Using the Group, Wave, and Mapping editors - Kontakt Tutorial

- We're gonna get into some deeper instrument editing now. To demonstrate this more effectively, I'm gonna load a simple drum loop and show you how it works. Let's audition this and see what it sounds like. (drum beat music) All right, so let's drag this over. All right, now I can play this with my keyboard. (upbeat music) Okay, so let's edit this instrument. Here in the edit view, you'll notice a bunch of windows and controls come up, don't be intimidated. I know it looks complex but I'm gonna help you break it down so that you can understand it a little better. Right here, a few buttons that are across the top of the group editor: it's instrument options, group editor, mapping editor, wave editor and script editor. The only two buttons that we're gonna dive into are the mapping editor and the wave editor. First, I like to draw your attention to the brown pane below, this is the group editor. Right now we only have one sample loaded into one zone in one group. We can control parameters in the group editor like tuning, volume and pan. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) You can also reverse the direction of the sample. (fading in and out upbeat music) This button here is keyboard tracking. When it's on, Kontakt will play the same sample at different speeds or pitches up and down the keyboard. When it's off, it will play the same speed or pitch no matter what key you hit. Right now I've got it on. (upbeat music) When I turn it off, I hit different keys. (upbeat music) This button here is to invert the phase. And this button swaps the left and right channels. You may not notice the effect of either of these two because the sample's a mono sample. These boxes here are insert effect slots. We're gonna get into that in a later video so don't worry about it for now. Now again, because keyboard tracking is on, the same loop plays but faster as I hit notes that are higher up on my MIDI controller. That's also because right now this sample is mapped across the entire keyboard. Let's get into the mapping editor so I can show you. Right now you can see that the drum loop that we loaded is mapped from C1 to C8. That's shown here in yellow. By default when you load a sample into a blank instrument, the root note defaults to C3. I'm gonna play a C3 on my keyboard and you'll hear the sample play its original speed and pitch. (upbeat music) Okay, so what if we wanted to have the sample only trigger on one key? Well we can adjust the mapping of it by dragging the edges of the zone here. Let's set it to only trigger on C3. Let's also zoom in for a closer look by pressing this plus button. Okay, so now my sample will only play on C3. If I play a D, you won't hear anything. If I play a B, you won't hear anything. The next thing I'm gonna show you is how to edit the trigger velocity. Now, watch closely here as I hit C3 at different velocities. You'll see a small red line pop up at whatever velocity contact receives from my controller. If I hit it quietly, (softer upbeat music) you see the red line at the bottom. If I hit it harder, you'll see one closer at the top. (upbeat music) I'm gonna set the zone to only trigger if it gets velocity data past 50 or so. Now if I hit it quietly it won't trigger. If I hit it louder, it will. You might be asking yourself why this is useful. Well, imagine a real piano for a second. When you hit a note softly, the timber is different than when you play the same note harder. You wouldn't wanna use just want piano note on a single key in contact because it would sound unnatural. You'd essentially be using the same sample but played at different volumes as dictated by the MIDI velocity. Ideally, you'd take a group of samples of the same piano note that were all recorded at different velocities and then you create velocity zones for each one of them so that the softer notes triggered at lower velocities and the louder notes triggered at higher ones. That kind of editing is a little beyond the scope of this course but now you have an idea of why this might be useful. Let's just reset the velocity range back to default. Okay, so what if we wanted to cut this drum loop up a bit and have the kick on one key and the clap on another. We can do that by copying the zone and pasting it to a new key. So we'll right click, copy zone and we'll paste. Now what we'll do is we'll click off of it and we'll just drag this to the right. This is a great opportunity for me to show you how the wave editor works. Let's click on the first zone and open up the wave editor. You'll see that this new window appears below. Let's adjust the sample end times that it only plays the kick drum. (drum beat music) Okay, now we'll click the second zone and adjust the start and end times that we only hear the clap. (drum beat music) You can zoom in for higher accuracy by using this button down here. (drum beat music) What if we wanted to change some of the properties of each zone? For example, what if I wanted to tune my clap up a bit? Well, the first thing you do is right-click the second zone and then go to move zone to new empty group. Now, it has its own property separate from the first zone. If you didn't do this by the way, any group changes you made to one zone would also apply to the other. Next, we're gonna press this edit all groups button so that we turn it off. This lets you edit each zone separately and let's tune our clap up. (quicker drum beat music) Go up here, to tune. (quicker drum beat music) Now the kick is at its original pitch and the clap is tuned up 3.74. You can also change other parameters like volume or pan. (fading in and out drum beat music) You can even reverse the clap by itself. Shut wave editor down here, clicked on that. (fading in and out drum beat music) There we go. The kick will play forward and the clap will play in reverse now. Lastly, I wanna show you how you can add a completely new sample to a zone. Let's go to our file tab and browse for some samples. (upbeat music) Let's use that one. We'll drag it over here into the mapping editor. This will create a completely new group for the sample so that you can edit its parameter separately from the other zones. Now, we can adjust the key it plays on by dragging the ends and are out. We'll just put it on the next note the D. (upbeat music) Great, you can do this up and down the entire keyboard with different samples and create your own instrument now. Those are the fundamentals of mapping zones and editing samples. I hope this helps you understand these concepts better.