Full Kontakt!

Here’s part 1 of Jonno Incledon’s guide to getting started with Native Instruments top notch sampler, Kontakt…

Kontakt is by far one of the most powerful samplers in my current repertoire of plugins, although it’s one that doesn’t seem to be used to its full potential. Sampling is a grey area of production- whether or not you condone sampling is your choice and it isn’t your God-given right to enforce it or belittle people because of it. Music is an art form, art is a subjective entity and people have the right to produce music how they see fit.

This is going to be another set of articles covering the basics of an incredibly powerful program. Anyway, as I was saying Kontakt is at heart a sample player and can be loaded with almost any form of audio and played back in your DAW as MIDI.

First off is importing audio into Kontakt, and for simplicities sake I’m going to go with a simple drum loop. Files stored on your computer can be found in the Files tab on the left section of the window.

Make sure you have the Browser icon selected as well in case it’s not showing up.

Now that we’ve found a sample drag it into the blank space to the right and a tab like below should appear.

Congratulations you’ve imported audio into Kontakt…

Key Mapping

Key mapping is linking a sample or sound to a specific note of MIDI; in this case our sample is mapped to a number of MID notes, which here are represented as keys on a piano. To bring up the mapping editor you first need to open up the Edit mode, which is represented by a little wrench symbol.

Then clicking the mapping editor tab will bring up the view below.

Dragging the sides of the yellow shaded area will change what notes trigger the sample and their pitch. The yellow shaded note represents the “Key Note” where the sample retains its original pitch.

Multiple samples can be used in one instance of Kontakt, making it ideal for sweeps where one instance of Kontakt can hold enough samples for a whole song and save screen real-estate and processing power.

Samples can also be mapped to the same key; this is done by simply having them occupy the same note which when played will trigger both samples.

In this example when C2 is played, both loops will be triggered.