Creating a new instrument in Kontakt 4! Wish me luck.

[Doug Lauber]

This is all about my Alesis D4 drum module. It's dying. It has a particular kick drum sample that I use in most of my recordings. I often replace the actual kick drum of the player's drum kit, with this particular sample. It has a nice low tone that hits you at a gut level.

The problem is that the D4 is dying. Its LCD menu screen is becoming unreadable. Note parameters are mysteriously changing to unchosen samples, mono to stereo, added reverb, etc.

So, I need to salvage this particular kick sample that resides at the 'G1' note position.

My plan is to take a recorded snippet of this sample from one of my recordings, and paste it into a new Kontakt 'instrument'. I don't need any velocity switching, but it would be nice to be able to setup velocity switching in the future.

This creation of a Kontakt instrument, could be the first step into a serious task of setting-up an elaborate instrument in the future. I might have each key contain a different sample with a different  timbre. It would require a lot of time and energy, but it's something I'd like to try. It would be amazing to create a 'custom' instrument, maybe even an instrument based on complex guitar chords. For today, my goal is a new Kontakt instrument based on that EQ'd D4 low kick drum.

[Doug Lauber]

Yeah Chris- I think there are lots of ways to create a fantastic 'instrument' in a sampler like Kontakt. I'd be tempted to create an instrument that has all kinds of subtle permutations as you change note and velocity values. George- back in the day, I always wanted one of those expensive hardware Akai samplers, to do something like an orchestral score, a la Danny Elfman's Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The great thing about building an instrument from my own samples, is that the resulting instrument would be quite unique. Uniqueness in music is a plus....

[Doug Lauber]

Update: I browsed through some of the one-shot samples that came with Sonar. I created a new folder named, DougsSamples. There were actually some usable samples among them, so I pasted 23 samples into the folder. Next I dragged them all at once, into the key mapping window of my Kontakt 4 VST window. Voila! 23 keys for this new instrument, Kick DL1, are assigned to these new samples. Easier than I thought it would be.... :)
BTW, I'll be using two samples simultaneously for my kick drum- a 42hz tone, and also a high-mid beater click. I had tweaked both in Adobe Audition's wave editor.