Make your own Kontakt instruments EASILY

I show you from scratch how I go about creating a fully functional Kontakt instrument.

How I build a Kontakt instrument

Making your own instruments is one of the best ways to give your music character that off-the-shelf libraries don’t have. Weird, unpolished sounds work especially well in trailers and TV spots. My workflow is deliberately simple: record, clean up, chop, then map in Kontakt with as little fiddling as possible.

Plan before you record. Work backwards from how the instrument will be played. Do you need velocity layers, or round robins so repeated notes don’t sound like a machine gun? A drum with a natural dynamic range might get two velocity layers with five round robins each. A pad might only need a handful of long notes. I close-mic everything to capture as much detail as I can.

Record a few seconds of silence first. Later, iZotope RX can learn that room noise as a fingerprint and remove it from every sample. After denoising I normalise each file, using the whole waveform so the levels stay consistent across layers. I record at 96k, but I bounce the samples down to 48k because the big files soon add up.

When I chop the samples, I leave the same small gap before every note, add tiny fades so nothing clicks, and name each file with its note, such as B2. That naming pays off in Kontakt.

To map them, drag the files into Kontakt and open the Mapping Editor. Select all zones and use Auto Map Setup to read the note from the file name and put each sample on a single key. Then use the batch tools to move the root key to the centre, and auto-spread the key ranges so the gaps are filled. I prefer pitching samples down rather than up, as it sounds nicer, so if I have time I record in tones or minor thirds. Finally, check each sample’s start point in the Wave Editor so they all trigger at the same moment. For round robins, set the group start options to cycle round robin.

For more on this, My Samples Are Out Of Tune! tackles a common problem with home-recorded samples, Ambient Cello is a free Kontakt instrument of my own cello recordings, and Writing A Piece Of Music In 25 MINUTES shows what a single sample in Kontakt can turn into.

Happy composing!Rich