New KONTAKT instruments - KOMPLETE Tutorial

- [Narrator] Now, I'd like to take a closer look at some of the new contact instruments that have been included with KOMPLETE 11. Now, one of the cool things here is that KONTAKT is an incredibly powerful platform, as a sampler. It's a bit of a less experimental sampler, at least at face value, than some of the stuff we've looked at in REAKTOR, like form. KONTAKT is generally used to recreate actually real instruments, not necessarily acoustic, but it's a great way to bring instruments into your studio that either you can't play, or don't have, or don't have the means to record properly. So, let's just talk about loading some of these up, and let's talk about some of my favorites. First of all, the piano stuff is really cool. Everyone likes a nice piano. I'm loading up the Maverick here. (piano music) And sometimes, right when you're starting to load up an instrument, it takes a minute for everything to be loaded into memory. You can see this amount right here going up. So, if you play something right off the bat when you load it, sometimes it'll take just a moment for it to load up properly. But, once it does... (piano music) Some of these different instruments have some interesting parameters here. For example, we can change, like, the size and the distance of the hall that we are in. (piano music) And then, it works better if you actually turn on the space. (piano music) That's a nice, kind of, straightforward sound. There are some other types of pianos in here. There's the Grandeur, which is a little bit more of a classical sound to my ears. And I'm going to hit Yes on the really replace there. (piano music) And we can go through some of the different effects here. Again, we have space. The spaces tend to be really, really nice. (piano chord) You can add a lot of that concert hall there. (piano music) We can also change whether the lid is open, closed, or halfway. (piano music) Lots of interesting stuff there. Now, let's check out some of the SCARBEE stuff. Now, SCARBEE instruments tend to be really meticulously-modeled real instruments. So, we've got a few, different types of basses that we can check out. We're loading up the Rickenbacker here. Oh, and I actually, I forgot to close the Grandeur first. So, we're on the same MIDI channel that we want to use. And so, let me just load that up one more time. (bass music) It's a really good-sounding bass. And also, even though this is a Marshall amp back here, that's not really what we're concerned about. We can actually click on the amplifier, for example, and say, OK, well, maybe I'd like to try a different type of bass. (bass music) Just very subtle differences. We can also add some tape warmth. (bass music) Especially if we turn it on. (bass music) I love the way that reacts. You can really hear a lot. And then, there are some presets up here. So, you can say, OK, well, this is going straight in. We can say, we want to use a dub bass. (bass music) Very interesting, cool stuff. So, that's the SCARBEE bass. There are a lot of different SCARBEE sounds that we can work with. There's the Pre-Bass, there's the Pre-Bass Amped, the SCARBEE MM-Bass. Let's talk about some of the string sounds, like Session Strings Pro. This is a really cool string library, and I'm just going into the Motown section, which has a more warm vibe to it than the other one. (string music) Really interesting, cool stuff. And if we look at the key switching, we can actually say, oh, OK, well, you know what? I would like to have my normal articulation be a forte piano. (string music) Or how about a pizzicato? (string music) Very, very interesting stuff. Some of these are very, very high quality. There are a lot of samples in here. Let's take a look at some of the world instruments that we have in here. So, let me go to India, and let's go over to Percussion. And I'm just going to grab this guy, right here. You'll notice that sometimes we have all of these different colors. And with the different instruments, many of the different colors represent different things. (percussion music) But you can see that orange usually represents a loop. (percussion music) And it's actually triggering some of the sounds up higher on the keyboard. (percussion music) So, we have these individual sounds here, now. (percussion music) But these loops are really cool, and they can be very inspiring. They're a really nice way to start out a track sometimes. (percussion music) And we can always pull down the BPM if we want, using our daw, or using something else. There's a lot that we can do. Let's go ahead and check out also some of the stuff that's a little bit out of this world, like the Giant, OK? The Giant is not meant to sound like a specific instrument. The Giant is an instrument all its own. It's in a much different category. It's a piano, but it's meant to sound like an exceptionally large piano. (Giant piano music) And it's what's called a prepared piano, where you have, like, different hardware and things like that, that are in the strings, giving you, kind of, a really interesting, different sounds. (Giant piano music) So, this is the cinematic one. There's one that plays a little bit easier. Let's check out Kinetic. I find that to be very, very useful. So, if we just open this up. Kinetic Metal is, like, very metallic sounds. It's a really cool sample library, a very interesting-looking instrument. (Kinetic Metal music) And you can hear there's noise in the background, lots of little motion and things like that. You can cycle through these pretty easily. (Kinetic Metal music) And you can explore some of these different parameters that we have. (Kinetic Metal music) So, explore some of these different things. There are a lot of different instruments that come with the KONTAKT library here. We've got such a huge variety of sounds here. And just remember that KONTAKT, at least for the novice user, isn't really the place for customization so much. It's really a place where we can load things that are really pristine-sounding, very high-quality audio. And we can create things that are very realistic, and, kind of, emulate, maybe a string section, or a horn section, or a choir. But it's also a place where, sort of like REAKTOR, we have specialty sounds that come in, and it's a place where they can deploy these different sample libraries that'll only expand your sonic palette.