A disappointing feature of many software samplers is that they don’t actually - sample! Can I have an amen? -Ed. They’re built and optimized for browsing sample libraries and reading data off the hard drive efficiently. This can be fantastic if it’s what you want to do - and I just used a bunch of Kontakt-based instruments in Kore in my hockey theme project - but sometimes you want to have fun recording and playing back live audio in the moment. If you have an audio itch, you can scratch it, or you can check the Reaktor user library and see if anyone else has had the same itch and has already scratched it for you.

New York musician Red Wierenga had an itch and a copy of Reaktor, and built a sophisticated and elegant solution for his needs.

Red’s live sampler has up to eight ten-second sample slots - you can increase the audio table size to make more room - and an array of playback and sound manipulation features. Since it’s constructed using audio tables rather than sampler modules or grain delays, the recordings can be directly saved with the instrument, unlike the grain delay based sampler we built earlier, where sample buffers have to be saved separately if you want to keep them. You can also load pre-existing samples into the Live Sampler’s audio tables by right clicking on the waveform display, so you’re not limited to line in and microphone audio sources.

Another instrument I’ve been playing with recently is the Traktor Scratcher. Built by Native Instruments, it’s the prototype for Traktor’s scratching algorithm. It was uploaded to the user library five years ago and I think it’s one of the forgotten jewels. It’s a bit rudimentary but makes a fantastic starting point for users with building skills - in the library, you’ll see several posts from users who’ve adapted it for use with their setups. I’ve tinkered it into an interesting live sample manipulation tool, which I’ll be covering in an upcoming article. However, now I’m thinking that it might be possible to adapt the scratching algorithm to work with Red’s sampler. Stay tuned - this could get a little crazy!

Ed. - naturally, Reaktor-based scratching and sampling will be must-haves for live Kore setups, too. Sounds like there’s an unber-rig of sampling / scratching / playing awesomeness that needs to happen, huh? -PK

Nils Liberg maintains a fantastic resource of Kontakt scripts, a tutorial and even a free/donationware programmer-oriented script editor that comes in Windows and OS X flavors.

Nils is behind the script that powers the Scarbee Black Bass instrument, and his scripts are mainly geared towards creating realistic instrument emulations. If that’s not your cup of tea, a few of the scripts look ripe for experimentation, like the MIDI filter and the FX morph.

These were written for Kontakt 2 - I haven’t tested them all but the MIDI filter and FX morph load up fine in K3. I think they’d be great starting points for taking things even further… hmmm, I wonder if I could hack the FX morph to use four instead of two presets and fade between them with a 2D control surface…