Go ahead and check some your instruments – maybe one of the smaller, more independent ones will have an open code and you’ll be able to see how it looks like. Developers do this to protect their own code from stealing. Encoded means the script itself is displayed in a completely unreadable form.
Locked means you need a password to display the script. Developers do this to protect their intellectual property. This is because most Kontakt instruments are locked and/or encoded. The “Edit” button in the bottom left corner would normally display the script, but it won’t. The above picture shows a script tab selected – it shows an interface of the instrument (without the background image). Kontakt 5 – Script Tab – background graphics won’t show in this area. While groups, mapping and wave editor will be freely accessible and ready for you to take a look, the script tab may be hidden. Go ahead and load some Kontakt patches yourself, and switch between various tabs mentioned earlier. When the key is released, the script looks for the code to tell the sample what to do next. Then it looks for a piece of code that tells it what to do – then plays the sound that has been mapped for the key being pressed. As you play a note, the sampler looks for the script, and the script looks at the key being pressed.
But the callback can also tell the sampler to play a release recording, or initiate a legato transition recording, or choose a proper recording based on a velocity of the key being pressed.įor example, if you load a strings library, the patch will tell the sampler where the sounds are, how are they mapped and where the scripts are. Once the callback code is found, inside it are instructions that tell the sampler what to do next: usually the callback tells the sampler to play the sound mapped for this particular key. When you press the key, the script takes over – it looks what key you pressed, and searches the code to look for a callback for this particular action. When you load the patch, the patch’s “graphical interface” already contains a lot of information – it tells Kontakt where the samples are on the hard drive, what plugins must be loaded as inserts or sends, how modulation is set, and how the patches are mapped to piano keys. This is an example of a choir’s syllable mapped to various velocities.Īll right – how all of this works together?
The picture below shows an example of a simple Kontakt test script.Īudio files for Kontakt instrument. The script has two functions: it’s used to build dedicated interface of the instrument, and it controls the instrument’s behavior.
I talked a bit about how Kontakt works in my “ How to Make Epic and Orchestral Music” course, part 3.
How does a sampler works? Any sampler is a computer program that allows us to load instruments from libraries and play these instruments to create music. Then I make some recommendations to people who want to learn how to make Kontakt instruments. In this article we’ll take a look at the basics of Kontakt and its instrument panel, the basics of scripting to get the idea, and I will also give you a link to some great tutorials about Kontakt scripting.īy the way, this isn’t a practical tutorial, but an overview – I explain how Kontakt generally works, and how Kontakt instruments are made. While I focus on Kontakt, all samplers work in similar way. But some people may be interested in this craft, so I decided to write an article on how Kontakt works. You don’t have to know how Kontakt sampler (or any other sampler) works in order to make your own music.