New Kontakt project

I've started on a more ambitious Kontakt instrument this time. My last based on my Boss Dr-110 drum machine was fun, but this time I'm basing it on some of my vintage synths - the first being my Oberheim Matrix-1000.

Dr-110 Kontakt Instrument

All the samples are created using the excellent (but no longer available) Autosampler. All sounds are captured over 4 seconds per 4 notes with low and high velocities. The looping facility of Autosampler is amazing creating seamless loops every time.

Any cable noise has been cleaned up using Izotope's RX2 software.

Here are some images of work in progress...

Kontakt Scripting - Continued

Carrying on from my previous blog on using Kontakt's native scripting function; here's my finished my Boss Dr-110.

You can set the volume and balance for all instruments as before, but it now has an adjustable reverb size plus a switch to activate a pseudo circuit-bent effect to the sounds with bit-rate, frequency and saturation.

Watch the video demo...

Available now via Sampleism

Kontakt Scripting

By day I'm a web and multimedia developer, so naturally I'm going to be drawn to any musical instrument that uses coding or programming in some way, so recently I've been getting more and more into Kontakt scripting, being inspired by the wonderful instruments created by Hollow Sun (Cognosphere and Triosc too mention a couple). For something so deep you'd think there would be a wealth of guides and tips on the web, but there isn't, for me, I managed to find a very useful resource book - "KSP Scripting 1" by Mike Navy which provides some great tips and ideas for building your own Kontakt instruments.

Taking the bull by the horns I decided my first project would be my own Kontakt drum machine using samples from my Boss DR-110. Here's the finished project.

Ok, not the most exciting looking instrument but it works and sounds good. Each sound has it's own volume and panning, single hits are colour-coded blue on the keyboard while pre-programmed 'beats' are in red. I took the logo and texture from a picture of my drum machine - cleaned it up in Photoshop and saved as a .tga file (you can use .png as well).

Here's the 'guts' of the project...

That's just a small amount of the code, take a look at the scroll bar on the right to see how far down the code goes! This is just a small project too...

My next project is scaling up -I've taken a load of multi samples from my lovely Kawai K5m using 'AutoSampler' ( no longer available, unfortunately ) and I'm planning to make a lovely Kontakt instrument with it - might even try selling it for a few quid too just like HollowSun - we'll see, otherwise a freebie perhaps?

Here's the progress...