If you read this site, you’re probably also on NI’s mailing list, but I just wanted to point out a great feature on Radiohead’s onstage setup. NI interviews Radiohead’s keyboard tech Alan Russell:

Radiohead On Stage with Kontakt

The setup is really interesting: one Mac laptop (with one backup) runs a single instance of Kontakt. Kontakt then simultaneously plays instruments from the two keyboards onstage.

They use Kontakt in order to fill in with sampled sounds and to replace a lot of the hardware that would otherwise need to be hauled around. (I’ve been talking to a lot of artists, famous and less-so, who are using samplers to lighten their load on the road.) There’s even a Crumar Orchestrator preset in the library. Russ’s and Jonny’s laptops fill out still more computer-based sounds with Max and Pro-53, and you’ll see in the image above Kontakt is hosted in Live.

Well worth reading the whole story. It’s written by our friend at NI, Florian Grote, who is an accomplished computer musician himself. (I’ve noted his Pure Data workshop on CDM.) It makes a real difference having the person doing the interview knowledgeable enough to ask the questions you’d ask.

But, while this is obviously good advertising for NI, I think it’s equally nice to note that this is a setup you could duplicate, at least on some level. A lot of us even have an extra laptop we could run as a backup. That’s rarely been the case with tours as big as the Radiohead tour. Yet you could now set up a really sophisticated rig running computer software, with the kinds of timbral changes that previously required massive rigs of outboard gear and technical crews. That’s very good news for those of us who have to be our own tech!

Peter Dines’ tutorial on scripting and modulation in Kontakt 3 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

I’m always on the lookout for a really sick sampler - something that can scratch my itch, and keep scratching when the itch migrates. I think I’ve found that sick sampler in Kontakt. I usually hit the wall with a sampler half an hour into exploring it. There will be some inflexible feature that shows me the developer had one way of making music in mind, and didn’t foresee how someone might want to creatively abuse the product.

Kontakt, on the other hand, invites creative abuse. It’s easy to do simple things and possible to do complex things. Here’s a video of a simple but offbeat thing I like to do with a sampler. I’ve also provided a Kontakt instrument for you to download. It has a different sample than the one in the video, for copyright reasons, but everything else is the same.

Let me know what you think, and maybe we can explore ways to take this further. One thing I’d like to do is get it integrated in Kore, and another is to fancy up the panning script a bit. Any other ideas out there?

Kontakt preset files download