My First NKI

This past weekend I made my first from-scratch Kontakt instrument. How cool is that?

Cool.  What kind of instrument is it? 

I made an NKI of the sounds of our dog. My plan is to make a whole piece of music with them. The scale spans from "strings" (loooong yawns) to castanets (teeth snapping).

Cool stuff Dave.

Where are you learning about scripting?

I've been studying scripting for a while, since Kontakt 2. Mostly by pulling up the factory scripts and scripts from commercial libraries and figuring out line-by-line just what they do. Writing one isn't too hard - it's a pretty straightforward and simple language - writing one that results in a musically-useful tool, well that takes a lot of work!

What prompted this exercise, other than I was just getting impatient for my K4 upgrade to arrive, was that I had a favorite patch on my Yamaha MO8 that I had no equivalent for on disk. This meant that I had to render it as audio which limited my compositional options, especially tempo changes. It occurred to me that I could transfer the MO8 patch into Kontakt, and possibly even improve on it in the process.

Fortunately, the patch I chose was a simple one that only required a couple dozen samples. The trick was figuring out the root notes of the original samples, which required recording a bunch of notes (over S/PDIF for best fidelity) and closely examining them to identify the small differences that gave away the transitions. From there it was trivial to record the root samples at different velocities, trim and normalize them. Because I was stealing someone else's samples it wasn't necessary to do volume matching, and because I was getting them digitally there was no cleanup required. I did, however, stretch the higher notes because my only complaint about the patch was that the high notes' sustain was too short.

What was really satisfying was when I loaded the nki into a project that already had an audio track of that MO8 patch and A/B'd it against my Kontakt version. To my relief they sounded identical.

Next step is to figure out how to script some pitch-bending tricks that the original could not do, e.g. properly sliding the root and third together up to the next chord.

Yer a scriptin' maniac.    Well done. 

bitflipper


It's so easy to get derailed at any step of the process and wind up with something else.

Hopefully not a banjo.