How do you make Kontakt play SHORT notes?

Chrisulrich

Dear Anyone.

I use notation for everything, I find it easier. I've got Kontakt 6, still trying to work it out so hopefully these two questions are easy for you guys. Here's the titular one!

I select a Project Pegasus instrument (but I've yet to find ANY library instrument without this problem to an extent!) If I play a long note, one longer - or as long as - the note's sample, fine. If I try playing a SHORT note, one SHORTER than the sample - nope. It can't do it. Every little note restarts the sample and the sounds build up and build up till you've got a Komplete(!) mess of echoing bits of sound. Yes I know I can shorten the amount of loop being played IN Kontakt - but then I can't play long sounds any more, because you're not using the whole sample you get a click like maracas at the end of the note. Every other VST I've got does short/long sounds perfectly - assuming the sound's designed for long and shortness, like a violin sound, say. How do you make Kontakt do it without having to have multiple instances of the same instrument hand-adjusted for different lengths? Also if you do a short note followed by a long note, it won't play the long note till it's hit the end of the sample the short note's told it to play, even if there's no actual sound coming ou.t Which means it can easily be playing notes in all the wrong places and you can't seem to do anything about it. That's the first one.

Here's the second, this one's a very annoying Kontakt-only (AGAIN!) nightmare. Combis. So I get a bunch of sounds and layer/mix them together into One Perfect Unified Combi Sound. Then I want to turn the sound up and down. Kontakt flat can't DO it (unless you can tell me otherwise!) Instead of applying the volume automation to the unified sound, it applies it to each of the instruments COMPRISING the unified sound, thus destroying the unification! Imagine you were playing a CD, turned it up - and each of the band's instruments was turned up by that much, not the entire track-as-a-whole. Turning up the individual instruments would kill the mix, turning up the whole track would just make it louder. I want to do the latter, Kontakt only wants to do the former!

Now the answer to the above would be to make Kontakt's sliders accept CC7 - but you can't DO that, they've not got MIDI Edit or MIDI Learn (as far as I can see, if I'm wrong, tell me!) I know turning up combis-as-a-whole IS possible for MIDI because it works perfectly with the Korg M1 Emulator, where ALL the presets are combis! If that can do it, why kan't Kontakt (or kan it?)

Over to you guys. Feel free to tell me I'm an idiot - but, when you do, PLEASE explain what I should be doing! Also - if any of you know of a GAIN control plug-in that accepts CC7 or has MIDI Learn/MIDI Teach (NOT Blue Cat, it's got a hewge bug, it only works on Channel 1`so you can't use it on anything multitimbral like Kontakt) THAT would solve all the problems - only I can't find one anywhere! (Am willing to buy one, just no idea what to purchase. If it's a purchasable one with a demo version, awesome, I'll test the demo and buy the plug-in if it works for me.)

Yours hopefully

Chris.

stephen24

Your first question I have answered with your previous post, if you take the trouble to have a look. The only other thing occurred to me, make sure you're not pressing the hold1 pedal (cc#64).

The answer to your 2nd question I suppose is that Kontakt is not a CD player, it's designed to create music, and real musicians playing real instruments in an ensemble don't all get louder and softer in perfect synchronisation. If you want your music to sound like someone twisting the volume knob of a CD player, there are various ways you could do it.

The simplest is to have all your sounds in Groups within a single Kontakt instrument. (In the Group Editor copy and paste all the groups from each instrument into one instrument - each group can have its own channel if you want.) Get the balance you want with the Volume knob in each group's Amplifier Module, and control overall volume with the slider in the instrument header.

Another way if you want to keep your instruments separate would be to modulate the volume of every group with the cc#of your choice in the Amplifier Module. Unlike automation, modulation reduces volume by a percentage, so will have the same relative effect in each case.

DunedinDragon

I guess I'm confused about the length of the note issue. When it comes to wind, brass or string instrument libraries you typically use keyswitches to change the articulation of the note being played such as legato, sustain, pizzicato, etc. This is because the notes are physically played differently and therefore sound different which is what you want, so it's not as much about the length of the MIDI note as having the correct articulation selected. They're all timing aligned to whatever your tempo is so there should never be a problem such as what you're describing. Does yours not work that way?