If you’re looking for folksy, retro, and acoustic sounds without all that pesky wood and wire, you should check out Pendle’s Grand Thrift Auto(harp).

It’s a Kontakt 2- and 3-based instrument that multisamples an autoharp and a plucked grand piano. What does it sound like? Something like a cross between a zither, a harp, and a hammered dulcimer. Listen to the embedded sound player on Pendle’s page for examples.

After playing with the Grand Theft Autoharp for a few days I can honestly say that it’s the last autoharp sample set you’ll ever need. There are four different multi-sampled layers, including a muted layer with a nice pizzicato thump, and you can mix the four layers freely. This eats up a fair bit of polyphony - by default, it’s set to use 60 voices, which in turn eats a bit of CPU, but the sound is worth it. You can always decrease polyphony and let voice stealing kick in sooner.

Want more retro Kontakt goodness? What about the Dulcitone1884 on the same page:

Originally designed and manufactured in Scotland in the 1800’s, and with allegedly only 2000 in existence the DULCITONE is a portable keyboard that was made for missionaries to hump around remote african village churches to help perk up hymn services. It has a very basic piano action with spring loaded felt covered hammers striking small magnet shaped tuning forks. Its a bit like a Fender Rhodes electric piano without the electric bits, and has a very lovely woody, clonky glockenspiel/celesta kind of sound.

Some of the higher-velocity Dulcitone samples have an interesting rattle, and this varies from one note to the next, giving the instrument an appealing organic quirkiness.

Both instruments are available in Kontakt 2 and 3 format for £15. There are some other intriguing instruments on Pendle’s site, including a free sf2 (soundfont) sample set of fireworks sounds. This imported nicely into Kontakt 3 for me and provides some creative percussion possibilities. Makes me want to try my hand at something like Astrobotnia’s Lightworks.

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

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!

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…