OK.....I have it all working. Some more questions.



#1) I have taken the battery template and added lots more staves for keyboards. I have loaded the marimba and vibe sounds into the rack on kompakt. They sound great. The only problem is that there are only 8 spaces. I want to have bells, Xylo, Timpani, chimes, crotales, etc. in there as well. what should I do?

#2) When all of the sounds play together the battery sounds are very soft in comparison to the keyboards especially if any keyboard part is doubled. How can I lower the keyboard sounds in the balance and raise the drumline sounds?

by the way, I had a problem when i was in finale where the quad bass and cymbal sounds were also triggering the snares when I entered them with my keyboard. I have set all of the channels the way they are supposed to be, but am still writing quad parts and having to hear a snare in the background. I'm not sure what is wrong but i can get over it because it plays correctly on playback.

Thanks again for all of your help. what an incredible program. This is going to be so helpful to people like the cymbals in my high scholl who don't really read as well. Now they will get a disk of Santa Clara playing their stuff! Now I can hear what my cymbal line would sound like if I had a bunch of Marty Lafontain's in it!!!!!

Thanks again

JJ

KOMPAKT and KONTAKT each have their own libraries that ship with the product. While KONTakt is a higher-end piece of software, the library that ships with KOMPakt is probably a little more appropriate for marching band type sounds.

You can of course expand Kontakt's functionality by purchasing separate libraries. As Bill mentioned, DS Soundware has some outstanding high-end keyboard libraries.

Jim mentioned to me once that Kompakt is better than Kontakt when it comes to percussion sounds. Kontakt was geared more towards hip-hop/rap whereas Kompakt was geared to more "normal" music.

You should try emailing Native Instruments and see how you might be able to get the sounds they have on Kompakt. They might charge you a small fee, but if you need keyboard sounds it's an option.

Another option is to check out www.dssoundware.com and consider purchasing some soundfonts from Donnie.

You would think that Kontact would have all the sounds that Kompact would, but as far as I know it doesn't.

I've got the orchestral percussion sounds (ie. timp, tri, snare, cymbals), along with bongos, congas, djembe, shakers, but believe it or not

NO FREAKIN KEYBOARD SOUNDS!!!!!!!!

I'm surprised you can't find the percussion sounds. In the pull down menu for each channel, look under Orchestral or also check Drums & Percussion> Orchestral or Percussion. The keyboard sounds are under just the Orchestral pull down. Everything els is under Percussion> Orchestral and Percussion.

This is where they are located on Kompakt. I would assume they are the same under Kontakt but I can't confirm that.

Hector,
I found some really good pit sounds in the kompakt "library". Hit the Browser button in the Kompakt window and look in your kompakt folder. Click on the library folder. They have a folder labeled orchestra in there. There is Vibes, marimba, etc and they sound pretty good.

JJ

I've tried searching extensively through all 5 Kontact disks and I can't seem to find any sounds resembling a Marimba, Vibes, Xylo, Bells, Chimes.

Thanks,
HG

Before you can use any of Kontakt's included samples, you have to load them from the Kontakt CD's onto your computer.

Kontakt comes with a large library of sounds in its 5-CD set. I'm not sure what types of "pit" sounds you'll really find here though. A lot of the sounds seem more synth oriented, but I'm not that experienced with them. You should load all those sounds onto your hard drive and experiment around with them. There's a listing of the sample CD contents here: http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?kontaktlibrary_us

You might find some various soundfonts that can be downloaded from the internet for free if you're looking for something in particular. Then just load those into Kontakt. Just a thought...

AB

Speaking of Pit Sounds..

I can't seem to access the any of the keyboard percussion sounds on Kontact. Do they exist on this program?

Thanks,
Hector Gil

Here's a screenshot of bidule running 4 instances of Kontakt (works the same for Kompakt). The Bidule "IN" devices act as virtual midi cables that would be accessed in your notation program. Each in-device goes to one instance of Kontakt, which goes OUT to the mixer. The mixer sends its audio to my computer's main audio-out which is where I hear it through my speakers. I also sent cables out of the mixer to the "audio file recorder" feature which will allow me to create a .wav of anything being played through Bidule. This shot shows it running in Mac OSX, but it's available for Windows as well.
[img]https://www.tapspace.com/images/bidule.jpg[/img]

By the way, if you're finding you'd like to get a different balance from your battery sounds to your keyboard sounds, you can simply adjust the instruments' volume knobs within kompakt. Usually minor tweaks is all it takes to get the balance you're looking for.

Actually there are some solutions for getting more than 8 instruments from Kompakt.

One of the cool things about Kontakt and Kompakt is that in addition to running these programs in "stand-alone mode", you can also load them as plug-ins in other programs (such as sequencer programs). Kompakt can run multiple "instances" if you run it as a "VSTi plug-in" in a host application. In each Kompakt instance, you can load 8 instruments. Doing it this way, you become limited only by your computer's processing power and memory.

There's a free (for now) program available called BIDULE that will allow you to load multiple instances of Kompakt (or any other VSTi's). It's a beta version right now, so there may still be a few glitches to work out, but it's generally quite good. It's available from Plogue here:
http://www.plogue.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=11&Itemid=28

Another very cool aspect to using a program like Bidule to host your samplers is that it has the ability to record all output to audio tracks, which solves a very common question from Finale and Sibeilus users.

Keep in mind, learning Bidule will take a little patience as well, but it's really quite simple once you understand its interface. I'll post a screenshot before long to get you started.

There's also a program by Steinberg called V-Stack that can host multiple instances of Kompakt.

If you decide you'd rather not mess with all this just yet, you can always run your keyboard parts from your computer's soundcard. You'll just have to setup Finale's channels/MIDI setup to send channels xx-xx (your keyboard channels) to the soundcard (rather than through maple/kompakt).

JJ

There is a way to set up Kompakt to accept up to 32 channels. Unfortunately, the instructions are at my house and I'm at work. You need a good amount of memory on your computer (1 gig or more) I believe, but it is possible, and fairly simple to set up. I haven't tried it because my computer couldn't handle it, but a friend that told me about it does it all the time.

If you're ever online at night, feel free to IM me at drumcorpbc on Yahoo, AOL or MSN and I can give you the instructions. I can help with the other problems you're having as well.

[quote="jj.pipitone"]
#1) I have taken the battery template and added lots more staves for keyboards. I have loaded the marimba and vibe sounds into the rack on kompakt. They sound great. The only problem is that there are only 8 spaces. I want to have bells, Xylo, Timpani, chimes, crotales, etc. in there as well. what should I do?
[/quote]

I believe with kompakt, you can only have 8 instruments playing at the same time. You can load more instruments into your sampler but you can only access 8 at any given point in your score. I even ran into problem running Gigastudio 32 with 16 channels, I had to cut out all of my aux. percussion to make sure all the keyboards could be heard. I have since upgraded to Gigastudio 96 with no space issues yet.

Gabriel Cobas

one more thing.....how do I get a differentiation between accents and inner beats? Is it a playback setting in the articulation tool menu?