In today’s free tutorial Danny J Lewis demonstrates how you can make use of the features within Native Instruments’ Kontakt to help with the compositional elements of your tracks.
DANNY SAYS:
We know that many of you struggle with the compositional aspects of music production so how about another way to cheat your way to a more interesting track? Kontakt from Native Instruments is the most powerful software sampler available and it’s an amazing tool for manipulating audio. What many people don’t realise though is that under the hood is a fantastic suite of tools that can help you create musical elements in your productions. For Logic users particularly this is essential as unlike its rivals Ableton and Cubase it doesn’t come with a complement of MIDI plug-ins or devices to help non-musicians to sound ‘musical’.
The Script Editor is a place where you can literally type additional functions into Kontakt. If you code in HTML or Javascript you’ll probably feel at home with the concept of typing pages of code into an editor. But if you don’t, have no fear, because there are a healthy selection of extremely usable presets that can get you up and running in no time at all. In the video you can see me demonstrate the retrigger script that brings MPC style note repeats. Combine this with pitch shifting and you’ve got a very contemporary technique for snare fills as well as a great tool for staccato bass hits and riffs.
Another one of my favourites is the constrain to scale script; this is like a quantize for musical notes. If you play a wrong note it will move it to the next correct one in the selected scale. There’s also harmonise, a great tool for create one finger chords. You choose the chord from a large list and then play it with just one note held down. It’s also possible to create your own chord presets with up to 6 additional notes. The arpeggiator is very powerful and far more flexible than others you may have come across. There’s also a mad invert script that also plays a note at the opposite end of the keyboard from the one you press.
In short, the scripts are a whole bunch of fun and great for inspiring you to finish your tracks. Kontakt 5 is part of the Komplete 8 bundle and you can learn more about some of the instruments in the collection on our Native Instruments Sound Design Course.
Watch more free tutorials on Point Blank’s sample course page.
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Here’s another batch of high quality, royalty free samples, this time put together by our friends at Original Music. This week’s pack includes 200mb of loops and samples from their Offbeats Accents pack. A bunch of snares and loops at 120bpm and 167bpm…it’s all here.
Click here to grab the samples and enjoy!
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Video Transcription:
Hello. This is Danny J. Lewis, also known as Enzyme Black. I am a course developer and tutor here at Point Blank Online. In this video I am going to demonstrate some really cool techniques contained within Kontakt. Kontakt is an immensely powerful sampler from Native Instruments. It has got tons of features, and one of the great things about it is a thing called Scripts. We are going to take a look at these and we are going to see the things that they can bring for you to really help with your compositional process. If you are struggling with your musical elements, you are going to take a look at this video and you will see some techniques that are really going to help you.
I was able to put this musical idea together in about 40 minutes, thanks to this script contained within Kontakt 5. Everything you are hearing at the moment is coming from Kontakt 5, with the exception of the main back beat, that is coming from Machine. I am just going to mute that for the moment. All of these musical elements are coming from Kontakt. I am going to take it forward. The snares, that are falling in pitch, are coming from Kontakt, as well. What I am going to do is backtrack and show you some of the things that I did, and these are basically the things that enabled me to put the idea together so quickly. It really felt like a fun experience, because I was not having to think about the musical elements. I was just using the scripts to get my parts down; I will show you. Let us take a look firstly at the base, the retrigger base. If I show the MIDI note data, you are probably going to be thinking, ‘That does not look like what I am hearing.’ You are right, because we wouldd be expecting to see staccato notes, very short rapid repeats of notes on sixteenths, but these are sustained notes.
Let me show you inside Kontakt 5. This is an instrument from the library, and I am going to open it up by clicking on the wrench, and we can see visible the script editor. This is where you can load up to 5 scripts, these flow from left to right, and they run in series, so that means one can influence the next. I dropped in onto the third slot the retrigger script. This is running at sixteenths, so it is creating for as long as I hold it down, a rapid retrigger of the note at sixteenths intervals. I can change this, to go into eight-triplet. The sixteenth is working well for me. You are thinking, ‘Why are they called scripts?’ Let me show you. If I open this up you can see the code. If you are a Java Script programmer or programming in another language, that is the stuff you might be used to seeing. That is what’s going on, it is a MIDI program that is adapting the incoming MIDI data and doing something different with it when it hits the actual instrument itself. That is a really good one, that is actually the same one that I used on the snares, as well. Instead of me actually playing in rapid snare hits these are being triggered sustained notes, so let me show you. I am going to open it up and take away the browser, notice how the mixer is nice and clear now.
You can see the very same script being used here. What I was doing there was to adjust the tuning. Can you see on the source module? It has gone to -3. Let me take it back in, watch here. This is a great effect, you might have heard this in tracks that you listen to. I set it up with a MIDI control, and I will show you how easy that is later on, as well. This is all hands-on, you are mapping a physical control to that parameter. It was real good fun to do that. You can see that data over here. I actually moved this down onto another track. It is still assigned to the same instrument, but you can see that if we set this up over here and then just click on it again, you can see we have got a slope from going high to low, that is literally going high pitch to low pitch, so that works really well. You will notice that I have also got some other automation going on, as well as the musical elements, such as the retrigger base; we got the morphing filter pad, so this is a really great example. Let me show you, I will start it over, let us open this up. Inside Kontakt, are some morphing filter, these are very good; they sound very interesting. I assigned a rotary control to this, so you can see the instrument control section, the sound parameter is what I used. Can you see that moving? It is morphing through different filter types.
Now, onto the op synth. This one has an arpeggiator included inside this, so if we click on the script editor you can see that. There is some interesting programming with the actual level so you can adjust the volume with each of the steps in the sequencer, and the traditional steps, as well. Then it goes beyond the realms of your usual arpeggiators, sounds great in there. Sometimes in the musicality, I was literally just playing one note, and there were some chords in some of these. If we open this up, I will show you, this is another thing that the script is offering. If we go back to the script editor, you can see this stuff. If we go down to the instrument, the chord button, and I use this and I switch to the preset, so it is a minor chord. The script for these are really complex. If I open this up, you can see there is a whole ton of stuff. Someone sat down and written a script that is really driving this whole frontend panel. This is such an amazing concept, it is almost open-ended. When you invest in Kontakt, you get so much possibility and there are some people that are coding scripts and uploading them to the Native Instrument site, as well, so you can see how Kontakt can become a really quick and easy tool for composition.
To conclude, what I am going to do is show you how easy it is to set up a physical MIDI control to one of the parameters inside Kontakt. I am just going to come up to this cut off parameter, I am going to right click Learn MIDI CC#, and I am going to find a control on my machine. I am just going to rotate it so you can see that that is actually working now, so it is assigned. I can record that into the MIDI track, and that is a really great way to get some hands-on control very quickly and easily. Hopefully, you got an idea now of the assistance that Kontakt can bring when you are composing. If you have Kontakt, make sure you check out all the other scripts, there is a massive library, some of these are fantastic. The things to look out for performance constraint to scale, you can actually get it so that you play some notes that are out, and they are going to be put into the scale automatically for you, lots of options here, so explore those, it is a great tool for composition. If you are interested in finding more about Kontakt, take a look at the brochure page on the PointBlankOnline.net site. We have a Native Instrument sound design course where we got many videos focusing on Kontakt. We will take a final listen to the music, uninterrupted. We are going to play out with this to the end of the video.
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