Kontakt 6 in 20 minutes

hello my friends today we're looking at Native Instruments contact it's the most powerful sampler in the world and something which I bet a lot of you have got and don't completely understand what I'm gonna be explaining to you in the next 20 minutes is how it works how the interface works how you load instruments how you set up multiple instruments inside the same instance of contact both in logic and in Cubase how you set up multiple output so they all go out to separate places all that good stuff plus some special stuff about how to massively reduce the amount of memory it uses and stuff like that all that is coming up in the next 20 minutes so we better get going right let's get going so when you first open up a contact you'll see something like this on the right hand side is a big empty space where all your loaded instruments will go when you load them and down the left-hand side are all your authorized libraries now the way you acquire your libraries is like this and when you first buy a library you will get a serial number you click there you put the serial number in add serial number and it'll then come up in this list of not installed instruments and now as soon as you then click on something like that which is not installed it starts automatically downloading most libraries will download through native access some need to be downloaded separately like Spitfire stuff and Berlin I think I'm the orchestral tools because they're so big they have their own system for downloading but this is how most libraries are downloading you can see it's downloading there and as soon as it's downloaded it will crop up here in this list of licensed libraries this is the big difference between the full version and the and the contact player the free version of contact other than three hundred and fifty nine quid or whatever it is the free version will only playback licensed libraries that means these developers are paid a fee to Native Instruments to use their contact player and their native access authorization and download system if you have the full version of contact you've got the ability to edit much more and also you can load third-party libraries which don't go through the native access system when we'll look at that in a moment let's first of all just look very simply at how you load an instrument you look at this it's here's for example Spitfire symphonic strings underneath it sets instruments you click on that you find the instrument you want violins one and you double click and it loads it here on the right hand side you might choose a different instrument let's add another one in we will have something from Berlin brass will have that French horn will load that and up it pops on the right hand side as soon as it's loaded ok right let's just click on the files menu now and this just gives you a normal file browser if you want to load an instrument which is not a licensed condo contact player in instrument this is how you do it on this panel here you navigate to where the sample may live so if we go on this drive for example there's a here we go the red rooms traveler series we find Celtic fiddle we open the thing you navigate down until you find the instruments folder when you click on the instruments folder in this panel underneath up will come your instrument and then from there on you just double click or drag it off to the right and it will load and there low and behold it is so and after that it behaves in exactly the same way as a licensed library so that's all you have to do now let's have a look in detail at what's going on on the right here because there's a lot of important controls which you need to know across the top and let's just look at these first of all this is a new instrument if you're going to create your own instrument you can save this is these instruments off if you've made some if you've altered them in some way and you want to save the Edit or you if you like if you've loaded up half a dozen instruments and they're all aligned assigned to different MIDI channels and things like that you can save them off as a multi and if you save them off as a multi you get a number of options patch only which means just saving the details of what's in the that particular contact instrument patch plus all the samples so it's quite big save or a thing called a monolith which is where you just get a single file which has all the samples and contact patch and everything in them and just back to this top bar again this is settings you probably won't need to get into that this is an important one if you click on this it allows you to open and close a whole load of different windows within contact so there's the master which is gives you master tuning master volume and master tempo should you say widget I don't normally have that one turned on there's the keyboard which i think is quite the keyboard which is useful because it shows you both the range of the instruments and it also shows you where relevant where you see here you get some different colored ones it shows you where the key switches are so it shows you how the whole instruments laid out it so it's really useful and outputs and we'll come on and look at outputs in a bit because it's it's the bit which a lot of people find a more confusing and so that's that's the layout of the the overall thing let's look in detail at actually how a single instrument is laid out this top half of the instrument is always the same and the bottom half the bit I'm flashing on off there is the user interface designed by the sample developer so you see the orchestral tool one is completely different to the two this the Spitfire one now having a look however at the top bit this is important this says this is the MIDI channel which this particular instrument responds to okay so for example I have a choice of one to sixteen in the in the plug-in version of contact you don't have access to port B C and D so you're just using these sixteen channels so you can load up to sixteen instruments into one instance of the plug-in version of content this is the output I'll come on and talk about that in a bit this is important this tells you how much memory this particular instrument is using so it's three hundred and thirty nine thirty three hundred ninety three megabytes and there's another memory thing up here which shows you how much all instruments in this particular instance of contact are using which is just over a gigabyte then you have the purge button which we'll talk about in a minute solo mute pan left and right volume and this volume knob here responds to CC 7 look look mom no hands so as I slide up as I move a fader which is adjusted CC 7 it will change the volume at this might differ depending on your door the view I might meters there it's useful because you can then see which instrument is playing back this is the two knob obviously it goes up in increments of a semitone unless you hold down the shift button at which point you can then do fine-tuning of that particular instrument everything else downstream of that is provided by the developer and so it's not going to be the same on each one so those are the main things you need to know if if you load so you can use you can use contact in a couple of different ways you can choose to have one instrument per instance of contact and just have lots and lots of instances of contact then you get end up with a really big template also that can use a lot more memory and I'll show you why for its suppose you've got an instrument like this and you don't want to load individual articulation but you want this just to be string Long's so you want to use say the Long's they're the the saw dinos there if you wanted another instance coming up on a different MIDI channel you might load in violins one again and then just use the shorts now if you load two inch the same two instances even with all these different articulations in into the same instance of contact it only uses one lot of memory so it doesn't use too lots of 393 megabytes if you look up here you can just about see it only uses one lot so it's a more memory efficient way of organizing your samples if you're going to be using this if it more than one instrument draws on the same sample port okay I also find it easier just to have a multi width for example shorts peccato staccato all the shorts in one instance a lot of the time you want them just coming out of one output and I'll talk about multi outputs in a minute and let's just look at how you might let's if we load in a Fiat for example couple more instruments will put violas in will put the celli in and some bases in okay now if you want to make that more compact so you can see it you just click this little button up here and they all go small now what it does by default is it'll go channel 1 channel 2 channel 3 so it'll put it'll incrementally so that's channels 1 to 5 how do you access that that depends slightly on your door include base the way you do it is if you select this and then go add track it will automatically assign the midi channels to that instrument so we're going to call this k6 and we're going to add 6 instruments and now if you look at the vu meters as i played this one violin one that's violin 2 of the pits beds of euros there's the celli ok so that's that's pretty much how it works um in logic it works slightly differently and i'll show you that now here in good old logic you will see as you go to open it you have a different choice to the people in Cubase in Cubase you just get one version of context 6 in logic you get a choice of all these different output configurations if you're going to be using multiple outputs then it's well worth choosing the 16 output stereo a 16 output version because that will do you very well again you open it in exactly the same way but when you come to allocate outputs that and multiple different types different instruments this does work differently so ok let's load up the same instruments again finally in one file in to viola cellos and basses ok now again they're all exactly as in the cuba version they're allocated to separate MIDI channels now what you do with this however if you go back into logic open up the mixer okay you see this little button here that's where you add aux channels and orcses is probably the best way of doing this there's in logic there a whole load of different ways of doing it but Orcs is for medium and small templates is probably the best once you've added the orcses select them all ctrl click create track and now the orcses come up as as tracks here so if we go back to contact at the top there our instrument open it up let's see what happens so we play one the instrument itself there's violin one go to aux one which we're going to is violin too awks two which is viola aux 3 cello and aux 4 which is bass okay okay let's now get get to grips with a thing which baffles quite a lot of people which is how you deal with the multi outputs and the best way it's so first of all we need our output paint open so we click on that and open the output pane and you see it opens up down the bottom here so you'll get a few default outputs and things like that the way to do the easiest way of assigning each of these instruments to a separate output is you click on this presets and batch configuration and up will come a whole load really useful options one of these batch functions says you go clear output selection and create one individual channel for each load instrument if that's what you want you click on that beam a look violin violin one viola cello all coming on separate outputs now how do you get them to come up in contact I mean how do you come in your door that is specific to each person's door in Cubase the way you do it is this you go to the instrument do you say this little activate outputs here you click on that and then you as you add these as you click on these these will come up in your mixer so if we just move that out of the way for a second and open up the mix of it at the bottom you see suddenly you've got the individual outputs coming up down there so you see look there's Pitt's coming out on that one there's the viola coming out on that one there's the cello coming out on that one so that's probably the easiest way of assigning separate outputs if you don't want to do that say you just want to channels so we click on this little button a plus button here let's have eight I don't know and delete existing yes and okay and there they are so it's created out eight separate outputs now if you want to manually set them you go into the instrument and there it's you can set them to here we go stereo one so you might want both of you might want one two stereo one and for example shorts two stereo two and so just for the sake of argument warm those to go to stare one we want these to go to state so you can assign the outputs like like that and they will come out of the correct output and if you want to label the outputs you just double-click on them and go hello whatever and the default output setting you can set up eight outputs like this call them whatever you like and then you can save them as a preset that's quite a cool thing to do if you need to and you can save it as a default which means that every time you open a new instance of contact all your outputs labeled one to wait order will come up so that's how you do multi outputs in Cubase this is how you do it in logic now if you want them to address separate outputs go here batch functions clearing a clear output and create one individual channel for each instrument loaded and then up then all come you're going to here and you make sure that each one is allocated to a separate output and then once again as you go through this this time we'll get the mixer up actually [Music] they're all coming up under separate separate aux channels and then you can route the chip then you can route them as you want wherever you like okay so it's different it works slightly differently you also have you have fewer outputs on the Audio Units version to the VST version so Cubase and the the plug-in which works on Cubase and the plug-in which works in logic do functions slightly differently so we've done how you set up multi outputs multi instruments in Cubase and logic a couple of really important things and so this whole setup here is using currently 1.3 5 gigs of ram now do you see this purge button here if you're running these samples off an SSD which is the best way of doing it and the SSD is fast enough that it doesn't actually have to load any of the sample at all into the memory of your computer so what you can do is you can what's called purge the all samples so if we click that suddenly you see the memory there has gone down to 0 as soon as you play that instrument I'll just go back it loads it so fast you can't hear it [Music] so it's only using ten megabytes of RAM if you want to purge all the samples of all here we go if you want to purge all the samples in all the instruments you've got loaded you go to the menu button there and you go where is it where is it global purge purge all samples Jim and look I'm not sure if you can see that but there it you've now down to zero memory now not all samples playback properly when you purge them and some Lagarto samples can be a bit difficult but the vast majority of them do so if you're working with a limited amount of RAM but you've got a fast SSD this is a tremendous way of saving an enormous amount of memory so if you're for example working on a macbook where memory is extremely expensive by yourself you know a one terabyte SSD plug it into the side of your put your samples on that and it effectively acts like extra memory so you can purge the samples all the time and run a much bigger template with hardly any memory being used so it's a really cool way of doing it and the other good thing to do if you want to get your samples loading fast is a thing called battery saving it does take a while but you go here you choose your library and it comes up with lots of this warnings and you should take these seriously because what it does is it so Reese Aves all the library just so it's complete it's all optimized and it'll just load really really really quickly you make sure make make sure you're not battery saving your only copy of the library if at all possible you can always redownload it later but if anything goes wrong it can screw it up but it shouldn't do and it and it does massively speed up the load time so here we go we go you have to navigate through your drive to find where you put the library so for example if we go into Berlin brass and we choose ok and now it goes through Reese aving all the patches now you can see this if you've got a big loads of loads of libraries this is going to take a while but once you've battery saved it just goes rush like a speeding bullet back into your computer so it is definitely something worth doing so I think that's pretty much all there is to be said for it for this for the time being and the full version of contact is well worth it if you're doing this seriously because although you're paying almost 400 quid for it you get access to the instruments which come with it from contact and not bad and some of them are very very useful some of them are really good it also gives you access to an enormous number of free and low-cost libraries so it's more like buying access to that rather than paying for the software if you know to me anyway I hope you found that useful and that you'll be able to navigate your way through contact with a bit more confidence in future if you've enjoyed this and found this useful then please obviously do the business and subscribe to the channel and we'll bring you more useful interesting and thrilling stuff in at the very near future so that's all from me for today and see you again very soon you

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 504,912

Keywords: guy michelmore, thinkspace education, Cubase, logic pro x, Cubase 10.5, kontakt 6, kontakt 6 tutorial, kontakt tutorial, native instruments, how to write music, cubase 10, music production school, cubase pro, cubase pro 10.5, best music software, cubase 10.5 tutorial, cubase 10 pro, sample library review, komplete 12, free kontakt library, music production tips, native instruments kontakt, sample library, komplete 12 ultimate, kontakt, best kontakt libraries, kontakt 5

Id: AdxX51_bflg

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020