently edited Instrument. Similar in nature to the Instrument Navigator pane, it shows a continually updated and searchable list of all Groups and Zones in your Instrument. It allows you to quickly include and exclude Groups for editing, and provides a context sensitive parameter view that shows the values of the parameter you touched last across all Groups.
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Monitor tab, displaying all Parameters of the Gongs Instrument
At the top, you’ll notice a tool bar with five buttons, the first four of which will switch the Monitor view into the respective display mode:
Groups
This view provides a list of all Groups in your Instrument. It will only work in Instrument Edit mode. The leftmost column indicates whether a Group is marked for editing — it corresponds to the checkboxes next to the Group names in the Group Editor — and can be clicked on to toggle the edit status of the respective Group.
Tip
The Group selection only affects commands that can be found in the "Edit" menu of the Group Editor, and is thus different from the editing checkbox, which is being used for changing parameters across multiple Groups.
At the right side of the list, the Group indexes are displayed as a quick reference for KSP script editing, as well as the number of Zones included. Groups can be selected by clicking on their names; multiple selections work in the same way as they do in the File Browser, i.e. [Shift]-clicking below or above a selected Group will select a range, a [Ctrl]+click ([Cmd]+click on Mac OS X) will add Groups to the active selection; [Alt]+click will select all currently visible Groups for editing.
You can rename Groups by double-clicking on their name and entering a new one.
Right-clicking on a Group will open a context menu with various Group-related actions; this is identical to the Edit menu of the Group Editor.
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The Group context menu
You can toggle a Quick-Search function by clicking on the button with the magnifying glass symbol to the right side of the list header. This will show a text input box above the list; while it is visible, the list will only show Groups whose names contain whatever you enter into this box.
You can hide (and, in consequence, deactivate) the Quick-Search feature by clicking the "X" button on the right side of the search bar.
Zones
This view displays a list of all Zones that are contained in your Instrument across all Groups. Otherwise, it works exactly like the Groups view, and includes the Quick-Search feature as well.
Each row displays from left to right: The Zone, its Index, its ID, and finally the Group the Zone belongs to.
Double-clicking a Zone will open it in the Wave Editor.
Parameter
When you switch to this view and touch any knob, the Monitor pane will show the values of the respective parameter across all Groups in your currently edited Instrument, or, if you’re not in Instrument Edit mode, across all Instruments in your Multi. This makes for a convenient way to compare settings across Groups. You can also change parameter values directly within the list by clicking on their value and moving the mouse vertically, just like you would do on the respective knob.
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Monitor tab, displaying the values of EQ frequency parameters across multiple Groups.
Of course, parameters will only appear next to Groups that actually contain the edited parameter as well. For instance, if you’re adjusting the Grain parameter of the Source Module — which is unique to the Time Machine mode — all Groups that are not currently in Time Machine mode, and therefore don’t know this parameter, will be indicated with NA in the Value column.
Engine
This sub-tab displays an overview of various system resources, such as detailed memory and CPU usage statistics. The information provided on this page is mainly intended for power users; when you have a problem and get in contact with the Native Instruments support, they might ask you for specific values from this page.
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The Engine page provides an overview of the current status of Kontakt’s audio engine.
The Restart Engine button allows you to force a reinitialization of Kontakt’s audio engine in case of CPU overruns.
If you’re using Kontakt as a plug-in, there will be another button below labeled Offline (Bounce) Mode. This is intended for hosts that don’t correctly advertise this mode to their plug-ins when bouncing or freezing tracks. You can check if your host behaves correctly in this regard by observing the state of the button when bouncing or freezing; if it turns orange, Kontakt receives the bounce signal from the sequencer. If it doesn’t and you experience crackles or drop-outs, you can activate this button manually before bouncing or freezing.
CPU Profiling Mode: Switch to CPU Profiling mode in order to identify which parts of your Instruments are currently consuming the largest share of processing power. Percentages are shown in the instrument name as well as in the Source module in Edit mode and in the top parts of all effects in the effect chains.
Tip
Use the bottom part of the effect icons to switch to different effect slots for editing while in CPU Profiling mode.
Instrument name: observe the Rack to identify most consuming Instruments first, then switch to Edit mode.
Source module: switch to a different HQI setting if CPU usage is too high. If you are using Time Machine Pro, consider downgrading to the lighter Time Machine engines.
Group Inserts: Move memory-intensive effects without attached modulators to the Instrument or Bus Inserts instead. Remember group effects are calculated per voice!
Instrument Inserts / Bus Inserts / Sends: Move memory-intensive effects to the Outputs section, inserts into the regular output channel, sends into the Aux channels.
Just like the File Browser, the Monitor pane optionally provides an Instrument Navigator list. This can be shown and hidden with the rightmost button of the Monitor toolbar. For an in-depth explanation of what this pane does, refer to Instrument Navigator Pane.
Automation Tab
When you need to control a parameter of an Instrument from outside Kontakt, for example, using a sequencer’s automation system or MIDI controller data generated by an external fader box, you can easily pick and assign the appropriate automation source from the Automation tab of the Side pane.
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The MIDI Automation page displays a list of assignable MIDI controllers at the top, and details of the selected assignment at its bottom.
At the top of the Automation tab, two buttons allow you to switch between the list of automation sources that are provided by your host and MIDI controllers. Assigning a source to a parameter works the same way in both lists, so the described concepts and process for working with MIDI automation can be applied to the host automation workflow.
Assign automation by selecting a source from the list and dragging it onto a knob whose parameter you want to automate. If you want to assign a fader of a keyboard or a MIDI controller, but you are unsure which controller number is correct, just move the fader when the MIDI automation list is visible and Kontakt will flash a red dot next to the respective list entry when it receives any MIDI controller data. This allows you to quickly spot and assign the appropriate controller.
Another way to assign a source to a parameter is via the Learn button. Press it once to enter Learn Single mode. After moving a modulation source on your MIDI controller, such as a knob or slider, click on a parameter of the instrument to assign it. Learn Single mode will deactivate automatically and the control will become usable immediately.
To do multiple MIDI assignments successively, press the Learn button twice to enter Learn Multiple mode. This allows repeating the above steps of turning a control and clicking on a parameter indefinitely. Click the Learn Multiple button to exit this mode and start using the controls.
Tip
Multiple parameters can be assigned to the same automation source. This allows you to control multiple aspects of your Instrument with a single controller, such as increasing the brightness of an Instrument in combination with the loudness. Also note that modulation wheels usually send MIDI Controller #1, while volume controls send #7.
You can edit assignments and their parameters by selecting them in the list. If the selected item is assigned to one or more parameters, these will show up in the list below. At the bottom of the pane, you can adjust some parameters of the assignment that is selected in the lower list:
From % / To %: Adjusts the range of the assigned parameter. By default, automation controllers are mapped in a way that makes them cover the whole available range of the parameter. By changing these values, you can alter the scaling of the assignment so that the automation values are mapped to a limited range of the assigned parameter. This allows you to automate the section of the parameter’s range with finer resolution.
Soft Takeover: Avoids sudden parameter jumps that can happen if received automation data is different from the current value of the assigned parameter. If you activate this button, the assigned parameter will not be changed until an automation value is received that matches the parameter’s current value. A typical example would be the assignment of an external fader to a filter’s cutoff parameter; if the filter cutoff is currently set to 50% and you slowly move the fader upwards, Kontakt will softly pick it up as soon as it reaches its mid-point.
Remove: Deletes the automation assignment selected in the lower list.
Assigning MIDI Controllers via the Learn button
To assign MIDI controllers to controls via the Learn button:
Make sure at least one instrument is loaded and set to the MIDI port and channel of your hardware controller.
Click the Automation tab in the Side pane.
Select the MIDI Automation sub-tab.
Click the Learn button once to assign a single MIDI control. Click it twice to assign many MIDI controls. The button will show either Learn Single or Learn Multiple.
Move the control on your MIDI device that you want to assign.
Click the control in the GUI of the instrument that you want to assign.
When assigning multiple controls using Learn Multiple, repeat step 5 and 6 until all controls have been assigned. Afterwards click the Learn button again to stop assigning controls and start using them.
The MIDI Controller is assigned to the parameter.
Assigning MIDI Controllers in the Side Pane
If you are unable to assign MIDI controllers as described in MIDI Learn, there is an alternative way:
Make sure at least one instrument is loaded and set to the MIDI port and channel of your hardware controller.
Click the Automation tab in the Side pane.
Select the MIDI Automation sub-tab.
Turn a knob or move a slider on your hardware controller.
In the Side pane, you should see a flash next to the CC# that is used by your external controller; in addition, the MIDI symbol in the Instrument header should flash.
If this does not work, open the Options dialog.
Select the MIDI tab.
Select Inputs. Check if your MIDI hardware is selected as input for the same port you have assigned the instrument in question to.
If the MIDI input is setup correctly, drag and drop the MIDI CC# you wish to use onto the parameter you wish to control.
The MIDI Controller is assigned to the parameter.
MIDI controller reception in Kontakt
Removing MIDI Controller Assignments
To remove an assignment made to a specific controller:
Click the Automation tab in the Side pane.
Select the MIDI Automation sub-tab.
Find the MIDI control whose assignment you wish to remove, either by searching, or by moving the control and seeing which number in the list is highlighted with the lightning bolt symbol.
Select the control in the list and click the Remove button.
The MIDI controller assignment is removed.
Quick-Load Catalog
The Quick-Load catalog is an organizational tool that helps you manage your Instruments, Banks, and Multis. Use it to freely organize and index your files.
The Quick-Load catalog is an organizational tool that helps you manage your Instruments, Banks, and Multis. It is similar to the File Browser in that it provides access to a hierarchical directory structure. However, the Quick-Load catalog allows you to freely define it's structure without consideration for file paths, library relationships, or formats. This acts as a type of "virtual file system", that exists in parallel to the actual file system on your hard disks. Use the Quick-Load catalog to freely organize and index your files, without copying or moving them to different locations.
The Quick-Load Browser appears below the Rack when you right-click inside the empty Rack space below the Instrument Headers. Resize this pane by clicking and dragging the bar that separates it from the Rack. When the Quick-Load Browser is visible, it will hide the on-screen keyboard.
The Quick-Load Browser, displaying an exemplary directory structure.
Lock: Protects the Quick-Load file structure from being altered when dragging files and folders.
Catalog Type: Switches between the catalogs of Multis, Banks, and Instruments, respectively. The contents of these catalogs are in no way related to each other, so independent directory structures can be created for each of the three catalog types.
Close (x icon): Closes the Quick-Load Browser. Right-click inside the empty region of the Rack to hide the Browser again. When the Quick-Load Browser is visible, the on-screen keyboard is hidden.
Directory Area: Displays multiple layers of a directory tree in a horizontal arrangement of columns. When a subdirectory in one column is selected, it's contents are displayed in the column to the right, with each additional column opening another sub-layer of the directory tree.
Building a Catalog
In order to organize any larger number of objects, you should begin by devising a directory structure that’s consistent with your approach to locating Instruments, Banks and Multis. The criteria you choose for this is entirely up to you; for instance, you could categorize your objects by their instrument types, music genres or libraries. You could also combine these and sort your collection by a coarse type category on the root level, then by the respective libraries on the levels below that. Of course, it’s also possible to mix categories on the same level — since no actual files will be touched when managing your collection via the Quick-Load Browser, you can easily put the same object into more than one directory.
Tip
In case you’d like to keep your favorite Instruments in direct access at all times, you can put these — in parallel to your normal categorization in the Quick-Load Browser — into a “favorites” directory. As contents are always sorted alphabetically, though, this directory will most likely appear amidst all others. To circumvent this, just prepend its name with a special character, such as an asterisk (*); that way, it will always appear at the top of the list.
To create a new directory:
Right-click into the empty list inside the leftmost columm
Choose the command Add New Folder from the context menu.
A new directory entry will appear. Give it a meaningful name
Repeat these steps for every directory that you want to create on the root level.
To create subdirectories that extend the directory structure with deeper levels:
Select one of the new entries and create more subdirectories within the column next to it as described. That way, you can build a hierarchical directory structure step by step. Of course, you can also extend a Quick-Load catalog that has already been populated with content at any time.
To rename a directory entry, double-click it or, alternatively, right-click and choose Rename Folder from the context menu.
To fill your directories with content:
Drag one or more files from the Browser into the column of the directory in which you’d like to put them. It doesn’t matter if these originate from the Files or Libraries tabs; you can even drag Kontakt-relevant files directly from your operating system’s file navigator into the Quick-Load Browser.
While you’re dragging your objects (with mouse button held down), you can still navigate through the Quick-Load catalog in order to locate a specific directory. Just move your mouse pointer across the directory entries that you’d like to switch to; the columns to the right of the current one will adapt their contents accordingly.
In order to remove a directory, a subdirectory, or an object from a directory of the catalog:
Right-click its entry and select the Delete from Quick Load command from the context menu. Of course, no actual files will be deleted in this process.
Loading Objects from the Catalog
During your work with Kontakt, the Quick-Load catalog is just a mouse click away at all times, and you can use it at any time to quickly locate and load Instruments, Banks or entire Multis. For this, you can use the Quick-Load Browser itself or, alternatively, one of the Quick-Load menus that replicate the structure of your catalogs as hierarchical drop-down menus. We’ll describe both methods in this section.
To open the Quick-Load Browser, right-click the empty space inside the Rack. First, use the type switches at the top to select the kind of objects that you’d like to access. Following the instructions in the previous section, you can now navigate the respective catalog, going from left to right, until you’ve found an entry that you’d like to load. If the object is an Instrument or a Bank, you can add it to your Multi either by double-clicking on it, by dragging it into the empty space inside the Rack, or by right-clicking on its entry and choosing Load from the context menu. Alternatively, you can replace an existing object in your Multi by dragging its replacement onto the respective header in the Rack or choosing its position from the submenu Load Into Slot, which you can find in the context menu. Loading a Multi works in the same way, but in that case, you can only choose between replacing or combining your current Multi with the new one.
An alternate method of accessing your catalogs is offered by way of the Quick-Load menus, which you can find in different spots of the user interface, depending on whether you’d like to add a new object to your Multi or replace an existing one. In the former case, click the button labeled Files in the Header and open the submenu New Instrument from List or New Instrument Bank from List. It contains the entire structure of the respective catalog as a list of menu entries and submenus, which you can traverse in the usual way.
Replacing an Instrument using the Quick-Load menu
The same menus appear when you click the small down arrows inside the name fields of the Instrument, Bank, and Rack headers. In that case, the respective Instrument, Bank, or the entire Multi will be replaced with the object that you select from the menu.
Outputs Section
Kontakt's Outputs section provides a routing and mixing environment in the style of a traditional mixing console.
Kontakt's Outputs section provides a routing and mixing environment in the style of a traditional mixing console. The output signals from all Instruments in the Rack are sent to this section, then routed to the physical outputs of an audio interface or host software. Use the Outputs section to create, delete, rename, and configure Output Channels, which act as mono, stereo, or multichannel signal routing destinations for your Instruments. Rename and configure Aux Channels, adjust the Output and Aux volumes, and monitor your output levels.
To display the Outputs section:
Select the Outputs option in the Workspace menu.
The Outputs panel will appear in the lower half of the Rack space.
The Outputs section contains the following controls:
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The Outputs section, displaying a stereo Output Channel strip and the four Aux Channel strips, left to right.
Add Channels (+ icon): Opens a dialog to create and configure new output channels. For more information, refer to Working with Output Channels.
Delete Channel (- icon): Removes the currently selected channel from the Outputs section. To select a channel, click its border.
Presets/Batch Configuration: Opens a dropdown menu containing options for saving, resetting, or reconfiguring the Outputs section.
Show Inserts: Toggles the Insert slots display. If deactivated, the Insert slots are hidden and the height of the panel is reduced in order to save screen space.
Channel Insert Slots: Contains slots for signal processing modules, which can be inserted onto a channel to process its signal. The Insert slots are only visible if the Outputs panel is at full size. For more information, refer to Working with Signal Processors.
Channel Strips: Displays the controls for the Output Channel strips, followed by four Aux Channel strips. For more information, refer to Channel Strips.
Channel Strips
Output Channels and Aux Channels contain the following identical controls:
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Channel Name: This name will be used throughout Kontakt whenever it refers to this channel. Change the name by clicking the text field and entering a new name.
Channel Insert Slots: These slots host signal processing modules, which can be inserted onto a channel to process its signal. The Insert slots are only visible if the Outputs panel is at full size. For more information, refer to Working with Signal Processors.
Channel Fader and Level Meter: The vertical fader adjusts the output gain of its respective channel. The corresponding bar meter provides visual feedback on the signal level.
Channel Configuration: This button opens a dialog window with options to configure the channel's name, the number of audio channels it carries, and its physical output assignment.
Working with Output Channels
In Kontakt, the output signal of each Instrument in the Multi can be routed to any Output Channel that is defined in the Outputs section. Each of these Output Channels can be configured to carry between 1 and 16 audio channels. When a note is played, the respective Instrument’s output signal arrives at the assigned Output Channel, then passes through any channel Inserts, the volume fader, and is finally sent to the the physical output defined in the channel’s Configuration dialog. The bar-graph display next to the channel fader indicates the signal level at the output.
Note
The Master Volume control, located in the Master Editor, will affect the levels of all Output and Aux Channels in the Outputs section. For more information, refer to Master Editor.
Output Configuration
The Output configuration must contain at least one channel. New Output Channels are configured for stereo signals by default, and can be changed in the channel’s configuration dialog. New Instruments will always be assigned to the leftmost channel in the Outputs section by default.
The Channel Configuration dialog contains the following elements:
The Channel Configuration dialog
Channel name: Displays the name of the channel. Rename a channel by clicking on the text field and entering a name.
Audiochannels: Adjusts the number of audio channels this channel will carry, up to a maximum of 16. To change the number, click the field and drag your mouse up or down, or double-click the value field and enter a number (1-16).
Output Map: Displays all audio channels of this Output Channel along with their assigned physical destinations, both output jacks on your audio interface or virtual connections to your host. To change a physical output assignment, click its name and choose a new output from the drop-down menu.
Previous/Next (arrow icons): Moves to the settings of the previous or next channel of the Outputs section, allowing you to quickly adjust the output configuration for all channels at once.
Working with Aux Channels
The four Aux Channels in Kontakt offer identical controls to the Output Channels, but receive their signal from other places. While each Instrument routes its output signal to only one Output Channel, you can additionally send this signal to one or multiple Aux Channels, at adjustable levels. This allows you to easily create sub-mixes.
You can also use the Aux Channels as routing destinations for all Send Effects that appear in your Instruments. This allows you to “tap” wet effect signals in order to process them independently from the dry signals. How this kind of routing works is explained in Using filters and effects in Classic view.
Aside from this difference, Aux Channels work in exactly the same way as Output Channels; each has its own channel strip in the Outputs section, can contain up to four insert signal processors, and can be routed to specific physical outputs. In addition, the levels of all Aux Channels can be adjusted globally with the Master Volume control located in the Master Editor.
Working with Signal Processors
Kontakt provides a range of signal processors that can be added as inserts and sends in the Outputs section. Inserts are provided within the Output Channel strips, while the Aux Channels can be used to send effects across Instruments. Each Channel has four slots, which can be loaded with different signal processors for varying uses.
To add a signal processor to a slot:
Click the menu button (arrow icon) on a slot to open the Effects menu.
Select from the nine categories, then select a module to load it onto the slot.
Click the module name to access its parameter controls and editing options.
Tip
For an overview of the signal processors, refer to the Kontakt User Manual.
Outputs in Host Mode
When using Kontakt in stand-alone mode, physical outputs are also assigned within the Channel Configuration dialog. The drop-down menu contains all outputs that are provided by the audio interface selected in the Audio tab of the Options dialog. When using Kontakt as a plug-in in audio hosts, there are more details to consider as each host handles plug-ins with multiple outputs differently.
The maximum number of (mono) audio channels that can be assigned in host mode is limited to 64 for the VST/VST3 version of Kontakt, and 16 for the AU and AAX versions.
Changes to output configuration cannot be made during operation. In consequence, when making changes in the Outputs section, a dialog will appear asking to save and reload the song. First, go to the Presets/Batch Configuration menu and select the appropriate option from the Save current output section state as default for sub-menu.
Another caveat relates to the fact that the output configuration of each Kontakt instance will be saved along with your song; this can result in the rather unfortunate case of several loaded Kontakt instances with different output configurations. This can confuse your host and lead to unexpected behavior, so when you’re working with Kontakt as a plug-in, it is recommended that you make all output configuration changes as default for that specific plug-in type.
Group Editor
Groups are the primary tool for manipulating batches of samples. Learn how to manage groups with the Group Editor.
Groups are perhaps the most prominent entity of a Kontakt Instrument. In addition to providing a way to combine and use a common signal path for any number of Zones in your Instrument, Groups allow you to define conditions on which Zones will be played, adjust how the voice allocation for the contained Zones will be handled, and provide a selection mechanism that lets you change parameters in unison across groups. What’s more, you can export and import Groups to and from your hard disk, which is the most convenient way to copy parts of one Instrument to another.
Generally, when you create your own Instruments, you should find a consistent way to distribute your Zones into Groups. This can be a common aspect of the Zones that serves as an attribute for dividing them into categories; for instance, if you create a chromatically sampled Instrument with four velocity layers, you could distribute the Zones on each layer across four Groups named “vel 0-31”, “vel 32-63”, “vel 64-95” and “vel 96-127”. This way, should you decide later that the highest velocity layer needs some additional “sparkle” to cut through your mix, you can simply select the respective Group for editing and add a EQ with a treble boost to its Group Insert Effects chain.
As another example, if you want to add release samples, you’ll need to move them into a separate Group, as the required Release Trigger parameter always acts upon a whole Group.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of how the Group concept works, you’ll need a convenient way to create, delete, access, name, and manage the Groups in your Instrument; this functionality is provided by the Group Editor.
When you’re in Instrument Edit mode, click the button labeled GroupEditor at the top of the Instrument Edit view
The Group Editor will appear in the Rack.
The Group Editor, opened on an Instrument which contains 3 Groups. Only the “Bass” Group is currently selected both for display and for editing.
The Group Editor is divided into four sections:
At its top, a control header provides several buttons and drop-down menus.
The largest amount of space is taken up by the Groups list below, which will display all Groups in your Instruments as a scrollable list.
At the bottom of the editor, you’ll find a row of several parameters that pertain to the assignment of Voice Groups
The Group Start Options button in the lower left corner will show or hide an additional set of rows which contain the Group start conditions.
Let’s take a look at what each of these elements does.
Control Header
This row of buttons and drop-down menus at the top of the Group Editor provides common utility functions for easy Group management. The following sections will explain each of these elements, from left to right, in detail.
The header of the Group Editor contains a number of options and utility functions.
Edit All Groups
If this button is activated, all parameters that you adjust on the Group level from that point on will affect all Groups in the currently edited Instrument. This button is just a convenient shortcut for checking all edit boxes in the Group list; the same function is also available via a button located in the Rack header when you’re in Instrument Edit mode.
As an example, suppose you have three Groups with a modulation assignment for each, which assigns an LFO to their pitch in order to create a vibrato effect. If you decide now that the vibrato effect is a little too strong across all Groups, you don’t need to change the respective modulation intensity in each Group. Just activate the Edit All Groups button and decrease the respective Intensity parameter in one of the Groups; the respective parameters in all other Groups will change with it.
We recommend that you always switch this feature off right after you’ve used it. If you leave it on and make any adjustments to Group parameters later without keeping it in mind, you’ll potentially destroy carefully tweaked parameter settings in other Groups.
You can find more information on how to change parameters across Groups in section Group List.
Group Selector
Next to the Edit All Groups button, you’ll notice a label that indicates the currently selected Group, as well as the total number of Groups in your Instrument. Clicking on it opens a drop-down menu that allows you to select another Group; clicking on the Group name that’s displayed in the Rack header when you’re in Instrument Edit mode will do the same. In contrast to clicking on a name in the Group list, however, this action won’t enable the selected Group for editing at the same time, which makes it the preferred way of selecting Groups if you just want to check out their contents without editing them.
Edit
This drop-down menu contains a number of utility functions, most of which act on all Groups that are currently selected in the Group list. Note that this selection is different from enabling Groups for editing; selected Groups will be indicated with a filled or hollow rectangle around their name in the Group list, while Groups that are activated for editing will be indicated with a checked box in front of their name.
The Edit menu contains editing commands that operate on the currently selected Group(s).
The Edit menu is also available as a right-click context menu both inside the Group Editor and the Groups tab of the Monitor.
Let’s take a look at each function in this menu:
Set edit flag for selected groups: This option checks the Edit Flag for all Groups that are currently selected in the Groups List. This allows you to check multiple Groups for editing quickly, without using the Edit All Groups option, which only allows an all or one mode of editing Groups.
Copy: Copies the selected Groups to the clipboard.
Cut: Moves the selected Group and its Zones to the clipboard for later use, removing the Group from the Group list in the process.
Tip
Using the cut, copy, and paste commands in the Group Editor, you can move and copy Groups between Instruments. This even works across multiple Kontakt instances and sessions.
Duplicate: Creates identical copies of the selected Groups.
Paste with samples: Inserts the contents of the Group clipboard into the Group list, leaving their Zones and referenced Sample information intact. Note that if you copied the respective Group(s) beforehand, therefore creating duplicates by pasting them, the Zones will be duplicated along with the Groups, so later changes to the Zone parameters in one Group won’t affect the Zones of its copy.
Paste without samples: Inserts the contents of the Group clipboard into the Group list, omitting any Zones in the process. This way, you’ll get empty Groups that replicate the settings of a previously copied or cut Group.
Delete: Deletes any selected Groups. If any of the Groups still contain Zones, they will be deleted as well; in such cases, you’ll be asked if you’re sure about this.
Delete empty groups: Deletes all Groups that don’t contain any Zones.
Create empty group: Creates a new empty group.
Export group...: This function allows you to save the currently selected Group to an .nkg file on your hard disk, which you can re-use in other Instruments. In contrast to other commands that act on all selected Groups, this one doesn’t handle multiple selections; only the currently displayed Group, which will be indicated in the Group list with a filled rectangle around its name, will be saved. When you click this function, a pop-up dialog will ask you to specify a location and name for the file. In addition, you can also choose between different ways of how the referenced Samples in this Group should be handled:
Patch Only won’t save the Samples, but reference them at their original positions in the Group file.
Patch + Samples will save the Samples along with the Group file in a definable location
Monolith will combine both Group data and its referenced Samples into one large file.
Import group...: Load a Group in .nkg format and add it to your Instrument, along with all of its contained Zones. This command also allows you to import Battery 3 Cells.
Group Solo
If this button is activated, all Groups except the currently selected one will be muted. This lets you conveniently check out the contents of a Group when working with multiple Groups, whose Zones may overlap.
Select by MIDI
If this button is activated, you can select Groups by playing notes on your keyboard. When Kontakt receives a MIDI note, it checks all Groups for Zones that match its note number and velocity, and selects any Groups that contain such Zones in the Group list. This makes for a very intuitive way to quickly switch between Groups; suppose you’re working on a drum set with every instrument being assigned to a separate Group. Instead of locating the bass drum Group within the Group list and clicking on its name, you just play a bass drum note on your keyboard, and the corresponding Group will be automatically selected.
Group List
This pane displays a list of all Groups in your currently edited Instrument. If the number of Groups won’t fit into the window, a scroll bar will appear on its right side. Here you can select Groups and enable them for editing.
In order to select a Group for viewing, just click its name; it will be highlighted with a filled rectangle, and all currently visible controls on the Group level will now show the parameters of this Group. Any command you select from the Edit menu of the Group Editor will now operate on this Group only. Double-clicking an entry allows you to change its name.
While only one Group can be displayed at any time (which will always be indicated with a filled rectangle in the Group list), you can select multiple Groups by holding the [Ctrl] key ([Cmd] on OS X) while clicking on separate Groups to add them to your selection, or holding the [Shift] key while clicking on a second entry to include all Groups between the first and the last one in your selection. This selection affects only upon which Groups the commands in the Edit menus will act; to find out how to change parameters across multiple Groups, read on.
You will notice a small check box next to each Group name in the Group list, which will always be activated on the list entry on which you clicked last.
The check box next to a Group name indicates whether this Group is selected for editing.
It indicates whether the parameters of the respective Group will be changed along when you do any adjustments. In other words, when you enable the check boxes next to multiple Groups and then move any controls of the currently displayed Group (such as the Volume or Pan knob of the Amplifier Module), the parameters of the other Groups will be affected as well.
This transfer happens in an absolute fashion; settings in the other Groups will simply be replaced with the new ones. This can easily result in unintentional changes to parameters in other Groups than the currently visible one, so be sure to check whether other Groups are currently activated for editing before you do any adjustments on Group level modules. This is made easier by a text indicator in the Rack header: as long as you’re in Instrument Edit mode, it will indicate how many and which Groups are currently activated for editing.
Note that the Monitor tab in the Side pane offers you alternate views for the functions described in this section. These can greatly simplify managing Groups and changing parameters across Groups; depending on your preference, you might want to use them instead of the Group list for some operations. The Monitor tab is described in detail in section Monitor Tab.
Voice Groups
The concept of Voice Groups allows you to fine-tune the way in which Kontakt allocates audio voices to Groups. Please don’t confuse Voice Groups with Groups; in spite of the similar names, they’re entirely different concepts. To understand Voice Groups, let’s begin with an example.
A typical sampler program of a drum set contains at least one sample of a closed hi-hat and one of an opened hi-hat. As the ringing sound of an opened hi-hat will be immediately cut off when the drummer closes it, we can conclude that these sounds never occur at the same time; therefore, we could simulate this behavior by limiting the maximum voice count of the hi-hat to one. As each played Sample will take one voice, and the last played Sample will have priority over any Samples that were triggered before by default, playing the closed hi-hat Sample will cut a still ringing open hi-hat Sample off.
How can we accomplish this? You can adjust the maximum number of voices to be used for an Instrument in the Instrument Header, but this would restrict all other parts of the drum kit to one voice as well. A more practical way would be to make use of the Voice Group concept: it allows you to create a voice allocation setting and apply it to any number of Groups in your Instrument.
In contrast to Groups, you don’t have to create or manage Voice Groups; instead, 128 of them are pre-defined in every Instrument. By default, Groups are not assigned to any Voice Group, which means they will share the pool of voices as defined in the Instrument Header with all other Groups. By assigning some of your Groups to one of the 128 Voice Groups and adjusting this Voice Group’s parameters, you can define a new set of voice allocation rules for these Groups. For instance, you could solve the hi-hat problem by assigning the closed and open hi-hat Groups to Voice Group 1, then set the voice count of this Voice Group to one. There are more parameters to a Voice Group than its maximum voice count; these will be explained later.
The 128 Voice Groups can be assigned and edited in the strip below the Group list of the Group Editor. Selecting a Voice Group from the drop-down menu at its left will assign all currently selected Groups to this Voice Group, and display its parameters in the fields to the right.
The row of parameters below the Group list allows you to assign and adjust Voice Groups.
Here’s a run-down of these parameters, from left to right:
Name: Displays the name of the selected voice group. Clicking in this field allows you to change the name.
Voices: Adjusts the maximum number of voices that can be used by the Groups in this Voice Group. If a Sample is triggered and the maximum voice count has already been reached, voices of Samples that would otherwise still sound will be “sacrificed” and recycled.
Mode: This setting decides which of the currently allocated voices will be sacrificed and recycled if a newly triggered Sample would otherwise exceed the maximum voice count for this Voice Group:
Kill Any: Let Kontakt decide what to do.
Kill Oldest: The oldest, still playing Sample will be cut off.
Kill Newest: The most recently triggered Sample will be cut off.
Kill Highest: The note with the highest pitch will be cut off.
Kill Lowest: The note with the lowest pitch will be cut off.
Pref.Rel: If this button is activated and the Voice Group runs out of voices, Kontakt will give already released notes a higher priority when it decides which voices to keep.
FadeTime: Adjusts how long a sacrificed voice will fade out before it disappears. The fadeout length is specified in milliseconds. This may cause the overall number of voices to temporarily exceed the maximum value.
Excl.Grp: This drop-down menu allows you to assign the current Voice Group to one of 16 Exclusive Groups. Assigning two or more Voice Groups to the same Exclusive Group will cause Samples from one Voice Group to cut off all still-sounding Samples from the other Voice Groups assigned to the Exclusive Group. When you re-consider our hi-hat example, you’ll notice that an alternative solution would be keeping the samples in separate Groups and assigning them to the same Exclusive Group. This has the added benefit that you can edit the Group-level signal processing of both samples separately.
Group Start Options
By default, each Zone in a Group will always play its assigned Sample when a note is received that matches its keyboard and velocity range. However, there are applications that demand for more control about when the Zones in a Group will come active. Some examples include:
When you sample an acoustic Instrument, you might want to provide multiple, slightly different Samples for each note and velocity range, then have Kontakt cycle between them in a round-robin fashion when note repetitions are played; this eliminates the dreaded “machine gun effect”, which is a giveaway of sampled instruments. For this, you need a way to make each Group wait for its turn before it sounds.
With the advent of large, modern sample libraries, it has become customary to let the user switch between different articulations with keys on his master keyboard that are unused by the Instrument’s Zones; these so-called keyswitches require a way to make Groups only come active when their respective keyswitch was the last received one.
You might want to switch between Groups depending on the value of a MIDI controller; for instance, lots of modern piano libraries use separate sample sets for notes which are played with the sustain pedal depressed and released.
The Group Start Options allow you to define a range of conditions that have to be met before the respective Group will become active and can output any sound. The list of these conditions is hidden from the Group Editor view by default; you can show it by clicking on the Group Start Options button in the lower left corner of the Group Editor.
Multiple Group start conditions, combined with “and” operators. This means that all specified conditions must be met before the Group becomes active.
Each row of this list has a drop-down menu at its left side.
To add a condition to the list, select its general type from this menu.
To the right of the menu, Kontakt will then show the respective parameters that belong to the respective condition along with explanatory labels, as well as an operator drop-down menu that logically combines this entry with the next one.
The Group Start Options list includes the following types of conditions:
Always: This is a no-operation value. If it’s is the only value in the list, the selected Group will always be active. In lists with more than one row, this value serves as a marker for the last row in the list, as well as an entry that deletes rows from the list when you choose it.
Start on Key: This condition lets you define keyswitches. A Group with this condition will be deactivated until a trigger note within the defined range is received; it will be deactivated again when another Group in your Instrument with a Start on Key condition will come active, so that you can switch between Groups with single key strokes.
Start on Controller: The Group will come active when Kontakt receives a MIDI controller within a specific range. It will be deactivated again when a controller value outside the range is received.
Cycle Round Robin: All Groups that have this condition in their Group Start Options will be cycled in a round-robin fashion on each note. Among other things, you can use this feature to add realistic variations to note repetitions, or automatically alternate between left and right strokes on percussion instruments.
Cycle Random: Like Cycle Round Robin, but notes will be cycled randomly instead of sequentially.
Slice Trigger: This option was used by slice Groups in Kontakt 2. It is provided for backwards compatibility and should not be used explicitly.
By adding multiple conditions to the list and connecting them with the logical operators you’ll find in the drop-down menu at the right side, you can create very complex combinations of conditions. Note that the last entry of the list (which will be an always condition) won’t be taken into account when your list contains at least another condition entry.
Mapping Editor
Samples, which are essentially audio files by another name, are made playable in Kontakt by creating Zones that reference these files. A Zone is a kind of container that holds information in order to tell Kontakt which Sample to play when a specific note is received. A Zone needs to specify a range of note and velocity values that it should respond to. In addition, a Zone can contain other values, like volume, pan, and tune adjustments.
All of the facilities required to specify the parameters of a Zone (and a few more) are provided in the Mapping Editor.
Click on the Mapping Editor button just below the Instrument Header to toggle the Mapping Editor view on and off.
The Mapping Editor, displaying the Zones of an Instrument which contains 3-layer velocity switches throughout its playable range.
The Mapping Editor consists of three parts:
At the top, a control strip with two rows of buttons and menus provides access to a number of utility functions that operate on your selected Zones.
A status line displays the parameters of the currently selected Zone and allows you to change it.
The largest space is taken up by the Zone grid, a two-dimensional panel with a keyboard at its bottom. It displays and lets you change the key range (horizontal axis) and velocity range (vertical axis) of each Zone in an intuitive, graphical way. Scroll bars at the right and lower border allow you to move the view around, as well as zoom vertically and horizontally by clicking the “-” and “+” buttons; the “-” and “+” keys on the number pad of your keyboard will do the same. Alternatively, you can quickly zoom into a specific region by holding the Alt key while clicking and dragging the mouse on the grid; this will open a “rubber band” selection frame, which will fill up the whole view with its selected area when you release the mouse button. To zoom out again, just click somewhere on the grid while holding the Alt key. When you play a note on your MIDI keyboard, a small red marker should appear above the corresponding key of the on-screen keyboard, with higher velocities being indicated with a higher position in the grid.
Mapping Samples Manually
You can manually create Zones by dragging one or multiple Samples from the Side pane or your desktop into the Zone grid of the Mapping Editor. While dragging, a highlighted region will tell you where Kontakt would place the Zone(s) on the keyboard. When you release the mouse button, the Zones will be created; if you change your mind and don’t want to add new Zones, just move your mouse outside the Mapping Editor and release the button.
While you keep your mouse button depressed, Kontakt will highlight the pattern in which it would map new Zones to the keyboard.
The way Kontakt will distribute the new Zone(s) depends on your mouse position and whether you’re dragging one or multiple Samples:
Dragging a single Sample into the Zone grid will create a Zone that spans the entire velocity range, and will be placed on one or several adjacent keys. When you move the mouse all the way to the bottom of the grid, the Zone will be assigned to a single key; moving the mouse upwards will gradually enlarge the keyboard range of the Zone, until it spans the entire keyboard when you’re at the top of the grid.
Dragging multiple Samples into the Zone grid will create a corresponding number of adjacent, non-overlapping Zones, starting with the key at your horizontal mouse position. Just like when you drag single Samples, the vertical mouse position will adjust the size of each Zone’s key range. When you move your mouse all the way to the top of the grid, all Samples will be layered in overlapping Zones that span the whole key range.
Dragging multiple Samples onto a key of the keyboard below the grid will create a corresponding number of Zones that evenly divide the velocity range on that key. This makes for a convenient way to quickly create velocity switches.
Note that when you drag multiple samples from the Side pane into the Mapping Editor, the sort order in which they appeared in the Side pane will also determine the order in which the corresponding Zones will be placed. For instance, if you’d like to create an eight-way velocity switch out of samples named “Piano-C3-1.wav” through “Piano-C3-8.wav”, you should make sure that the Samples list in the Side pane is sorted by name in ascending order before you select and drag the Samples into the Mapping Editor.
In addition to Samples, you can also drag one or multiple sliced loops into the Mapping Editor to place them on the keyboard. In this case, the newly created Zones won’t belong to the currently selected Group; instead, a new Group will be created for each Loop with its Source Module set to Beat Machine mode.
Mapping Samples Automatically
Placing Zones manually by dragging Samples from the Side pane into the Zone grid works well if your Instrument won’t contain a lot of Zones, or if your Samples are conveniently named in a way that makes it possible to pre-sort them in the Side pane before you create Zones out of them. But what if the samples of your violin set are not named “Violin-1.wav” through “Violin-14.wav”, but instead “Violin-G2-A2” through “Violin-A#5-C6”? There’s no way to get the Side pane to sort them in any meaningful way.
For scenarios like this, the Mapping Editor includes an Auto-Mapping feature. It consists of a customizable filename scanner that first attempts to determine which parts of your Sample’s filenames could contain valuable information, then lets you assign to which Zone parameters these parts should be mapped.
To use the Auto-Mapping feature, you’ll have to create Zones out of your Samples first by dragging them into the Mapping Editor as described above. While doing this, you won’t have to care about aspects that can be derived from the Sample filenames later. For instance, if your filenames contain the key range, you don’t need to place the Zones anywhere particular; they will be moved to their correct destinations by the Auto-Mapping feature anyway.
In the next step, mark all Zones in the Mapping Editor upon which you want the Auto-Mapping feature to act. You can select multiple Zones either by holding the [Shift] key while clicking on them, or by clicking on the grid background and dragging the mouse to open a “rubber band” selection frame. When all Zones you want to process are selected, open the Edit drop-down menu at the top of the Mapping Editor and choose Auto Map — Setup. A dialog window will appear that displays the result of the filename scanning process.
The Auto Mapping dialog, displaying a filename that has been split up into four tokens.
At the top of this dialog, you can see which filename has been used to determine where the interesting parts of the filename could be. These so-called “tokens” are any strings that appear in the filename and are separated from each other with non-alphanumeric characters like spaces, dashes, or underscores. Below, the filename is displayed again, this time split up into its determined tokens, with a drop-down menu below each of them. These menus allow you to specify for each token whether it shall be ignored or used to derive any Zone information. For example, if your Samples are named similar to “Trumpet-f-C1-D#1.wav”, with the “f” indicating the dynamic layer and the notes representing the low and high endpoints of the key range, you can leave the drop-down menu of the first token (“Trumpet”) at its Ignore Me entry, while setting the menus of the second, third and fourth tokens (“f”, “C1” and “D#1”) to Make Group Name, Make Low Key, Make High Key and Set to Single Key respectively.
Tokens marked “Ignore me” won’t be used for any automatic Zone adjustment.
Of course, this applies only if you want to separate multiple dynamic layers into Groups, otherwise you can leave the second menu set to Ignore Me as well.
When you enable the Read root key from sample metadata if possible option at the bottom of the dialog, Kontakt will read and use the root key information that’s embedded in some WAV and AIFF files, if available, instead of trying to get it from the filename. Once the settings accurately reflect the information contained in your filenames, click the Close button at the bottom of the dialog.
Now, with the Zones still selected, choose the Auto map selected command from the Edit menu at the top of the Mapping Editor, or use the keyboard shortcut [Ctrl] + T ([Cmd] + T on Mac OS X). If you correctly identified all filename tokens in the previous step, Kontakt will now automatically arrange and place the Zones according to the information it gets from the filenames of their referenced Samples.
Managing Zones
Once you’ve created Zones for your Samples, you can take care of adjusting their parameters to your needs. Each Zone carries the following parameters with it:
Key Range: This is the range of notes on your keyboard to which the Zone will respond. For instance, a keyboard range of “C3–D#3” tells Kontakt that the respective Zone shall be played when a C3, C#3, D3, or D#3 note is received. If a Zone is being assigned to a single key (as it’s the case with chromatically sampled Instruments), the keyboard range will look similar to “C3–C3”.
Vel Range: The values here specify the lowest and highest velocity values the Zone will respond. A Zone that will be triggered regardless of the velocity will have a velocity range of “0–127”.
Root Key: This is the pitch at which the sample was originally recorded. When the Zone is being played at this key, no transposition will take place. Note that an incorrect root key value will result in a transposition offset of the whole Zone, as Kontakt will transpose Zones based on the distance between their root key and the actual received note. Also, for any transposition to occur at all, the Tracking parameter of the respective Group’s Source Module needs to be activated.
Volume: This parameter lets you specify a volume offset for each Zone. The default volume setting of all Zones is 0 dB.
Pan: This parameter allows you to place each Zone independently within the stereo panorama.
Tune: This parameter lets you change the tuning of a Zone within a range of +/- 36 semitones.
Note that the last three parameters are mainly intended for a non-destructive correction of Samples which deviate in volume, panorama position, or tuning. They work in combination with the identically named parameters of the Source and Amplifier modules. If you want to modulate these parameters on a per-Zone basis, read about Zone Envelopes in section Zone Envelopes.
Editing Parameters in the Status Bar
In order to view and change the parameters of a Zone, first select it in the Zone grid of the Mapping Editor by clicking on it. All parameters of the currently selected Zone will now be displayed in the status bar above the Zone grid. You can change a parameter by clicking on its value and dragging your mouse upwards or downwards. While this is the only way to change the volume, pan and tune parameters of a Zone, there are several alternate ways to adjust its keyboard range, velocity range, or root key.
Editing Parameters Graphically
You can change the keyboard and velocity range of a Zone, as well as its root key, graphically within the Zone grid of the Mapping Editor:
Clicking into a Zone and moving the mouse horizontally will move the whole Zone across the keyboard. Using the left and right cursor keys while holding [Ctrl] ([Cmd] on Mac OS X) will move the currently selected Zone(s) across the keyboard.
Clicking on the left or right border of a Zone (the mouse cursor will change when it’s right on the border) and dragging it horizontally, thereby changing the horizontal size of the Zone, will change that Zone’s keyboard range. Using the left and right cursor keys while holding [Shift] and [Ctrl] ([Cmd] on Mac OS X) will adjust the high key limit of the selected Zone’s key range.
Clicking on the upper or lower border of a Zone and dragging it vertically will change this Zone’s velocity range. Using the up and down cursor keys while holding [Ctrl] ([Cmd] on Mac OS X) will move the velocity range of the currently selected Zone(s) by two velocity steps; holding [Shift] and [Ctrl] will change their upper velocity limits.
Clicking on the yellow key on the keyboard below the Zone grid and dragging it horizontally will change the Zone’s root key.
[Ctrl]-clicking and dragging while your mouse is on the left or right border of a Zone will create a Zone crossfade. This function will be explained below.
Alt-clicking and dragging will open a “rubber band” zoom frame; when you release the mouse button, the contents inside the selection frame will zoom in to fill the whole pane. To zoom out again, just Alt-click somewhere on the grid.
You can select multiple Zones by clicking on them while holding the [Shift] key, or clicking on an empty space of the grid and dragging the mouse to open a “rubber band” selection (when you hold [Shift], you can open the selection frame at any point, also on Zones).
Tip
If multiple Zones overlap and you can’t reach one that’s hidden behind another, try holding the [Ctrl] key ([Cmd] on Mac OS X) while clicking inside them repeatedly; this will cycle through all Zones you’re pointing at.
By using the cursor keys while holding [Shift], you can add adjacent Zones to your current selection. This way, you can use the described methods to move or modify the Zones in unison; the status bar, however, will only show values that are identical across all selected Zones when multiple Zones are selected.
Editing Parameters via MIDI
A third alternative that lets you change the keyboard and velocity ranges of a Zone in an intuitive way is using your MIDI keyboard. After you’ve selected a Zone in the Zone grid of the Mapping Editor, enable one of the buttons depicted with a small MIDI jack and a double arrow in the control strip, or both.
Enabling MIDI Mapping
The button with a horizontal arrow lets you change the keyboard range, the one with a vertical arrow lets you change the velocity range.
When these are active, play two keys on your keyboard; it doesn’t matter whether you play them at the same time or in succession. Depending which of the two buttons you have activated, Kontakt will use the note numbers and the velocity of both notes as endpoints for the Zone’s new keyboard and/or velocity range.
Control Strip
The control strip is located at the top of the Mapping Editor and consists of two rows of controls. This is where you can find most utility functions for managing and editing your Zones.
The Control Strip of the Mapping Editor provides a number of options and utility functions.
Let’s take a look at the elements of the control strip:
Edit menu: This button opens a drop-down menu with utility functions that operate on all currently selected Zones, such as clipboard operations, functions for assigning Zones to Groups, and batch processes. You can find a thorough explanation of all entries in this menu in the next section of this chapter.
List View: This button switches the Zone grid to an alternate view mode that displays all Groups and their contained Zones in a hierarchical list structure at the left side.
Tip
When you’re in list view, you can expand or collapse all Groups at once by holding [Shift] when you click an expand/collapse button.
This mode is especially handy when you’re working with lots of Zones that overlap in large areas, as Zones that are hidden behind others can be difficult to select and edit in the normal, flat view. The downside of the list view is that it doesn’t convey any information about the velocity ranges; the only way to modify these is by editing them numerically in the status bar after you have selected a Zone. Just like the default view, the list view can be moved around with the scrollbars and zoomed with either the zoom buttons or by clicking and dragging a “rubber band” zoom frame while holding the Alt key.
Select Zone by MIDI: If this button is activated, any incoming MIDI note will automatically select any Zone(s) that match its note number and velocity. The function works similarly to the Select by MIDI feature of the Group Editor.
Auto-Spread Zone Key Ranges: This function automatically fills “holes” in your key mapping by successively extending the key range of each selected Zone to both sides until it “touches” its neighbors. The algorithm ignores the root keys of the selected Zones; it simply uses the current key range as a starting point for extension. If you want the root keys to be accounted for, use the Auto-Spread Key Ranges via Root Key function instead. The Auto-Spread Zone Key Ranges function is also available in the Edit menu.
Auto-SpreadVelocity Ranges: This function works similarly to Auto-Spread Zone Key Ranges, but operates on the velocity range of each selected Zone instead of the key range. This function is also available in the Edit menu.
Auto-Map Selected: When you click the Auto button, the Auto-Mapping feature will change the parameters and placement of each selected Zone according to information it has derived from its Sample’s filename. This function is also available in the Edit menu. The Auto-Mapping feature is explained in detail in the previous section of this chapter.
Auto-Spread Key Ranges via Root Key (Root): This function works similarly to the Auto-Spread Zone Key Ranges command; however, it aims for the smallest possible maximum transposition that can occur in each Zone by accounting for the root keys and trying to keep them in the center of their respective Zone. This function is also available in the Edit menu.
Resolve Overlapping Key Ranges: This function eliminates key range overlaps between the selected Zones by successively shrinking the key range of each Zone until it doesn’t overlap its neighbor anymore. It aims for optimal utilization of root keys (and consequently, the smallest possible amount of transposition). This function is also available in the Edit menu and via the keyboard shortcut [Ctrl]-R ([Cmd]-R on Mac OS X).
Resolve Overlapping Velocity Ranges: This function works similarly to the Resolve Overlapping Key Ranges command, but operates on the velocity ranges of the selected Zones. It’s also available in the Edit menu and via the keyboard shortcut [Shift] + [Ctrl] + [R] ([Shift] + [Cmd] + [R] on Mac OS X).
Set Key Range via MIDI: If this button is activated and a Zone is selected, Kontakt will use the next two incoming MIDI notes as the endpoints of a new key range for the selected Zone. This function is described in the previous section.
Set Velocity Range via MIDI: If this button is activated and a Zone is selected, Kontakt will use the velocities of the next two incoming MIDI notes as the endpoints of a new velocity range for the selected Zone. This function is described in the previous section.
Lock Zones: When this button is activated, the key and velocity ranges of all Zones will be protected from being changed graphically inside the Zone grid. This can be handy when you’re doing editing tasks that require you to switch between Zones a lot, and want to avoid accidentally moving one of them or changing its key or velocity ranges.
Zone Solo: This button will mute all Zones in your Instrument except of the currently selected one(s). Once activated, the solo function will follow your selection, so you can quickly check out the contents of specific Zones acoustically.
Selected Groups Only: When this button is activated, the Mapping Editor will only show Zones that belong to the currently selected Group. To help you keep the overview, other Zones will be displayed dimly in the background, but won’t be able for selection or editing.
Auto Sel Grp: When this button is activated, the Group selection will follow your Zone selection. In other words, selecting a Zone will automatically select the respective Group to which it belongs in the Group Editor.
Sample Field: This text field displays the filename of the Sample that’s assigned to the currently selected Zone. When you hover the mouse pointer over this field, Kontakt will additionally display the full path to the Sample file. Using the arrow buttons on the right side of the field, you can assign a new Sample to the selected Zone; the buttons will switch to the previous or next Sample within the folder of the current one.
Batch Functions
You can find these tools in the Batch functions submenu of the Edit menu. In addition to functions that place root keys in relation to the respective Zone borders, the menu includes several utility operations that let you create crossfades between Zones, which needs a brief introduction.
When you create Sample sets of tonal instruments that don’t include a Sample for each note, the notes that haven’t been sampled need to derive their signal from the Samples of nearby notes. This is usually done by transposing these “native” Samples upwards or downwards. This method has a downside — the necessary re-sampling process can “skew” the sound character of your instrument, especially when transposition over a wider note range is required. Consequentially, this means that two consecutive notes on a scale which happen to cross the “border” between two Zones, and thus are both transposed versions of different Samples, can sound dissimilar.
The same problem can arise with velocity switched Sample sets; suppose you’re using four Samples per note, each assigned to one of four equally large velocity ranges. Especially when you’re sampling an acoustic instrument, it can easily happen that two consecutive notes with only marginally different velocity values still happen to fall into two different velocity ranges, thus resulting in noticeably different timbres.
Crossfades provide a way to counteract these effects. The basic idea is that overlapping your Zones and creating a crossfade between them, thus making them blend into each other within the overlapping parts, will mask the difference in sound for notes that fall “between” them.
Crossfades are being depicted with colored gradients.
Consider this example: You’re sampling an instrument in minor thirds and have just sampled D and F. You create two Zones out of the Samples and extend them a major second to both sides. Now, Zone 1 covers the key range between C and E, with its root key being D. Zone 2 has its root key on F and covers the key range between D# and G. Notice that the Zones overlap on D# and E, where both will be transposed. Now you create a key crossfade on both Zones; as a result, D# and E notes will play a blend of both Zones, with the D Zone’s Sample being predominant on D# notes, and the F Zone’s Sample being predominant on E notes. Of course, this method works just as well with larger sampling intervals. Just make sure that your Zones overlap in ranges you’d like to be crossfaded, whether in key (horizontal) or velocity (vertical) direction.
With this knowledge, let’s get back to the contents of the Batch Tools sub-menu:
Auto-apply key crossfades: Creates crossfades between all selected Zones whose key ranges overlap to some extent. Active crossfades will be indicated with a shaded area between Zones; if this makes your Zone grid look too cluttered, try zooming in or switching into List View.
Tip
You can manually create crossfades by [Ctrl]-clicking and dragging the left or right border of a Zone.
Auto-apply velocity crossfades: Creates crossfades between all selected Zones whose velocity ranges overlap to some extent.
Remove key crossfades: Removes all key range crossfades from the selected Zones, if any, which reverts them to normal overlapped Zones.
Remove velocity crossfades: Removes all velocity range crossfades from the selected Zones, if any.
Move root keys to lower border: Moves the root key of each selected Zone to the lowest note in the key range.
Move root keys to center: Moves the root key of each selected Zone to the center of the Zone’s key range.
Move root keys to upper border: Moves the root key of each selected Zone to the highest note in the key range.
Wave Editor
Learn how to manipulate source samples in Kontakt's Wave Editor.
In the previous chapters of this manual, we explained how you can use Kontakt to turn Sample files on your hard disk into playable Instruments. Building Zones, Groups and Instruments out of ready-made Samples is fine by itself, but if you want to really get into creative sound design, you’ll sooner or later want a tool that lets you work directly on the waveform of your audio material. As you might have guessed already, the Wave Editor is this tool. Let’s have a look at what you can do with it:
View and audition Samples This sounds trivial, but it’s sometimes helpful to listen to a Sample in its “raw” form instead of playing it via the keyboard right away. Also, there are some problems that that can be hard to spot by listening alone, such as DC bias, inaccurate Sample starts, or excessively long silence at the end of your Samples; such issues are easy to notice when you’re looking at a graphic representation of your waveform.
Create and edit loops . Ever since digital sampling became feasible, sound creators have used looping as a means to render the maximum playable note length independent from the actual sample length. In the days of sampling libraries that routinely exceed the 10 GB mark, this might not be the predominant reason for looping Samples anymore; Kontakt’s looping facilities go far beyond the traditional concepts, though, and open up a whole range of creative sound design applications.
Slice Zones: Slicing is a method that lets you deconstruct drum and percussion loops or musical phrases into their rhythmic “atoms” and trigger these either from the outside or using an internal sequencer. This makes it possible to change the tempo of a drum loop or phrase without the sonic artifacts associated with conventional time-stretching algorithms. It also allows you to reconstruct your loops into entirely new patterns and process their elements separately. As slicing your Zones provides Kontakt with information about their rhythmic structure, you can also align most selection and processing operations to the rhythm pattern by making them snap to Slice markers.
Create and edit Zone Envelopes: Just like you can use envelope generators as a source for parameter modulation on the Group level, Kontakt also provides envelopes that operate on separate Zones. The most striking aspect of Zone Envelopes, apart from the added flexibility, is that you can edit them right on top of the Sample waveform; this makes it possible to create precise automation curves in perfect sync to your audio material.
Perform destructive Sample editing: Kontakt offers a range of operations that modify your Samples permanently on the hard disk; this is useful for editing tasks that prepare your Samples for smooth operation within Kontakt, such as clean editing of start and end positions, normalizing, fades, or removal of DC bias.
To open the Wave Editor, click the Wave Editor button at the top, just below the Instrument Header.
Usually you’ll want to open the Mapping Editor along with it, as the Wave Editor always displays the content of the currently selected Zone; this way, you can easily switch between the Samples in your Instrument by selecting Zones in the Mapping Editor.
Double-clicking a Zone in the Mapping Editor will open the Wave Editor with this Zone right away.
The Wave Editor panel. In its lower half, the Sample Loop tab has been selected, which lets you create and edit loop regions.
The Wave Editor’s interface panel is divided into five sections:
At its top, a horizontal tool bar provides common utility functions and playback controls.
Below that, a status bar displays various aspects of your current Zone, such as its start and end positions, in numeric form. These readouts make it possible to edit with sample accuracy.
The largest space is taken up by the waveform view, which contains the Sample waveform and allows graphical editing of various position-related parameters. At the top of the waveform view, you’ll notice a time line that informs you about the currently displayed time region and scale of the display. If you don’t see a waveform in this section, select a Zone in the Mapping Editor first.
At the bottom of the editor, four tabs provide access to function sets, which relate to the various tasks you can perform in the Wave Editor: creating and editing loops, synchronizing sliced Zones to your song tempo, creating and editing Zone Envelopes, and editing your Sample destructively.
Next to the tab section, a Grid panel allows you to define a number of markers at rhythmically relevant points across your Zone; we’ll refer to this process as “slicing”. Slicing your drum loops or phrases opens up a range of possibilities for changing their speed and patterns, and can be used to align most editing operations to rhythmical values of your material.
Before we get to the more sophisticated facilities that the Wave Editor has to offer, let’s stick to the basics and take a closer look at the utility sections, starting at the top.
Tool Bar
The topmost row of buttons in the Wave Editor pane provides various navigation functions that affect which part of the Sample is currently being displayed, a set of playback controls, and menus that contain selection options and utility commands.
The Wave Editor Toolbar
From left to right, here’s what the elements do:
Size (only visible in external window): If you have opened the Wave Editor within an external window by clicking the arrow next to the Wave Editor button at the top of the Rack, this drop-down menu lets you choose between three predefined window sizes.
Magnify Tool: This is a toggle button. When it’s activated, clicking and dragging your mouse in the waveform view will open a zoom frame; when you release the button, the area within the selection frame will be horizontally zoomed in so that it fills the entire view. Just clicking somewhere within the waveform view will zoom out again. You can obtain the exact same behavior by holding the Alt key while performing the same mouse actions inside the waveform view.
Jump to Zone Start: When you click this button, the waveform view will jump to the start marker of your Zone (which may or may not coincide with the actual beginning of the Sample data).
Jump to Loop Start: Clicking on this button will center the waveform view on the start point of the currently selected loop region.
Zoom on Loop: Zooms the waveform view so that the currently selected loop region fills the entire view.
Jump to Loop End: This button will center the end point of the currently selected loop region in the waveform view.
Jump to Zone End: When you click this button, the waveform view will jump to the end marker of your Zone.
Snap: This drop-down menu contains three toggle options, which affect whether Kontakt will automatically adjust (“snap”) the start and end positions of your loop regions to match certain features of your waveform, which can be helpful in finding inaudible loops and avoid clicking. The loop snap modes apply to the whole instrument. Snap loop to zero crossing will snap the start and end points of your loops to positions at which your waveform crosses the zero line and matches the direction of the respective other point; Snap loop to value crossing will snap start and end points to the nearest position where the waveform value and direction matches the value at the respective other point. You can only choose one of these options, or none; the currently active one is indicated with a small check mark icon next to it. Note that when you choose a snap option, Kontakt won’t change your loop right away; you’ll have to move both the start and end point of your loop manually in order to make them snap to the selected features. How to do this will be explained in section Sample Loop Tab. Finally, you can select Snap sample start/end to zero crossing. This can be done in addition to the loop options.
Command Menu (the cog icon): This drop-down menu contains utility functions that adjust your loops automatically in various ways; the available operations will be explained below.
Stop: This button stops Sample playback.
Loop: When this toggle button is activated, the Play button next to it will play your currently selected loop in repetition. Note that only the section between the start and end points of your loop is played, not the initial portion of the Zone before the loop; therefore, the playback result will be different from what you will hear when you trigger the Zone with a note.
Play: Clicking on this button will either play your Zone once (if the Loop button next to it is inactive), or the currently selected loop region (if the Loop button is activated).
Auto Pre-Listen: When this button is activated, Kontakt will play any region as soon as you select or change it; depending on which tab is selected, this works with loop regions, Slices, or edit selections.
Ext. Editor: When you click this button, the current Sample will be opened within your favorite external Sample editor. This requires that you have set the External Wave Editor option on the Handling tab of the Options dialog beforehand. Note that while your external editor is running, Kontakt will freeze and not respond to any input; as soon as you quit your external editor, Kontakt will examine the Sample on your hard disk for changes and reload it if required.
Command Menu
This drop-down menu appears when you click the menu with the cog icon in the tool bar. It contains various functions that operate on the loops of either your current Zone, or all loops of the currently selected Zones. Note that some options are only visible when you have selected an active loop on the Sample Loop tab.
The Command Menu
The following commands are available:
Find loop end (short) (only visible when a loop region is selected): Attempts to find a well-working end point for the selected loop region automatically, but will only look for it in the vicinity of your current end point, thereby keeping your loop at roughly the same length.
Find loop end (long) (only visible when a loop is selected): Attempts to determine an optimal end point for the selected loop region. In contrast to the previous entry, this function can increase the length of your loop by a significant amount if the detection algorithm deems a more distant position an optimal candidate for a new end point.
Restore loops from sample: Some audio file formats, such as WAV and AIFF, can optionally carry metadata that specifies one or more loop regions. When you choose this function, Kontakt will look for this data in the Sample file and, if it finds any, use it for creating loops.
Reveal sample in Finder/Explorer...: Opens the folder where the sample is located in either the explorer (Windows) or finder (macOS).
The following functions can be found below the To All Selected Zones sub-menu. As the name suggests, these functions operate on all Zones that you have currently selected in the Mapping Editor, not just the currently displayed one.
Restore loops from samples: Attempts to retrieve and use loop data from the Samples of all selected Zones. This function works like the similarly named function explained above, but acts upon multiple Zones.
Copy current zone’s loop settings: Copies the loop settings of the currently visible Sample to all selected Zones.
Copy current sample start settings: Copies the sample start offset of the currently visible sample to all selected Zones.
Copy current start mod settings: Copies the sample start modulation amount of the currently visible sample to all selected Zones.
Copy current sample end settings: Copies the sample end offset of the currently visible sample to all selected Zones.
Adjust Loop Starts +/- 1: This nudges the start points of any loop regions in all selected Zones forward or backward by one sample value. This function is meant for correcting loops that were incorrectly imported; some editors and samplers use different offsets than Kontakt for saving their loop points, which results in loops being off by one or more sample values when you import them.
Adjust Loop Ends +/- 1: This function works like the previous one, but acts upon the loop end points.
DC Removal: This function will detect and remove any DC bias from the Samples of all selected Zones. DC bias appears as a constant offset between the sample values and the zero line. While it’s inaudible, it can reduce your headroom and cause problems at mixdown. It’s also a possible side effect of a few signal processing and re-sampling functions found in sample editors, so it’s generally a good idea to execute this function on your Samples once before you proceed with further editing. Note though that it’s a destructive function, which will alter the Sample data on your hard disk.
Status Bar
The status bar is located below the tool bar and contains the filename of the Sample that’s assigned to your current Zone, as well as a number of numeric values.
The status bar of the Wave Editor displays various details of your Sample and your currently selected loop region, if any.
It serves as a precise position monitor for various editing operations that take place in the waveform view. You can adjust editable values either by clicking on them and moving your mouse up or down, or by double-clicking on them and entering a new value. The status bar consists of the following elements:
Sample: This is the filename (without extension) of the Sample that’s assigned to the currently selected Zone. Hovering your mouse over the name will display the full path to this file. Using the left and right arrow buttons at the right side of the field, you can switch to the previous or next Sample file in the same folder as the current one. This will assign a new Sample to the currently selected Zone, so this field works in the same way as the identically named one in the Mapping Editor.
S. Start (Sample Start): The position of your Zone’s start marker, indicated in sample values. Moving the start marker will change the position from which the Sample will be played when the respective Zone is being triggered; you can change it either by dragging the vertical green line in the waveform view, or by adjusting this value as described above.
S. Mod (Sample Start Modulation Range): This value indicates the maximum amount by which the Zone start position can be modulated forth and back. For instance, if this range covers two seconds to both sides of the Start position, modulation assignments can change the Start position by two seconds at most. The modulation range is indicated graphically in the waveform view with a green line at the top, which extends horizontally to both sides of the Zone start marker to the earliest and latest start position attainable through modulation. You can change this value by clicking on it and dragging your mouse up or down.
S. End (Sample End): The position of your Zone’s end marker. All playback will stop at this position, and any material beyond the marker will be ignored. You can change this position either by dragging the vertical red line in the waveform view, or by adjusting this value as described above.
Format: This readout indicates the sampling rate and bit depth at which your Sample was recorded. It’s not adjustable.
Len (Length): The total length of your Sample. This value is not adjustable.
Waveform View
The central element of the Wave Editor is the waveform view in the middle of the panel. It displays a navigable, visual representation of your Sample and allows you to perform a number of editing functions in a direct and intuitive graphical way.
The Waveform View
If you don’t see a waveform when you open the Wave Editor, remember that you first need to select a Zone in the Mapping Editor. It’s a good idea to keep the Mapping Editor open as well when you’re using the Wave Editor, as this arrangement allows you to quickly switch between the Zones in your Instrument. When a Zone is selected, the waveform view will display the waveform of the assigned Sample, with each audio channel being drawn on a separate zero line. The time line at the top of the view indicates which portion of the Sample is currently being shown, and allows you to estimate the length of loops, Slices, and selections visually. In addition to the waveforms, the waveform view contains a variable number of additional items. Note that some of these, such as the loop regions, envelopes, or Slice markers, pertain to features which will be explained in detail later in this chapter.
The start position of your Zone is indicated with a green vertical line that ends in a flag at the bottom. Unless the Zone start position is being modulated, any playback of the current Zone will always start at this marker, and the Sample portion to the left of the marker is discarded. To change the position of the Zone marker, click its green flag at the bottom and drag it horizontally, or adjust the S. Start value in the status bar as explained in the previous section.
The end position of your Zone is indicated with a red vertical line. It marks the position in your Sample where all playback will stop. Apart from that, you can handle it in the same way as the start marker.
The range in which your Zone start position can be modulated back and forth is indicated with a horizontal green line above the Zone start marker. You can adjust this range by clicking on its numeric value in the status bar and dragging your mouse vertically.
When the Sample Loop tab at the bottom of the editor is selected, loop regions will be highlighted, with the currently selected region being indicated with a brighter color and a small status bar at its bottom. Loop crossfades will show up as diagonal lines at the beginning of a loop section. When one of the other tabs is selected, the borders of your loop regions will be shown as vertical lines, with a horizontal, dashed line in between.
When the Grid is activated, Slice markers will appear as vertical lines across your waveform. The first marker, which allows you to adjust the Grid offset, is marked with a small “1” at its top.
If your Grid is in Auto mode, thereby aligning the Slice markers to peaks in your Sample, the threshold above which a peak will create a Slice marker is shown graphically with horizontal lines across the view.
When the Zone Envelope tab is selected, the currently selected Zone Envelope will be displayed as a curve on top of the waveform. If your Zone Envelope contains a loop region, it will be highlighted. A vertical line indicates where clipboard contents will be inserted when you use the Paste function.
When you switch to the Sample Editor tab, a vertical line indicates where clipboard contents will be inserted when you use the Paste function.
The Sync / Slice, Zone Envelopes, and Sample Editor tabs allow you to select contiguous regions of your Sample for editing; these selected regions will be highlighted.
Just like in other editors, you can move the portion of the content that’s currently being displayed by clicking and dragging the horizontal and vertical scroll bars. The horizontal scroll bar allows you to move to a different time position of the Sample. The vertical scroll bar shifts the waveform of each channel up or down within its view region; when you have zoomed in vertically, this scroll bar allows you to view the signal at different parts of the level range.
There are different ways to zoom in and out of your waveform. Firstly, there’s a noteworthy difference between zooming horizontally and vertically. Horizontal zooming works in the same way as in other editors: zooming in magnifies a region of the content (in this case, a specific time range) so that it fills up the view, thereby displaying a greater level of detail, zooming out fits more content into the view. Vertical zooms in the waveform view, on the other hand, will always keep the zero line of each channel at its respective position, thus magnifying only the amplitude of each waveform. This makes it possible to see level changes that are too small to be noticed at a normal zoom level; by zooming in vertically, you can make out small sonic details, such as release trails, in regions that look like plain silence on a lower zoom level.
You can zoom in and out horizontally or vertically one level at a time by clicking the “+” and “-” buttons next to the scroll bars. Whenever you use this method to zoom vertically, the zero lines of each channel will be re-centered in their respective regions of the view. An alternative that’s often more convenient is to hold the Alt key while clicking and dragging your mouse in the view; this opens a “rubber band” selection frame. Once you release the mouse, the selected region will be zoomed in so it fills the whole view. To zoom out again, just click somewhere in the view. This method allows you to quickly and intuitively get a detail view of a specific region of your Sample. Enabling the button marked with a magnifying glass in the tool bar has the same effect as holding Alt.
Grid Panel
The Grid settings affect most other operations in the Wave Editor, so we’ll describe this feature before we get to the function tabs. You can find all settings that pertain to the Grid on the panel in the lower right corner of the Wave Editor. When the Grid is inactive, this panel will be shaded.
The Grid Panel
In a nutshell, whenever you’re working with Samples that contain rhythmic material or musical phrases, the Grid allows you to put a marker on every single hit or note that occurs within your Sample, thus splitting it up into a number of musically significant regions — we will refer to these regions as “Slices” from now on. Preparing your material in this way (“slicing”) has lots of advantages:
By aligning loop regions with Slice markers, you can instantly create clean Sample loops that stay in perfect tempo.
Using the functions on the Sync / Slice tab, you can adapt your drum loop or phrase to your song tempo in various ways.
The mapping features of the Sync / Slice tab allow you to turn Slices into separate Zones, which makes it possible to trigger them separately; this way, you can instantly create a playable “drum kit” from any drum loop, and construct entirely new patterns out of its elements.
When you’re working with Zone Envelopes, you can make their breakpoints snap to Slice markers. This way, it’s easy to create rhythmical modulation curves.
When you’ve selected the Sample Editor tab, the region selection for destructive operations will snap to Slice markers as well, which lets you perform operations like removing, exchanging, or reversing Slices in isolation very quickly.
It’s almost always a good idea to activate and adjust the Grid panel first before doing any further editing on rhythmic material. To activate the Grid, click the “power” button in the upper left corner of the Grid panel. The panel will light up, and a number of vertical markers will appear across your waveform view — if you can’t see them, try zooming out horizontally. Each of these markers indicates the start of a Slice (and the end of the preceding one). You can always move these markers around by clicking on the small arrows at their top and dragging them horizontally, but in a lot of cases, you won’t have to. That’s because the Grid offers two modes that take care of the correct marker placement for you, namely Fix and Auto. You can switch between these modes by selecting one of the tabs in the Grid panel.
Fix Mode
The Fix mode is intended for slicing material that has a very precise timing; it’s less ideally suited for sloppily played acoustic drums. Also, it helps to have your drum loop or phrase edited cleanly when you’re planning to use the Fix mode, with the first beat being exactly at the beginning of the Sample, and no silence after the last beat; this is not a requirement, though. When you activate the Grid on a Zone for the first time, it’s in Fix mode by default; if you’re currently in Auto mode, you can switch to the Fix mode by clicking on the Fix tab of the Grid panel.
The Grid Panel in Fix mode
The idea behind the Fix mode is that your Sample will be split up into Slices of equal length, which is determined by the tempo of the loop, it’s time signature, and a selectable note value.
To achieve a proper slicing, Kontakt first needs to know the native tempo of your Sample. It tries to guess this by looking at its total length and assuming that it’s a whole number of measures, played in a 4/4 meter. The resulting tempo is displayed in BPM at the bottom of the Grid panel. Note that this guess will only have a chance of success if your Zone has been cleanly edited, with the first hit or note being exactly at the beginning, and no excess space behind the last one. If you’ve made sure that this is the case, but the displayed tempo value is still incorrect, there can be two reasons for this:
First, your drum loop or phrase could be in a different meter than 4/4. This is easy to correct: next to the tempo readout, you’ll notice a Time Signature value. By clicking on either its numerator or its denominator and dragging your mouse up or down, you can specify a different meter.
If the Time Signature value matches the meter of your loop, but the tempo is still incorrect, Kontakt has estimated the number of bars in your Sample incorrectly. You can validate this by switching to the Sync / Slice tab and checking the value of the Zone Length field. For instance, if your Zone consists of one bar at a tempo of 50 BPM, Kontakt might misinterpret it as two bars at 100 BPM. In such cases, the detected tempo will always be a multiple of the actual tempo, or vice versa. You can correct this by halving or doubling the tempo value with the “-” and “+” buttons next to it, respectively, until the correct tempo is indicated. Note that this will change the length as indicated in the Zone Length field on the Sync / Slice tab as well; the tempo and (musical) length values are invariably tied to each other.
Of course, if you already know the tempo of your Sample, you can skip all this and just enter the correct tempo value after double-clicking on the tempo value. Alternatively, click the time line and drag your mouse horizontally; this will stretch or compress your Grid until it matches the tempo of your Sample. Provided that your Sample start is cleanly edited, adjusting the tempo directly will give you a perfectly set up Grid right away. If there’s any silence at the beginning, the Slice makers will all land slightly before the actual hits; you can compensate this by moving the first Slice marker, labeled “1” at its top, which will move all following Slice markers along, thereby adding a time offset to your Grid.
Once the tempo of your Sample is set to the correct value and you have compensated any possible time offset, you’ll notice that the Slice markers in the waveform view split your Sample into 16th notes. That’s because the Grid uses the length of one 1/16th note as the default width for Slices. You can change this value by adjusting the control labeled Width in the middle of the Fix tab. You can change both the numerator and the denominator of the displayed note value by clicking on it and dragging your mouse vertically; also, clicking on the -/+ buttons next to the note value will halve or double the denominator, thereby increasing or decreasing the size of your Slices.
Tip
The Slice width directly affects the usefulness and quality of later tempo adaptations, either via the Beat Machine or by triggering the Zones from the outside. For instance, if your loop contains a constant 16th hi-hat groove and is sliced up into 8th notes, two hi-hat hits will end up in each Slice, with the duration between them remaining constant. This would create a shuffle effect with increasing tempo. While this trick can be useful in some cases, it’s usually a better idea to use the smallest rhythmical division that occurs in your drum loop as the Slice width: 1/8 for a straight heavy rock beat, 1/16 for a more delicate funk groove, 1/12 for a ternary shuffle, and so on.
Once you’re done with all required adjustments and made sure that the Slice markers are well-aligned with your beat, you might want to remove or add Slice markers to accommodate pauses or additional ghost notes outside of the Grid, or manually correct the position of some Slice markers. These actions will be described after the next section.
Auto Mode
The Fix mode of the Grid works well for exact and predictable beats or phrases, possibly of an electronic origin, that follow a fixed pattern in tempo and articulation. It’s less practical with irregular beats or loops that were recorded live and played by a drummer with less than perfect timing: in such cases, most Slice markers that were placed in Fix mode will land slightly before or after the hits they were meant for, and would need careful manual tweaking to be corrected. This makes the Auto mode the better choice for such material. You can switch over to this mode by clicking on the Auto tab at the top of the Grid panel.
The Grid Panel in Auto Mode
In Auto mode, Kontakt detects transients in the waveform of your Sample and creates Slice markers at these positions. For instance, each bass drum and snare hit in a typical rock groove will be clearly visible as a level peak in its waveform; intermediate hi-hat hits will be visible as smaller peaks. By using the attack phases of these peaks as Slice positions, Kontakt can split these elements into Slices automatically. All you have to do is telling Kontakt the level above which a transient shall be considered for slicing; this level threshold is the most important parameter of the Auto mode.
When you switch the Grid into Auto mode, you’ll notice two dotted, horizontal lines that appear at the top and bottom of your waveform view. By moving the horizontal slider on the Auto tab, these lines will change their position; they indicate the peak detection threshold graphically. Any peaks in your waveform that cross these lines will result in a Slice marker being placed at their respective position. As an example, reconsider the straight rock groove mentioned above: adjusting the threshold so that only the strong bass drum and snare hits cross the threshold will create large Slices, possibly at the length of 1/4 and 1/8 notes. Slowly lowering the threshold will gradually add more Slices, until all hi-hat hits and ghost notes will be marked separately.
When you’re using this function frequently, you’ll sooner or later encounter a drum loop where no threshold setting seems to work just right: on higher settings, hits that you’d like to be included will be ignored, while lower settings will add too many unwanted bits to the Grid. There are two ways to deal with this problem: if a low threshold tends to add lots of very small slices (for instance, on snare flams), try increasing the parameter labeled Min Slice Duration below the threshold fader. This will ignore all slices that would be shorter than the specified length. If this does not work, try to find a compromise threshold that covers most of the hits you’d like to be included, and then add or remove Slices manually as needed. This process will be explained in the next section.
Note that even if you’re using the Grid in Auto mode, Kontakt still needs to know the tempo of your Sample if you want to use one of the features for automatic synchronization. Therefore, the tempo control is still visible at the bottom of the Grid panel in Auto mode and might need manual adjustment as described in the previous section. In contrast to the Fix mode, though, it won’t affect the position of your Slice markers; it’s only important if you use the Beat Machine or Time Machine to adapt your Sample to a new tempo.
Editing Slices Manually
You can manually modify or delete any Slice, including those that were generated by Kontakt, and add new Slice markers to your Sample. This allows you to fine-tune automatically generated Slices, or manually slice material that’s not suitable for being processed automatically.
Note that whenever you move an existing Slice or add a new one, it will be automatically locked. While Slice markers that were created via the Fix or Auto mode will change their positions or disappear when you adjust the tempo or switch the Grid mode, locked markers will always remain at their absolute position within the Sample until you change their position or remove them manually. Locked markers will appear as gray vertical lines in the waveform view.
There are several ways in which you can engage in the slicing process:
To move an existing Slice, click the small triangle at the top of its marker in the waveform view, and drag it horizontally. If you need to change it with more precision, try zooming in on the waveform. The first Slice marker in your Sample, indicated with a small “1” flag at its top, is special; when you move it, all following markers will move along by the same amount. This allows you to compensate silence at the beginning of your Sample.
To remove a Slice from your Sample, enable the “-” button on the right side of the Grid panel, then click the small triangle icons on top of the Slice markers that you’d like to remove from your Sample. Remember to disable the “-” button when you’re finished to avoid accidental deletions. Alternatively, you can remove a Slice marker by right-clicking on the triangle at its top.
To add a new marker to your Sample, activate the “+” button on the right side of the Grid panel, then click in the waveform view wherever you’d like the new marker to be located. When you’re done, remember to deactivate the “+” button again. Alternatively, you can right-click anywhere in the narrow strip below the time line in order to create a marker at that position.
Finally, if you want to toggle the “locked” status of a Slice marker manually, activate the lock icon on the right side of the Grid panel, then click the small triangle on top of the marker(s) that you’d like to lock or unlock. To lock all slices at once, Alt-click the lock icon. Remember that any unlocked Slice markers will be changed when you adjust the tempo or switch the Grid mode.
Sample Loop Tab
The functionality of the Wave Editor is split across four tabs at the bottom of its panel. Any tab that you select changes the behavior of the wave editor and the details that are being shown in the waveform view to a certain amount; for instance, when you switch to the Sample Loop tab, Kontakt will highlight all loop regions in your Sample; when you change to the Zone Envelopes tab, loop regions will merely be hinted at with vertical amber lines, but any selected Zone Envelope will appear as an orange curve on top of the waveform. In this section, we’ll take a look at the Sample Loop tab.
First of all, a little semantics. In the context of sampling, the term “loop” is used for two different concepts, which are related, but should be distinguished anyway for sake of clarity:
Technically, a loop is a contiguous region of a Sample that will be played back repeatedly; in a traditional forward loop, the playback position will jump to the start of this region whenever it reaches its end. In Kontakt, loops can be played forward and backward alternately, or played only a specific number of times before playback will proceed as usual. When we refer to loops in the context of this section, we’re talking about this technical concept.
A more colloquial use of the term is to describe Samples that contain musical phrases (as opposed to single notes). Often, these Samples are pre-produced drum or percussion phrases (“drum loops”), which makes them useful as building blocks for rhythm parts. As the name implies, these Samples are usually meant for being played in repetition in order to fill the required number of measures. This can be done by looping them in the sampler as described above; however, this is not a prerequisite. Many people prefer to trigger them inside their sequencer on each downbeat instead; this method has the added benefit of avoiding tempo drifts that can occur over time when a loop region doesn’t match the length of a measure exactly.
Sample loops were common in the heyday of hardware samplers, when both disk space and sample RAM were sparse. This limitation made it all but impractical to capture notes of an instrument like a piano, which can have a natural decay time in the order of a minute, in their entirety. Instead, it was reasoned that the most critical part of an instrument sound is its attack phase; after that, most sustained instruments quickly settle to a predominantly periodic waveform of some sort. By using sample loops to keep these periodic parts sounding during the sustain phase, thereby artificially “stretching” the sound beyond the length of the actual sample data, sample creators overcame the space limitations.
With the advent of software sampling and hard disk streaming, this application of loops became a little less important. They’re still being used in this way, but their predominant appeal nowadays is creative sound design. As you might guess, loops in Kontakt are equally well-suited for both approaches; let’s see how they work. To create and edit loops, first click the Sample Loop tab in the Wave Editor.
The Sample Loop tab of the Wave Editor is split into a number of loop selection buttons, and a parameter view for the currently selected loop region.
You’ll notice a small “power button” icon to the left of the tab title. Clicking on this icon will globally activate or deactivate all loops of your Sample. When your Zone contains any active loop region, this button will be lit up.
Kontakt allows you to define up to eight different loop regions per Zone. These “slots” are accessible via eight buttons, which are arranged in a 2x4 grid below the tab. When you start with an unlooped Zone, none of these buttons will be highlighted, which indicates that there are currently no active loop regions. Each selection button can take up one of 3 colors:
Non-highlighted (dark blue): The respective loop region has either not been defined yet, or has been temporarily deactivated.
Yellow: The respective loop region is active and currently selected for editing. The region will also be highlighted with a bright amber color in the waveform view. Only one loop region can be selected for editing at any time.
Light blue: The respective loop region is active, but not currently selected.
Clicking on one of these buttons will select the respective loop region for editing; if it’s not active or has not been defined yet, it will be activated in the process. When you select a loop region, Kontakt will display its parameters within the edit panel next to the selection buttons, and highlight the region in the waveform view. You can instantly create a loop region by right-clicking into the waveform view and dragging your mouse horizontally. This will replace your currently selected loop region, or, if none is selected, define the first one. You can change the start and end positions of a loop region graphically by clicking on its left or right border, respectively, and dragging it horizontally. Clicking inside a region and dragging it allows you to move loop regions without changing their size. You can view and change these and all other parameters of a loop region numerically within the edit panel.
The detail view allows you to adjust the start and end positions of your loop regions numerically with sample value accuracy.
To change any value, either click it and move your mouse vertically, or double-click it and enter a new value. Let’s have a look at each parameter of the edit panel:
Power Button: Indicates whether the current loop region is active. When you select a loop region for editing, it will automatically be activated. To disable (and de-select) a region, click this button. Note that this applies to the power button in the edit panel of the selected loop region; the power button next to the tab title will globally activate or deactivate all loop regions.
Loop Start: The start position of the loop region within your Sample, displayed in sample values.
Loop End: The end position of the loop region within your Sample, displayed in sample values.
X-Fade: To mask imperfect loop points, Kontakt can fade the end of the loop region into its beginning. This value adjusts the length of this crossfade in milliseconds. Kontakt will indicate a loop crossfade in the waveform view with a diagonal line on the left side of a loop region.
Loop Edit: When activated, Kontakt will switch the waveform view to an alternate display mode that allows you to adjust your loop points in a very intuitive way.
The Loop Edit View
The Loop Edit view is split vertically; the left side will show the waveform just before the loop end point, the right side will show the waveform just after the loop start point. In other words, the boundary in the center depicts the transition that will occur at the loop point. In addition, the original progression of the waveform after the end point is shown in a dim gray in the right part of the view, which allows you to assess how close the transition matches the unlooped waveform. You can move your loop start and end by clicking in the right or left part of the view, respectively, and dragging the mouse horizontally. Alternatively, you can adjust the numerical values within the edit panel in the usual way. While you change the positions, observe the transition in the center of the view; the more it looks like a continuous waveform, the cleaner your loop will turn out to be. To return to the normal waveform view, just click the Loop Edit button again.
Tune: This control allows you to change the pitch of Sample loops independently from the rest of your Zone. Note that the detuning will affect all playback passes after the first loop jump; in other words, Kontakt will play the region at its normal pitch once until the playback position reaches the end marker of the loop, then the specified pitch will come into effect for the duration of the loop.
Count: This value specifies how many times the loop region will be repeated before Kontakt proceeds to play the rest of the Sample. A value of zero will loop the region indefinitely, which means that playback will never reach any following Sample material and loop regions.
Loop Mode: This drop-down menu lets you choose between several different loop characteristics. In addition to the displayed entry, the selected behavior is depicted with an illustration above the menu. Kontakt provides the following loop behaviors:
Until End: Kontakt will play the loop in a forward direction. The loop will keep playing during your amplitude envelope’s release phase, if any.
Until End <->: Kontakt will play the loop in alternating forward and backward directions (“ping-pong loop”). The loop will keep playing during the release phase of your sound.
Until Release: Kontakt will play the loop in a forward direction as long as the key is being held. When it’s released, it will resume normal playback of the Sample, starting from the current playback position.
Until Release <->: Like Until Release, but with an alternating forward and backward playback direction during the loop.
One Shot: If the first loop region of your Sample is set to this mode, Kontakt will ignore all other active loop regions and play the Sample in its entirety when it’s triggered, without stopping at note-off events. This is useful for drum samples that should always play to their end, regardless of the actual trigger note length. Note that this works only if you’re not using a volume envelope on your Group; otherwise, the release phase will still fade the Zone out as soon as the key is released.
If the Grid is active, all changes to the start and end points, whether they take place graphically within the waveform view or numerically within the edit panel, will snap to the nearest Slice marker; this makes creating exact loop regions within rhythmic material very easy. For a thorough description of the Grid feature, refer to the previous section of this chapter.
Sync / Slice Tab
In the section about the Grid panel, we mentioned that slicing your drum or percussion loop with the Grid allows you to synchronize its playback speed to your song tempo in a number of different ways, or map the resulting Slices to your keyboard, which lets you trigger the elements of a drum loop or a phrase at your own tempo and in your own pattern. The launch pad for all these features is the Sync / Slice tab in the lower part of the Wave Editor. Note that an active Grid that’s adjusted to match your Sample is a prerequisite for most of these functions to work; if you want to synchronize or rearrange any rhythmic material, you should therefore always set up the Grid first, then proceed to use the functions on the Sync / Slice tab. Section Grid Panel of this chapter explains how to activate and adjust the Grid.
The Sync / Slice tab
The Sync / Slice tab provides four different approaches to make your Sample independent from its original tempo or pattern: you can feed your slices to the Beat Machine, time-stretch your Sample with the Time Machine, or map your Slices to the keyboard in a manual or automated fashion. Let’s have a look at the advantages and peculiarities of each approach.
Using the Beat Machine
The Beat Machine, which is one of the playback modes provided by Kontakt’s Source Module, plays all Slices of your Zone in succession via an internal sequencer. This retains the original pattern of your drum loop or phrase, but allows you to adapt it to your song’s tempo, or freely change the playback pitch of the Slices. To use this feature, make sure your Grid is correctly set up, and enable the Use Beatmachine button on the Sync / Slice tab. Depending on the contents of the Group to which your current Zone belongs, one of two things will happen:
If the current Zone is the only one in your Group, Kontakt will switch the Source Module of this Group into Beat Machine mode.
If there are any other Zones in your Group, Kontakt will move the current Zone into its own Group first and then switch that Group’s Source Module into Beat Machine mode. This reassignment is necessary to avoid disrupting the playback of other Zones which cannot be triggered correctly by the Beat Machine.
Once the Source Module that plays your Zone is in Beat Machine mode, any key to which the Zone is assigned will trigger the tempo-synchronized playback of all Slices in succession. When you look at the Speed knob of your Group’s Source Module, you will notice that it displays the keyword Zone instead of the usual numeric value. This indicates that it uses the Zone Length value (as displayed on the left side of the Sync / Slice tab) to determine at which speed it has to play the Slices so that the phrase will span the same length at your song tempo. This is the same mechanism that allows you to select a note value from the drop-down menu of any time-related control in order to synchronize it, and in fact, the special Zone keyword appears among the usual note values in the drop-down menu of the Speed control if you use the Beat Machine via the Sync / Slice tab. Of course, nothing prevents you from selecting a different note value from the drop-down menu, or selecting the Default entry in order to adjust the playback speed independently from your tempo. You can always return to synchronized mode by selecting Zone again.
Note that all changes to the slicing of your Sample will be immediately picked up by the Beat Machine, which lets you hear any modifications instantly. For example, you might notice during playback that some ghost notes are not properly marked in your Sample and are thus being played back with incorrect timing. Just add the respective Slice markers, as explained within the Grid section of this chapter — the Beat Machine will adopt your changes right away, even during playback.
Using the Time Machine
As an alternative to the Beat Machine, Kontakt can also use the more conventional time-stretching algorithms of the Time Machine mode to sync your Sample to the tempo of your song. While using the Beat Machine or one of the Slice mapping features explained below is usually the better choice for percussive material, the Time Machine can be very useful for tonal phrases.
As the Time Machine treats your Sample as one contiguous region with no regard to Slices, you don’t necessarily need to have the Grid activated in order to use this feature. However, Kontakt still needs to know the length (and therefore, the tempo) of your Sample in order to determine how far it has to be stretched or compressed in time to match your current tempo. Therefore, you need to specify the correct (rhythmical) length of your Zone in the Zone Length field of the Sync / Slice tab. If you don’t know the length, you can alternatively activate the Grid and specify the tempo of your Sample instead. Kontakt needs to know only one of these values, as the respective other one can be derived. Note that specifying the Zone Length value explicitly will only change the tempo correctly if the end marker of your Zone coincides with the actual Sample end; otherwise, it will change the end marker position to match the length that you entered. In such cases, you should therefore adjust the tempo in the Grid panel instead.
Once the Zone Length field displays the correct length, enable the Use Timemachine Pro button on the left side of the Sync / Slice tab. If your Zone is not the only one in its Group, Kontakt will move it into a new Group first to avoid disrupting the playback of other Zones. The Source Module of the Group that contains your Zone will then be put into Time Machine mode.
Just like the Beat Machine, the Time Machine will have its Speed control set to the special Zone value by default when you’re using it via the Sync / Slice tab. This means that your Sample will be played back at your host or Master Editor tempo right away when you trigger it. The meaning of the Zone keyword and how you can override it to freely adjust the playback speed is explained in the previous section of this chapter.
Mapping Slices Manually
Once you have placed Slice markers across your Sample via the Grid, you might want to trigger these Slices directly with your keyboard or from within your sequencer. The manual mapping feature of the Sync / Slice tab lets you do just that.
Provided that you have correctly set up the Grid for your Sample and selected the Sync / Slice tab, you can select Slices that you want to map to your keyboard simply by clicking between two Slice markers in the waveform view. Kontakt will highlight any selected Slice in blue. To add more Slices to your selection, either hold the [Ctrl] key ([Cmd] on Mac OS X) and click further Slices one at a time, or hold the [Shift] key and click a second Slice to select all Slices in between. For instance, if you want to map all Slices of your Sample to keys, click the first one, then hold [Shift] and click the last one; this will select all Slices and highlight the entire Sample.
Selecting Slices
Once you’re happy with your Slice selection, make sure the Mapping Editor is visible above the Wave Editor. Now, click one of the selected Slices, and drag it over into the Zone grid of the Mapping Editor; all other selected Slices will move along. You’ll notice that while keeping your mouse button pressed, Kontakt will highlight a range of keys in the Zone grid, starting from the key below your mouse pointer. This allows you to position the Slices you’ve selected on the keyboard. The process works exactly as if you’re dragging a number of Samples from the Side pane into the Mapping Editor — the horizontal mouse position determines the key at which Kontakt will begin to map the Slices, while the vertical mouse position within the Zone grid determines the number of adjacent keys each Slice will be assigned to.
While you keep your mouse button depressed, Kontakt will indicate where it would place the new Zones on the keyboard.
If you agree with the displayed assignment pattern, release your mouse button. Kontakt will now create a new Zone for each Slice in your selection, and place all Zones in succession in the order in which they appear in your Sample. Each of the new Zones will reference the original Sample from which it was created, with its Sample start and end markers set to the boundaries of the original Slice. You can now trigger these Zones from your keyboard or within your sequencer, create new patterns with them, or adjust the playback or effect parameters of each Zone separately via Zone Envelopes.
Mapping Slices Automatically
While mapping your Slices manually in the way described above works well if you want to place only specific Slices or a range of Slices onto keys, the more frequent case will probably be that you’d like to put all Slices on adjacent keys and then trigger them from within your sequencer. Of course, you can do this manually as well; there’s a better way, though. The auto mapping feature of the Sync / Slice tab allows you to automatically map all Slices of your Sample to adjacent keys. What’s more important, it can generate a MIDI sequence for you that, when placed in your sequencer, will trigger all Slices in exactly the same pattern as they occur in your Sample. As your sequencer will obviously play MIDI sequences at the song tempo, the pattern will always be in sync, thereby replicating the functionality of the Beat Machine. The feature leaves more room for creativity, though: once you have imported the MIDI sequence into your arrangement, you can go ahead and make modifications to this pattern. Of course, you can also discard it altogether and build your own patterns from scratch, thereby reassembling your drum loop or phrase in an infinite number of ways.
Before the auto mapping can take place, you may need to adjust some parameters first that affect where the new Zones will be placed and how Kontakt will handle the Zone creation process. You can find these parameters in the middle and on the right side of the Sync / Slice tab.
The Auto Mapping parameters
Auto-Fade Time: Kontakt can optionally create volume fade envelopes for each Zone that it creates from your Slices. When you set this parameter to a value other than zero, each new Zone will contain a volume Zone Envelope which fades the respective Slice in and out; the specified value determines the fade-out time, the fade-in time will be shorter than that. Creating auto-fades for your Slices can give smoother results when you change the playback speed of the pattern. The specifics of how Zone Envelopes work will be explained in the next section of this chapter.
Mapping Base Key: This is the first key at which Kontakt will start mapping the Slices.
Auto Find Empty Keys: If activated, Kontakt will leave out any keys that trigger existing Zones when it maps Slices to the keyboard. This avoids mapping Slices to the same keys as other Zones.
After adjusting these parameters, you can go ahead and start the auto mapping process. You’ll notice a rectangular field labeled Drag’n’Drop MIDI at the right side of the Sync / Slice tab. From here, you can “pick up” the MIDI sequence that corresponds to your Slice pattern; just click inside the field and drag its content onto either your desktop (which will create a standard MIDI file) or into the arrangement window of your MIDI sequencer (which will insert the MIDI sequence right into your arrangement). If you’re sure you won’t need the MIDI file, you can also just click the field instead; this will only create the mapped Zones.
Using Drag Midi to Host
At the same time, Kontakt will create the required Zones, map them to the keyboard, and put them into a new Group. If you’ve placed the MIDI sequence on the correct track of your arrangement — it has to be sent to the MIDI channel of your current Kontakt Instrument — and play it back, you should hear your drum loop or phrase played back at your song tempo. If you want, you can now proceed with modifying this MIDI sequence. Of course, should you decide to delete the sequence, the generated Slice mapping will stay in place, so you can build your own patterns from scratch as well. To get rid of the mapping, just delete the Group that was created in the process.
Zone Envelopes
Envelopes are a common source for modulating parameters in synthesizers and samplers; they provide a flexible way to create finely adjustable and repeatable modulation patterns. In Kontakt, envelopes are usually being generated by envelope generators, which act as signal sources for modulation assignments. These can be added to Group-level modules, which means that any conventional envelope affects all Zones in a Group in the same way. There are cases, however, when modulating parameters on a per-Zone basis would be really helpful; Zone Envelopes make this possible. What’s more, since they are directly tied to the Sample of the Zone in which they appear, you can edit them on top of the waveform view; this allows you to intuitively create all kinds of modulations in perfect sync with the Sample content.
To create and edit Zone Envelopes, click the Zone Envelopes tab at the bottom of the Wave Editor.
From left to right, the Zone Envelopes tab provides selection and delete functions, assignment buttons, edit tools, and utility functions.
Assigning and Selecting Envelopes
Similarly to normal Group-level modulation assignments, the first step to create a Zone Envelope is to tell Kontakt which parameter you’d like to modulate. For this purpose, the Zone Envelopes tab provides three assignment buttons, labeled Volume, Pan, and Add. These are located in the middle of the panel. Each of these buttons creates a new Zone Envelope for a specific parameter and selects it for display; if an envelope for the selected parameter already exists, an info message will appear instead.
The upper two assignment buttons create a Zone Envelope for volume and panorama position, respectively; using the lower button, you can create a Zone Envelope for any Group-level parameter.
The upper two buttons create envelopes for the playback volume and the panorama position, respectively; as these are parameters that you will probably want to modulate frequently, they are provided here for quick access. The third button, labeled Add:, allows you to create Zone Envelopes for any parameter that appears on a panel of a Group-level module. Whenever you click the control of such a parameter, the Add: button will pick it up and display its name. By clicking on the Add: button then, you can create a new Zone Envelope which modulates the chosen parameter. For instance, you might want to modulate the cutoff frequency of a filter that resides in the Group Insert Effects chain of your current Group; just locate the Cutoff knob on the filter panel (you may have to double-click the filter module in the chain if you don’t see it) and click it — you don’t need to move it. The lowest assignment button on the Zone Envelopes tab of the Wave Editor should now read Add: Cutoff. When you click this button, a new cutoff envelope will appear as a straight horizontal line within the waveform view.
In theory, you can create a Zone Envelope for every Group-level parameter, all within one Zone. However, Kontakt will only display one of your envelopes in the waveform view at any time. In order to select a Zone Envelope for viewing and editing, click the drop-down menu button on the left side of the Zone Envelopes tab, and choose an existing envelope from the menu.
The selection drop-down menu contains all Zone Envelopes of your current Zone. Selecting one will display it in the waveform view.
If you want to get rid of an envelope, first select it for editing via the drop-down menu, then click the Delete button below. This will remove the envelope from the list and return the respective parameter to its unmodulated state.
Adjusting Assignment Parameters
There are a few adjustable parameters that change the way in which the Zone Envelope’s shape will affect the modulated parameter. For this purpose, each Zone Envelope that you create will add an entry to the Modulation Router of the module that contains its target parameter. You can jump to the corresponding assignment parameters of a currently selected Zone Envelope by clicking on the Modulation Quick-Jump button that’s located next to the assignment buttons on the Zone Envelopes tab.
The Modulation Router of a Zone Envelope
A Modulation Router entry of a Zone Envelope looks and works exactly like one that belongs to a normal modulation assignment — it provides a modulation intensity slider, an Invert button, a Lag control, and an optional Modulation Shaper. To find out what these controls do, refer to section Assignment controls of this manual. In contrast to normal Modulation Router entries, though, entries that pertain to Zone Envelope assignments can’t be created in the usual way of assigning other modulation sources; the only way to add them is implicitly by creating a Zone Envelope within the Wave Editor.
Tip
Adjustments made to parameters for individual Zones stand in proportion to adjustments made on Group level: The value of a parameter for a single Zone can only be edited in relation to the value of the corresponding parameter on Group level.
Notice
Editing parameters for factory content is only possible on Group level.
Editing Envelopes
After you have created a new Zone Envelope, it will be selected right away and displayed within the waveform view of the Wave Editor as an orange, horizontal line. Zone Envelopes work similarly to flexible envelopes (refer to Flexible Envelopes) in that they consist of a series of breakpoints, which are connected by either straight lines or curves. The minimum length of a Zone Envelope is predetermined by the length of your Sample, though. At the beginning of the envelope, you’ll notice a small rectangle; this is the first breakpoint of your envelope. Click this breakpoint and drag it up or down to change the envelope’s initial level.
To add a new breakpoint, right-click ([Ctrl]-click on Mac OS X) somewhere within the waveform view. Kontakt will connect the new breakpoint to its neighbors with straight lines. You can change each breakpoint’s level and position in time by clicking on it and dragging it around; the waveform display in the background provides visual feedback if you want to align it to features of your Sample. The envelope display will always keep in sync with the waveform; thus, zooming in and out of the waveform or scrolling the view, as described at the beginning of this chapter, will change the envelope view accordingly.
Zone Envelopes allow you to create arbitrarily complex modulation shapes.
In the middle of a segment between two breakpoints, you’ll notice a small, filled circle. Clicking on this circle and dragging it up or down will change the curve shape of this segment. To remove a breakpoint from your envelope, right-click ([Ctrl]-click on Mac OS X) on it.
If the Grid is active, all breakpoints will snap their position in time to the nearest Slice marker when you move them. This allows you to create rhythmically useful modulation patterns very quickly. Also, the Pencil Tool explained below allows you to create straight envelope lines for each Slice.
When you use this function in combination with the Beat Machine, as explained in section Using the Beat Machine, it opens up a whole range of possibilities that were only possible in previous Kontakt versions if you separated each Slice into its own Group: since straight lines, as created with the Pencil Tool, set the target parameter to a value that will remain constant over the duration of the Slice, you can easily adjust parameters for each Slice separately. As an example, suppose you’re playing a sliced dub drum loop via the Beat Machine and want to add reverb to a single snare hit. To accomplish this, add a reverb module to a free Instrument Send Effects slot first, then insert a Send Levels module into the Group Insert Effects chain of the Group that contains your drum loop. Now, with the Sample being displayed in the Wave Editor and the Zone Envelopes tab selected, click the send level button in the panel of the Send Levels module which corresponds to the reverb. The name of this send parameter should now appear in the Add: button on the Zone Envelopes tab. Click this button; a new envelope will appear in the waveform view. Now select the Pencil Tool and click inside the Slice of the snare hit that you’d like to process; a new “plateau” will be added to your envelope at this spot. Clicking and dragging it allows you to adjust the reverb level of this slice in isolation. With a little creative thinking, the possibilities of this approach are virtually boundless.
Using the Pencil Tool and/or the Randomize Env function, you can quickly change Group-level parameters for each Slice in isolation.
You can cut, copy, and paste regions of your Zone Envelope. For this purpose, the waveform view provides a selection feature and a paste cursor. When you click anywhere in the waveform view and drag your mouse horizontally, Kontakt will highlight the selected region; you can change an existing selection by clicking and dragging one of its borders, or move it across the envelope by clicking inside it and dragging your mouse horizontally. To put the contents of a selected region into the clipboard, click either Cut or Copy in the middle of the Zone Envelopes tab — Cut will remove the selected region in the process, while Copy won’t change your envelope. To insert the clipboard contents into your envelope, click the Paste button below; Kontakt will insert the clipboard region at the position of your edit cursor, which is indicated with a vertical red line that you can position by clicking anywhere within the waveform view. This method also works across different envelopes.
Utility Functions
The right side of the Zone Envelopes tab contains a number of utility functions that change the behavior of your currently selected Zone Envelope in various ways:
Loop Env: When this button is activated, you can define a loop region within your Zone Envelope. This feature works similarly to the loop sections of flexible envelopes, though in contrast, it does not need to be anchored to breakpoints. This aspect is rather important, as Kontakt allows you to reproduce a loop region of your Zone within the envelope, which makes it possible to keep the Zone and its Zone Envelope in perfect sync during loops. Of course, you can just as well adjust your loop region freely and independently from any Zone loops; clicking and dragging one of its borders will resize it, and you can move it as a whole by clicking inside the region and dragging your mouse horizontally. Note that when you’re using an envelope loop that doesn’t match an identical loop region in your Sample, your envelope and the Sample will eventually drift out of synchronization.
Randomize Env: If you’re working on a sliced Sample, this button will create a random step pattern which changes its value at each Slice marker; using this feature, you can quickly create rhythmic modulation patterns that resemble classic “sample and hold” modulations of synthesizers. Using the Pencil Tool described below, you can easily change the level of each step. Note that this function will overwrite your currently selected Zone Envelope.
Get Param From Cur. S. Loop: When you click this button, Kontakt will copy the start and end positions of the loop region that’s currently selected on the Sample Loop tab and use them for your envelope’s loop region. This is useful for getting your envelope in sync with a looped Sample.
Env Follows Playback Speed: When this button is active, the selected Zone Envelope will always speed up or slow down in unison with your Sample. For instance, when you’re playing your Sample an octave above its original pitch in Sampler or DFD mode, its playback speed will be doubled; enabling the Env Follows Playback Speed button ensures that the Zone Envelope will speed up accordingly, so that your Sample and its envelope always stay in sync. When this button is inactive, the envelope will always be processed at the original speed of the Sample.
Pencil Tool: This button is located above the Cut, Copy, and Paste buttons in the middle of the Zone Envelopes tab. It provides a tool that lets you create and edit straight lines between Slice markers. This way, the target parameter of your envelope will be set to a constant value during the length of the respective Slice. For example, you might want to adjust the volume of each Slice of a Beat Machine-triggered drum loop separately. When the Pencil Tool button is activated, clicking between any two Slice markers will create a straight horizontal line between them; you can change the level of these lines later by dragging them up or down with the Pencil Tool.
Sample Editor
Most of the available operations in the Wave Editor work in a non-destructive way, which means that they affect only the playback of your Sample and don’t change the actual Sample data on your hard disk. Therefore, they can be easily reversed if needed. This is not always what you’ll want, though: for example, if your Sample starts with a region of excess silence, you might want to get rid of it permanently (instead of working around it by changing your Zone start markers). Similarly, if there’s a DC bias in your Sample, there’s no practical reason to keep it in there. For these cases, Kontakt provides a built-in collection of destructive editing tools that allow you to cut, copy, and paste your material, create fades and regions of silence, reverse portions of your Sample, normalize its peak levels, or remove any DC bias. To access Kontakt’s palette of destructive editing tools, click the Sample Editor tab in the lower part of the Wave Editor. If any other currently loaded Instruments use the Sample which you’re just trying to edit, Kontakt will ask you first which of these Instruments should adopt your changes, and which should keep the original version.
The Sample Editor tab
As you can see, the elements on this tab are split into three functional blocks, namely Edit, Transform, and Selection. The Edit tools let you remove and reorder regions of your sample, but leave the Sample data within these regions unaffected; the Transform tools process the actual Sample data, for instance by changing the level.
When the Sample Editor tab is selected, the behavior of the waveform view will depend on whether the Grid is active or not.
Tip
If the Auto Pre-Listen button in the tool bar of the Wave Editor is activated, Kontakt will automatically play your selected region whenever you change it.
If it’s inactive, clicking into the waveform view will position a vertical marker at this location; this is the edit cursor, which indicates where the contents of the clipboard will be inserted when you select Paste. Clicking on the waveform and dragging your mouse horizontally will highlight a contiguous region of your Sample; all Edit and Transform commands will operate on this region. To change an existing selection, click its left or right border and drag it horizontally; holding the [Shift] key while doing this allows you to make finer adjustments. The boundaries of the currently selected region will also be displayed numerically in the Selection panel of the Sample Editor tab; you can adjust any of these values directly by clicking on it and moving your mouse vertically, or by double-clicking on it and entering a new value.
If the Grid is active, the position of the edit cursor, as well as all selection boundaries, will snap to the nearest Slice markers. You can select a contiguous series of Slices by clicking into a Slice and moving your mouse horizontally. Changing the left or right border of the selection or moving it as a whole works as described above, but the selection will remain tied to the Slice markers.
Selecting slices for editing
While you’re working on your Sample, Kontakt will actually write out any changes to a backup copy, so your original file will be left untouched. Kontakt will create the backup copy inside a folder named “__edited__”, which is located in your original Sample’s location. Once you’re finished with editing, your Instrument (and any other loaded Instruments that use this Sample and have been selected by you when you switched to the Sample Editor tab) will reference this backup copy instead, and you will hear your changes instantly. By saving your Instrument, you’ll make the reference to the modified backup copy permanent; your original Sample will remain unaffected during the whole process, so other Instruments on your hard disk that use it will still work as expected.
Before we explain what each operation on the Sample Editor tab does, we should mention an important feature that will turn out to be rather helpful if things go wrong, namely the Undo and Redo buttons on the right of the tab.
Undo and Redo button
These work like the identical buttons in the Instrument Edit Rack header. Clicking on the curved arrow on the Undo button (left) will reverse the effects of the last operation, thus reverting the waveform to its former state; clicking on the small down arrow on the same button will open a drop-down menu with a list of the most recent operations that lets you select to which point in the operation history you want to return. Note that the last entry of this list will always be Restore Orig., which will undo all changes that took place since you switched to the Sample Editor tab, thus restoring the Sample reference in your Instrument to the original Sample again. If you don’t do any further editing on the Sample Editor tab after this, the “__edited__” folder will be deleted when you quit Kontakt. The Redo button to the right works similarly, but the other way around: it will restore any effects that you have just reversed with the Undo button.
Edit Operations
Cut: Puts the currently selected region of your Sample into the Sample clipboard, removing it from the Sample in the process.
Copy: Leaves your Sample intact, but copies the selected region to the Sample clipboard for later use.
Crop: Removes all audio data outside the selection; in other words, the selected region will become your new Sample.
Delete: Removes the selected region from the Sample, without putting it into the clipboard.
Paste: Inserts the contents of the clipboard into your Sample. The insert location depends on whether a region is currently selected: if so, it will be replaced with the clipboard contents, which erases the previous contents of the region and will change the overall length of your Sample in most cases. If no region is selected, the contents of the clipboard will be inserted at the location of the edit cursor; this location is indicated with a vertical blue line, which you can position by clicking into the waveform view.
Duplicate: Inserts a copy of the selected region right after the region.
Transform Operations
Fade In: Creates a smooth fade in from silence that spans the selected region.
Fade Out: Creates a smooth fade out into silence that spans the selected region.
Silence: Replaces the selected region with digital silence, i.e. a series of zero values.
Reverse: Reverses the selected region, so that it plays backwards.
Normalize: Amplifies the selected region to the greatest possible level without clipping. The Normalize function analyzes your Sample region and applies a gain factor that makes it utilize the entire available dynamics range; in other words, after you’ve used this operation, the highest peak in the region will just hit the 0 dB mark.
DC Removal: Detects and removes any DC bias from the selected Region. DC bias appears as a constant offset between the sample values and the zero line. While it’s inaudible, it can reduce your headroom and cause problems at mixdown. Usually, you’ll want to use this operation on your whole Sample.
Script Editor
This section describes loading and using scrips with Kontakt's Script Editor. A full KSP reference is available as a separate document.
Kontakt includes a powerful and flexible scripting language processor, which is designed to let third-party developers come up with custom and complex ways in which users can interact with their Instruments and Multis. Although Kontakt’s scripting language is easy enough to learn for anyone who has used a programming language before, a thorough reference would still go beyond the scope of this manual, so we’ve made it available as a separate PDF document that you’ll find in the Documentation folder of your Kontakt installation. In this section, we’ll keep to the basics of loading and using Scripts within the Script Editor.
There are some basic aspects of Scripts that you should be aware of, even if you’ll only use pre-made Scripts. Scripts in Kontakt work like small programs that hook into Kontakt’s way of processing notes, controller data, and user actions, enabling them to change Instrument parameters and MIDI data in a programmatic way. A very simple example would be a Script that alters incoming MIDI notes by transposing them up an octave, or creating a second voice that follows in octaves; more complex Scripts, though, can provide anything from powerful sequencer environments to realistic simulations of human instrument articulation.
Scripts are not only available on the Instrument level, but on the Multi level as well. This opens up a wide range of new possibilities in Script design; for instance, you can write Scripts that split and distribute MIDI data among multiple Instruments. For the most part, the scripting features that you can use on a global level are very similar to those on the Instrument level; there are some inherent differences, though, which are explained in the KSP Reference Manual.
Loading, editing and managing Scripts takes place in one of Kontakt’s Script Editors. You can access the global editor, which contains Scripts that affect the Multi, by clicking on the button labeled KSP on the right side of the Instrument Rack Header.
The KSP button
In order to open the local editor of an Instrument, click the Script Editor button below its header when the Rack is in Edit mode. The Script Editors on the Multi and Instrument levels are mostly identical, and the explanations in the remainder of this chapter apply to both.
An empty Script Editor
At the top of the panel, you’ll notice five tabs, each of them with an empty label. These are slots that can take up a Script each; if a Script changes any events, another script in a slot to its right will “see” the modified events. In other words, the five slots act as a chain of event filters. Below the slot tabs, there’s an empty space; each script can provide its own user interface, which will appear here.
Loading a Script
To load a Script, click the Preset button. A drop-down menu will appear, allowing you to select an item from the preset scripts folder of your Kontakt installation.
Loading a preset Script
After you’ve selected a Script, its user interface controls will appear in the space below the tabs. Most Scripts will work right away after loading; others might need you to do any meaningful adjustments first. You can always bypass a Script, thus temporarily deactivating it, by clicking on the Bypass button in the upper left corner of the Script Editor.
Whenever you’re using a Script that provides its own controls, you can automate these like any other control of the Kontakt user interface; select the Automation tab in the Side pane and drag either a MIDI controller or a host controller ID onto the knob whose parameter you’d like to automate. For more information on how this works, refer to section Automation Tab.
Saving Script Settings
Whenever you have made a setting that you particularly like, you can save the Script in its current state for later re-use. Just click the Script button, then select the Save Preset command from the drop-down menu. A dialog will appear, asking you to enter a new filename for the Script. We don’t recommend that you overwrite the original Script with your new settings, except if you want to change its default state for any later use.
Note that you don’t need to explicitly save your Script if its settings are unique to your current project; its state will be saved along with your session or Multi. Also, some more sophisticated Scripts provide a built-in facility for preset management within the Script’s user interface.
Editing and Saving a Script
If you’re into programming, you can browse and edit the source code of a Script via a built-in code editor. Click the Edit button in the lower left corner of the Script Editor; a text editor pane will open below the Script’s user interface. Within this editor, you can make changes to the current Script, or write your own Script from scratch. Whenever you’ve made any changes, they won’t affect the running Script right away; instead, the Apply button in the upper right corner of the source code editor will light up to remind you that you’ll have to commit the changes first. You do this by clicking the Apply button; if the Script interpreter does not find any errors in your Script, your changes will be made active. Keep in mind, though, that you still need to save your Script in order to make the changes permanent.
Locking a Script
If you want to protect the source code of your Script to keep others from browsing and editing it, you can lock it with a password while the source code editor is visible. To do this, click the Lock with Password button in the upper left corner of the source editor, enter a password twice, and click OK. Others can still use the script as it is, but the source code editor won’t show up if they don’t have the password.
Before you lock a Script, though, remember that there’s a helpful and friendly community of fellow Script authors out there; locking your Scripts will keep them from finding and fixing bugs you might have missed or enhancing them with new features.
Tip
Even if a thorough explanation of the scripting language is beyond the scope of this manual, here’s a neat trick we don’t want to keep back: you can turn any panel of an Instrument Script into a Performance View, thereby making it visible and accessible within the Rack, simply by adding the statement “make_perfview” in a new line somewhere between the lines “on init” and the following “end on”, which can usually be found at the top of Scripts. After you click the Apply button and return to the Multi Instrument view, the Script controls will appear below the Instrument Header in the Rack. You can read more about the Performance View feature in section Performance view of this manual.
Source Module
Located at the very beginning of Kontakt's signal flow, the Source Module acts as the origin of all audio signals.
As its name suggests, the Source Module is located at the very beginning of Kontakt’s signal flow and acts as the source of all audio signals. It provides access to the underlying sample playback engine, and as such can’t be removed from an Instrument. It operates in one of ten playback modes, all of which are optimized for handling different audio material:
Sampler: This is a traditional sample playback engine that keeps all sample data in your computer’s RAM.
DFD (Direct from Disk): This is a high-performance solution for streaming samples from disk in real-time.
Tone Machine: In this mode, you can change the pitch and formants of your sounds independently from the playback speed.
Time Machine 1, Time Machine 2, and Time Machine Pro: These playback modes allow you to compress and stretch your Samples in real-time, while leaving their pitch unaffected.
Beat Machine: This mode handles rhythmic samples (such as drum loops) that have been “sliced”, making them fit your song tempo.
Wavetable: This mode enables wavetable synthesis, turning every zone in a given group into a separate wavetable oscillator.
S1200 Machine and MP60 Machine: These are the two "vintage machine" modes. They emulate two classic samplers of the 80s, degrading the playback quality of the sample and changing how Kontakt changes the pitch and basic handling of the sample playback engine.
The mode of operation can be switched via the drop-down menu in the upper left corner of the Source Module’s control panel. Note that the Source Module is located on the Group level, which means that each Group in your Instrument has its own Source Module, and changes to the playback mode only affect Zones within the Group to which the respective module belongs.
Let’s have a look at how each of the playback modes works and what controls it does provide.
Sampler
This is a “traditional” digital sampler that stores sample data in system memory, reads it out from memory, and applies any required transposition by re-sampling the audio data in real-time. The Sampler module is very efficient and draws little power from the host CPU.
Most of the available parameters in this mode can be modulated. Remember that all adjustments you make will affect all Groups that are currently selected for editing in the Group Editor.
The Sampler contains the following controls:
The Sampler mode provides traditional, interpolated playback of Samples from memory.
Tune: Changes the playback pitch within one octave up or down. As this is a traditional sampler mode, changes to your pitch will always affect your playback tempo as well; if you want to adjust these parameters independently of each other, switch to one of the Tone Machine or Time Machine modes. This control works in semitone steps when moved, but you can make finer adjustments by holding down the [Shift] key as you move the knob.
Reverse: Plays all Samples in the Group in reverse. Note that when this button is activated, playback will start at the End Marker of a Zone, so if there are a few seconds of silence at the end of a Zone, the sound will be delayed.
Tracking: When activated, the pitch of the Sample playback will be transposed along with the key position. If your Group contains Zones that are mapped across several keys and should be played tonally, Tracking needs to be activated, or else all keys of the Zone will play at the same pitch. If you want to keep the pitch of a Sample constant across multiple keys or provide a separate Zone for each key (as it’s the case with chromatically sampled Instruments), you can deactivate it.
MIDI: Sets the MIDI port and channel this Group will respond to. Use this only if you want different Groups respond to different MIDI channels, otherwise set the Instrument’s MIDI channel in the Instrument Header and leave this setting at its Default (Instrument) value.
Release Trigger: When activated, samples in this Group will be triggered when a MIDI note-off command is received (as opposed to responding to note-on commands as usual). This function provides the necessary means for creating release samples. With these, you can recreate the natural release sound of an instrument, such as the damper on a harpsichord or a reverb trail recorded in the instrument’s natural environment, when a key is being released. Note that if your release sample has a loop, there’s no way to tell Kontakt to stop playing it from the outside (after all, that’s what the note-off command was meant for in the first place), so you should make sure your Group has a volume envelope, or else it will keep playing indefinitely.
t(ms) (Time, only visible if Release Trigger is activated): If you set this to a value other than 0, Kontakt will count from that value backwards in millisecond intervals when it receives a note, then stop the timer and provide its current value as a modulation source when it receives the corresponding note-off value. This way, you can make your Instrument respond to note durations, for instance by reducing the volume of your release sample after longer notes in order to make it fit a Sample with a natural decay.
Monophonic (visible only if Release Trigger is activated): This button affects how release samples will respond to note repetitions. When it’s activated, playing a note repeatedly will cut off any previous release samples that are still sounding (if any), so that only one release sample will play at any time.
HQI (High Quality Interpolation): This drop-down menu allows you to choose from a list of 3 re-sampling algorithms of various quality. Only Samples that are played at a different note than their root key will need to be re-sampled. The Standard setting uses the algorithm of old Kontakt versions, which offers a reasonably good re-sampling quality while being light on the CPU. The High and Perfect settings select high-quality re-sampling algorithms, which eliminate virtually all audible artifacts (especially when transposing upwards), but need more CPU resources. Note that while the CPU demand of the Standard setting is constant, the High and Perfect settings will use more CPU resources the further they need to transpose a Sample from its root key; therefore, if you play a Sample two octaves above its original pitch, they will generate a higher CPU load than if you play it a semitone higher.
DFD
The DFD mode uses an advanced streaming engine, which allows you to play very large Sample sets in real-time without having to load all sample data into RAM. This is accomplished by loading only the beginnings of all Samples into RAM (where they can be accessed instantly) and, as soon as a Sample is being played, streaming its remainder from your hard disk. This method has a few caveats that you’ll need to keep in mind when creating your own Instruments, but they’re usually far outweighed by the possibility of playing Instruments whose Sample data is anything from “inconveniently large” to “several times bigger than the size of your computer’s RAM”.
The controls for the source module’s DFD mode are identical to those of the standard Sampler mode; all internal differences are transparently handled by Kontakt.
The DFD mode streams Samples from your hard disk in real-time as they are triggered.
When using DFD mode, consider the following:
The maximum number of voices will most likely be lower compared to the Sampler module, as the latency and throughput of your hard disk will be a bottleneck for sampling performance. Therefore, you can optimize your overall voice count by putting only Groups and Instruments that access very large Samples into DFD mode, while keeping all others in Sampler mode.
Do not try to use DFD mode with Samples that reside on a CD-ROM. Copy them to hard disk first.
Although the DFD mode minimizes RAM usage in comparison to the Sampler mode, it still has a noticeable memory footprint, as it needs to pre-load the beginnings of all Samples into memory.
You can switch between DFD and Sampler mode at any time. However, when switching from DFD to Sampler, there may be a slight pause, as the entire Sample set needs to be loaded into RAM.
Wavetable
Wavetable synthesis is a sound synthesis technique that uses digitally sampled, single-cycle waveforms to produce musical tones. In Kontakt, you can use this technique by selecting wavetable mode in the Source Module. When this mode is selected, every zone in the given group is turned into a wavetable oscillator. All samples are interpreted as wavetables consisting of 2048 sample long wave cycles. This means that the root note settings are ignored, while all other Zone or Group settings work as expected.
The internal structure of a wavetable oscillator comprises of two main elements: a sawtooth oscillator, called the phase, and a set of values representing a number of waveforms, called the wavetable. The phase is used to read out a waveform from the wavetable once every cycle, thus reconstructing the waveform as the wavetable oscillator's output signal. By manipulating the wave shape of the phase, the resulting waveform can be bent and warped in interesting ways. In the Source module's wavetable mode, this can be achieved by using the Form controls.
Due to the low size of the single-cycle samples, wavetables can store multiple waveforms to use as the basis of your sound creation. By morphing through the disparate waveforms in the wavetable, you can create new and evolving wave shapes. This allows for diverse combinations of waveforms and complex timbral effects. You can achieve this in Kontakt by routing an LFO, envelope or MIDI control to modulate the Wavetable Position control. Digital interpolation increases the accuracy of the wavetable read-out and reduces aliasing noise. The type of interpolation contributes significantly to the character of the sound. Kontakt's Quality setting allows you to choose from four different types of interpolation.
Wavetable synthesis offers a wide range of sounds that can be explored in a dynamic and flexible way. From recreations of acoustic instruments to various synthesis techniques, the wavetable module allows you to expand the tones and timbres of your sound.
Main controls
Wavetable mode contains the following main controls:
Tune: Adjusts the playback pitch in the range of -36 to +36 semitones. Pressing Shift while turning the control allows for fine adjustments.
Tracking: When activated, the pitch follows the MIDI key position. When deactivated, the pitch won’t follow the keyboard.
Quality: Selects one of four types of interpolation applied to the wavetable read-out (LoFi, Medium, High and Best). Higher settings result in improved levels of accuracy and lower levels of aliasing noise, however require more CPU power.
Position: Morphs between the waveforms included in the loaded wavetable.
Form 1 Type: Selects one of 14 types of wave shaping that can be applied to the oscillator's phase. This fundamentally changes the way the wavetable is read out, therefore bending and warping the resulting waveform.
Form 1: Adjusts the amount of wave shaping applied to the oscillator's phase by Form 1 Type. The type of wave shaping can be selected using the Form 1 Type drop-down menu.
Form 2 Type: Selects one of 14 types of wave shaping that can be applied to the oscillator's phase. This fundamentally changes the way the wavetable is read out, therefore bending and warping the resulting waveform.
Form 2: Adjusts the amount of wave shaping applied to the oscillator's phase by Form 2 Type. The type of wave shaping can be selected using the Form 2 Type drop-down menu.
Phase: Adjusts the reset point the oscillator's phase. This determines the sound's start position in the waveform when a new note is triggered.
Ph Rand(Phase Randomness): Adjusts the amount of randomness applied to the reset point of the oscillator's phase. This creates random deviations of the sound's start position when a new note is triggered. When Phase Randomness is set to 100, the Phase control does not have an effect.
Release Trigger mode
Release trigger mode offers the following controls:
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Release Trigger: When activated, the wavetable will be triggered when a MIDI note-off command is received.
t(ms) (Time, only visible if Release Trigger is activated): If you set this to a value other than 0, Kontakt will count from that value backwards in millisecond intervals when it receives a note, then stop the timer and provide its current value as a modulation source when it receives the corresponding note-off value. This way, you can make your Instrument respond to note durations, for instance by reducing the volume of your release sample after longer notes in order to make it fit a Sample with a natural decay.
Monophonic (visible only if Release Trigger is activated): This button affects how release samples will respond to note repetitions. When it’s activated, playing a note repeatedly will cut off any previous release samples that are still sounding (if any), so that only one release sample will play at any time.
Inharmonic mode
Inharmonic mode offers the following controls:
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Inharmonic: Activates inharmonic mode, which allows you to stretch partials away from the harmonic series. When activated, the inharmonic control knob will appear.
Inharm: Adjusts the amount of detuning for the second wavetable oscillator. Only visible when Inharmonic mode is activated.
Modulation Oscillator
Then modulation oscillator offers the following controls:
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Modulation Type: Selects the type of audio rate modulation applied to the wavetable oscillator by the modulation oscillator.
Modulation Oscillator Waveform: Selects the waveform of the modulation oscillator.
Mod Tune: Adjusts the tuning of the modulation oscillator. Tunig is available in three modes: Semitones, Ratio (harmonics and subharmonics), and Hz (fixed frequency). Modes can be switched by clicking on the small st label under the knob.
Mod Amt: Adjusts the amount of modulation applied to the wavetable oscillator by the modulation oscillator.
Tone Machine
The Tone Machine mode offers you unprecedented control of your Samples’ pitches and formant frequencies, which can both be changed independently from the playback speed. It accomplishes this by processing your audio signals with granular synthesis algorithms, and has tremendous potential for creative sound design, as well as lots of utilitarian applications.
When you switch your Source Module from Sampler or DFD mode into this mode, it needs to analyze your sample material first, which can take some time if you have lots of samples in this Group. A progress bar will indicate the current status of this analysis.
Note that since the Tone Machine handles your audio data in small chunks of sample values called “grains”, all boundaries of Sample loop regions will be aligned to these chunks. In consequence, this can result in slightly inaccurate playback of loops.
The Tone Machine mode contains the following controls:
The Tone Machine mode lets you adjust the speed and pitch of your Samples independently.
Tune: Changes the playback pitch within one octave up or down, without affecting the playback speed.
Smooth: In order to reduce artifacts during playback, Kontakt will crossfade grains into each other. This control adjusts the shape of these very short crossfades. Higher values will result in a smoother pitch shift, but rhythmic material may lose definition and “punch”. Lower values are prone to cause a buzzing sound, but will keep transients intact.
Speed: Changes the playback speed independently of the pitch. This value is displayed as a percentage of the original speed by default, so 200% doubles the playback speed, while 50% halves it. The control goes all the way down to 0%, which freezes the sound at its current playback position. The Speed parameter can also be synchronized to your host or Master Editor tempo; in this mode, your samples will be stretched to match the length of a note value. To do this, click the displayed unit of the Speed control and select a note value from the drop-down menu, then dial in a numerator for this value with the Speed knob. To switch back to unsynchronized mode, just choose the Default entry from the drop-down menu.
Formant: This control shifts the formant frequencies, which are the parts of your signal’s frequency content that decide its predominant timbral characteristics, independently of the pitch.
DC Filter: The Tone Machine algorithm can impose a DC bias upon your waveform in certain cases, which reduces headroom and can cause distortions. This button enables a filter that eliminates this bias and re-centers your waveform around its origin. It’s recommended that you leave this activated.
Legato: If this button is activated and you play multiple notes in a legato fashion, Kontakt will carry its current playback position over to each following note, rather than playing each Sample from the beginning.
Tracking: If this button is activated, the playback pitch will depend on the notes that you play. When deactivated, the pitch won’t follow the keyboard.
MIDI Channel: Sets the MIDI port and channel this Group will respond to. Change this only if you want different Groups respond to different MIDI channels, otherwise set the Instrument’s MIDI channel in the Instrument Header and leave this setting to its Default (Instrument) value.
Release Trigger: Allows samples in this Group to be triggered when a MIDI note-off command is received. This function and its additional parameters are covered by the description of the Sampler mode above.
t(ms) (Time, only visible if Release Trigger is activated): If you set this to a value other than 0, Kontakt will count from that value backwards in millisecond intervals when it receives a note, then stop the timer and provide its current value as a modulation source when it receives the corresponding note-off value. This way, you can make your Instrument respond to note durations, for instance by reducing the volume of your release sample after longer notes in order to make it fit a Sample with a natural decay.
Monophonic (visible only if Release Trigger is activated): This button affects how release samples will respond to note repetitions. When it’s activated, playing a note repeatedly will cut off any previous release samples that are still sounding (if any), so that only one release sample will play at any time.
Time Machine 1
The Time Machine 1 works similarly to the Tone Machine in that it uses granular synthesis to render pitch and playback speed of your samples independent of each other. It is optimized to alter the playback speed while leaving the pitch unaffected, thus providing a facility for real time time-stretching.
The Time Machine's controls are mostly identical to those of the Tone Machine. In addition, it offers the following controls:
The Time Machine 1 performs time-stretching of your Samples in real time.
High Quality: This button replaces the DC Filter button of the Tone Machine. When activated, the Time Machine will analyze the sample data in order to determine optimal grain boundaries for this material; disabling this will make the granular synthesizer work the same regardless of its source material. This especially affects playback quality at low speeds.
Grain: This control replaces the Formant control of the Tone Machine. It determines the grain size of the granular synthesizer. Since the grain size is not static in Hi Quality mode, this control has little effect when you have activated the button described above.
Time Machine 2
This module works in a similar way as the Time Machine 1, but uses enhanced algorithms that provide better quality time stretching and pitch shifting.
The Time Machine 2's controls are mostly identical to those of the Time Machine, with the following exceptions:
The Time Machine 2 mode is optimized for high-quality time stretching, especially of percussive material.
Transient Copy: When this button is activated, transients in your material — instantaneous level changes that occur in percussive sounds — will be preserved as accurately as possible. Therefore, this mode is recommended when you’re working with drum loops or other percussive material.
Transient (Transient Size): When the Transient Copy function is activated, this control adjusts the duration of transients that will be left untouched.
Grain: This drop-down menu allows you to choose from several grain sizes that are optimized for various types of source material. As the effects of various settings on your particular material is hard to predict, it’s usually worth trying several settings until you have found the one that sounds best.
Time Machine Pro
This module should be used for the highest quality, independent pitch-shifting and time-stretching. It is best used for realistic changes, not extreme effects. Due to the higher quality, the CPU and RAM consumption of this mode is rather high.
The Time Machine Pro's controls are mostly identical to those of the Time Machine, with the following exceptions:
The Time Machine Pro is the highest quality time-stretching mode.
Reverse: Time Machine Pro is the only time machine module that offers a real-time audio reverse function.
High Quality: Switches between "efficient" and "high quality" mode and displays advanced controls, which are described below.
Env Order (Envelope Order): Sets the order of the spectral envelope (formant) estimation. The default is set to 25% which works fine for most material. If the input audio is really high pitched the order should be lowered, cogently, if the input audio is low pitched the value should be raised.
Frm Shift (Formant Shift): Sets the spectral envelope’s shift factor. The default is set to zero which works fine for most material. This spectral shift is performed before the overall pitch shifting.
Keep Formants: Enabling this option allows for formant preserving pitch shifting.
Notice
Time Machine Pro can only process stereo files. In case of more channels (surround), only the first two channels are processed, the others are muted.
Beat Machine
The Beat Machine is a mode for tempo-synchronized playback of “sliced” Samples. In short, the slicing mechanism provides a way to change the playback speed of percussive audio material, such as drum loops, without the tendency to “slur” transients or introduce other artifacts that are common to other time-stretching methods. In contrast to these, though, slicing needs some prior human intervention, the idea being that you add markers to your Samples, which tell Kontakt where their distinctive parts — such as the drums in a drum loop — are located. After you’ve created those markers, Kontakt will be able to trigger these elements in time to your song with an internal sequencer. This sequencer is the Beat Machine.
If the task of placing markers in your Samples, which is referred to as “slicing”, sounds daunting to you, don’t worry. The intelligent slicing functions that you’ll find in the Grid panel of the Wave Editor will make this task as simple as possible, and of course, once you’ve sliced a Sample, the slicing information will be saved along with the Instrument. What’s more, there’s lots of pre-sliced material available in the form of commercial loop libraries.
The process of slicing a Sample manually is described in detail in section Grid Panel. Also, note that the Sync / Slice tab of the Wave Editor includes a Use Beat Machine button, which allows you to synchronize the Sample to your song tempo right away. In fact, you should always use the Use Beat Machine function instead of switching your Source Module into Beat Machine mode explicitly. Please refer to sections Grid Panel and Sync / Slice Tab of the Wave Editor chapter to learn how to slice your own Samples and use the Beat Machine to play them back.
The Beat Machine contains the following controls:
The Beat Machine mode shouldn’t be activated manually; it’s better to Slice your Samples first in the Wave Editor and then activate it via the Use Beat Machine button on the Sync / Slice tab.
MIDI Channel: Sets the MIDI port and channel this Group will respond to. Change this only if you want different Groups respond to different MIDI channels, otherwise set the Instrument’s MIDI channel in the Instrument Header and leave this parameter at its Default (Instrument) value.
Tune: Adjusts the pitch at which each Slice will be played back within one octave up or down.
Speed: Adjusts the speed at which the Slice pattern will be played back. When you’re using the Use Beat Machine button on the Sync / Slice tab of the Wave Editor to synchronize your sliced Samples, the readout of this control will display Zone, which means that the speed gets automatically synchronized to your host tempo. Read about this mechanism in section Using the Beat Machine. If you have activated the Beat Machine mode manually, the speed will be displayed as a percentage of the pattern’s original speed, and can be synchronized manually by clicking on the displayed unit, then choosing a note value from the drop-down menu.
Tracking: If this button is activated, the playback pitch will depend on the notes that you play. When deactivated, the pitch won’t follow the keyboard.
Slice Atk (Slice Attack): Since slicing can occur at spots in your Sample that can cause clicks when played back in isolation, Slices are being crossfaded into each other instead of just played back in succession. This control adjusts the attack time of the crossfade envelopes. As large values can weaken your transients, you should generally adjust this control to the lowest possible value that just avoids clicking.
Slice Rel (Slice Release): Adjusts the release time of the crossfade that occurs between Slices.
Release Trigger: Allows samples in this Group to be triggered when a MIDI note-off command is received. This function and its additional parameters are covered by the description of the Sampler mode at the beginning of this chapter.
t(ms) (Time, only visible if Release Trigger is activated): If you set this to a value other than 0, Kontakt will count from that value backwards in millisecond intervals when it receives a note, then stop the timer and provide its current value as a modulation source when it receives the corresponding note-off value. This way, you can make your Instrument respond to note durations, for instance by reducing the volume of your release sample after longer notes in order to make it fit a Sample with a natural decay.
Monophonic (visible only if Release Trigger is activated): This button affects how release samples will respond to note repetitions. When it’s activated, playing a note repeatedly will cut off any previous release samples that are still sounding (if any), so that only one release sample will play at any time.
Internal Trigger: This button is only included for backwards compatibility. Its function was used with slices that have been automatically mapped into Groups across the keyboard. As this function is replicated with Zones since the release of Kontakt 3, you need this button only if using Instruments that have been saved in previous Kontakt versions.
S1200 Machine
The S1200 Machine is the first of the "vintage machine modes". It emulates the behavior of a classic drum sampler from the late 80s. It not only degrades the playback quality of the samples (to about 12-bit, 26kHz), but also changes the way Kontakt changes the pitch and basic handling of the sample playback engine.
The controls are similar to those of the Sampler or DFD modes, but with the omission of the Quality menu and the inclusion of a Static Filter menu.
The S1200 Machine
MP60 Machine
The MP60 Machine is the second of the "vintage machine modes" and emulates the behavior of a different 80s classic sampler. As with the S1200, it not only degrades the playback quality of the samples, but also changes the way Kontakt changes the pitch and basic handling of the sample playback engine. It is generally of a higher sample quality than the S1200 mode.
The controls are similar to those of the Sampler or DFD modes, but with the omission of the Quality menu.
The MP60 Machine
Amplifier Module
This section describes the Amplifier module, the final stage in the Group level of Kontakt's signal flow.
The Amplifier Module follows the Source Module and the Group Insert Effects chain in the Group level of Kontakt’s signal flow. Its purpose is to adjust the volume and stereo panorama of the signal before it enters the Instrument level, and optionally change the default output channel assignment and the channel routing that occurs between the Group and the Instrument level. A particularly vital task of the Amplifier Module is brought about by combining it with modulation: this way, you can use volume envelopes, which are elementary in the creation of playable Instruments.
As it’s a fundamental part of Kontakt’s signal flow, the Amplifier Module can’t be removed from a Group, nor can you have more than one Amplifier Module within a Group. All signals generated by the Source Module in the Group will pass through your Amplifier Module.
The Amplifier contains the following controls:
Volume: Adjusts the overall level of all signals that originate from this Group.
Pan: If the Group is being routed to a stereo Output Channel, this control allows you to place the signal in the stereo panorama. Note that the Volume and Pan controls affect the playback of all Zones in your Group; if you want to adjust these parameters on a per-Zone basis, change them in the Mapping Editor instead, or use Zone Envelopes, which are described in section Zone Envelopes.
Phase Invert: Switching this button on inverts the phase of the audio signal, so that negative signals become positive, and vice versa. It acts in the same manner as a phase invert button on a mixing console and has the same uses, namely to make sure that signals mix together without phase cancellation.
L/R Swap: Activating this button will swap the left and right channels of a stereo signal.
Channel Routing: Clicking this button will open a routing matrix below the panel, which allows you to change the channel assignment aspects of the connection between the Group and the Instrument level, as well as create special routing configurations for up-mixing or down-mixing your Group signal to a different channel configuration. More details regarding this panel will be described later in this chapter.
Output: This drop-down menu allows you to specify an alternate Output Channel, or Bus routing for this Group. When set to Default (Instrument), the Group’s output is routed to the Instrument Insert Effects Chain, then to the output of the instrument, the Channel Output of which is selected from the Instrument Header. If you select a Bus from this dropdown, the group’s audio will be routed to that Bus Effect Chain, then to the respective Bus’s output (which, by default, is the Instrument Effect Chain). You can also send the Group’s audio directly to a Channel Output, which will bypass any Bus and/or Instrument effects.
Channel Routing Panel
A routing configuration which keeps the channel order and assignment intact, but lowers the second channel by -12 dB in volume.
Each horizontal row of this table corresponds to a channel of the Group signal that’s present at the input of the Amplifier Module, as specified in the leftmost column. Each vertical column corresponds to an audio channel of the output that you’ve selected for this Instrument in the Instrument Header. You can create a connection between an input and an output channel by clicking into the field that is crossed by the respective row and column. An existing connection will be indicated with a colored rectangle; click it again to remove the connection.
For more complex routings that convert between different channel configurations, it’s possible to send an input signal to multiple output channels, or to mix multiple input signals down to one output channel. You do this simply by creating more than one connection within a row (mix-up) or a column (mix-down). In such cases, it’s often desirable to create connections with an intrinsic amplification or attenuation; for example, a common practice for mixing surround signals down to stereo is to fold the rear signal to the stereo channels at a lower volume. This can be accomplished in the Channel Routing matrix by right-clicking into the fields of existing connections, which will change the level of this connection as indicated by the color of the rectangle. Repeated clicking will cycle through a number of preset levels, which are displayed with their respective colors at the bottom of the routing matrix.