When I look back at the Kontakt features we’ve done here at Noisepages, I notice that one feature of the software that keeps coming up is scripting. We’ve used scripts to:

• sequence and re-tune music box samples
• create a constrain-to-scale MIDI insert effect for Kore and other hosts
• Latch incoming notes, and dynamically pan voices in stereo

As well, we’ve looked at the creative potential of the scripts that ship with Kontakt. I’ve also pointed readers towards some fine scripting resources for Kontakt users. With one exception - stereo panning - these have all been stock factory scripts, prewritten scripts from third parties, or very slightly modified versions. Now that everyone’s toes are wet it’s time to dive in and splash around with some scripting from scratch. The water’s warm and we won’t venture too deep. I guarantee there are no sharks.

Last time we looked at Kontakt I showed you how to import and slice up a sample, and create new music out of an old melody. Now let’s pick up where we left off by exploring the scripts and performance views in some Kontakt and Kontakt-based Kore library instruments.

The Urban Beats collection that ships with Kontakt includes 49 instruments, each with a different set of percussion loops and samples. I’ll show you how to use the sequencing and effects scripts to create endless variation in each instrument. As well, we’ll have a look at creating and managing zone envelopes to repitch and pan loops.

Ed.: When you think of sample design, you may think of hours spent painstakingly multisampling hundreds of audio files. Of course, that’s not the way most of us work (or have time to work). More often, you have a short recording you like that you want to manipulate. Kontakt’s functional depth need not intimidate you: you can use all that horsepower to get your sounds doing interesting stuff right away.

Here, Peter Dines walks us through in a few quick steps taking a simple sample and turning it into a complex instrument. He’s got a free download to round it out. Even if you’ve seen very little of Kontakt beyond its presets, you should be able to pick up some quick skills. And yes, you’ll even do some scripting - though thanks to the presets, you won’t have to know about scripting yourself to take advantage of this feature. (We will make all of you scripters soon, though.)

In this video, a basic set of Kontakt skills that could apply to lots of ideas:

• Creating a sample from a file
• Slicing up bigger samples into mapped slices with the Wave Editor
• Correcting slice points
• Using Script Editor performance presets to get advanced features
• (without having to write your own scripts)
• Simple script modification - even if you’re afraid of code

But the whole thing started (appropriately enough in the holiday season) as a gift. Peter recalls:

My brother in law came back from Vienna with a great gift for me - a music box mechanism. I recorded its output and imported the file into Kontakt. In this video, I demonstrate some of the ways you can manipulate and script your way to creative results.

Music-boxing in NI Kontakt from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Here’s the Kontakt instrument I created in this video:

Kontakt 3 has fantastic MIDI transform scripting abilities, and they’re not limited to triggering internal samples. If you take a look at the MIDI dropdown menu on the engine tab of Kontakt 3’s main options, you’ll see settings for what MIDI events will be sent out when triggered or generated.

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…

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