[Shell review] 5 free Kontakt foley tools

Hi gang!

It's Thursday evening, I was relaxing behind my home studio (kinda out of inspiration (and motivation)) when I ended up on the N.I. main website where I noticed something interesting on the front page:



It turned out that this was a link to an article on the Native Instruments blog which briefly describes 5 free Kontakt foley tools. What's a Foley you ask? I wondered about the same thing, but that is explained in the article itself: "Foley – that is, sound effects added to film and television in post production – is a lot more common than some might think.". Seems obvious enough.

So then I became a bit skeptical. Why? Because more than often "free" on the Internet is not really free at all, there's a catch. For example a company provides free samples to download, of course you'll "only" need to register with their website first; get ready to provide them with your place of residence, phone number, e-mail address and so on. That's not free! Heck, even if a site "only" wants to have your e-mail address before you're allowed to download something then that is plain out not free either. I wonder how Native Instruments does this...

Yah, much to my surprise 'free' actually meant free (hey, I'm just being honest, ok?). In other words: you can click on the download link(s) and you'll get the freebies instantly, no registration required! Now that's a freebie!

So what is this all about?

Foley tools, duh!

Nah, you can download the following stuff:

• Empty playground
• Clashing rails
• Mr. Pot
• Garage foley
• Footsteps

And honestly? This stuff is pretty convincing. However... for a Kontakt newbie like myself it turned out to be a little tricky before I couldmake the whole thing work. But I succeeded so I figured I'd share Heck, I even discovered that Maschine might even be a better Kontakt than Kontakt is! Sounds bizarre? Then my cliffhanger worked, so see ya next week!

(gotcha! )

Installing (the long version)

Now, bear in mind that I'm still kind of a Kontakt newbie. That is.. with the full Kontakt, I've been using the player since 2011 or something, but only last year did I get into contact with the real deal. I know some of my basics like the ability to edit instruments; call up the wave table editor and I'm even getting somewhat familiar with the group editor. But I don't use these options very much.

Alas... these instruments are provided as archives which you need to place in a folder yourself. There are RAR files and ZIP files.

Because I seriously dislike clutter I decided to create a new folder (d:\Ableton\Kontakt data) in which I extracted all archives (where each instrument resides in its own sub-folder). I then added this folder to the Kontakt database which is an option found in the Kontakt settings:



and then hit Update. AND.... nothing. No new instrument showed up in my library. Not to worry! As you can see almost every instrument in this library has its own unique entry, even though everything resides under "D:\Ableton\Komplete data". So I added a single instrument. Nope, no workie either.

So then I fired up Explorer (the Windows file manager) and took a closer look. Then I noticed the obvious: these 3rd party instruments didn't use the same format as the instruments (and/or libraries) which were shown in my main Kontakt browser. That explained a thing or two.. so I guess we'll need to use the 'Files' tab. And what do you know:



That was easy enough And there's even a cool trick here as well! If you click on the 'View' submenu (shown in the Files section toolbar) then you can use 'quick jumps' to make it easier to navigate to those places. Better yet, you can even lock your current view so that nothing gets accidentally changed:



Now that's convenient! So by locking the current quickjump I'm making sure that if I close Kontakt while I navigated to the Mr. Pot subfolder (as shown above) then Kontakt will always reset itself back to the main folder. So next time I fire up Kontakt and hop over to quickjump 1 I'll start once again in my main 'Kontakt data' folder.

Summing up the installation process

Do note that this is merely my preferred way of doing this, your ideal way may differ. Even so....

1. Make a folder in which you want to store your 3rd party instruments.
2. Extract all downloaded archives here but make sure all instruments have their own sub-folder.
3. Start Kontakt (either standalone or as VST) and open the 'Files' tab.
4. Navigate to the folder you just created.
5. Open up the 'View' menu and lock the current quickjump (as shown above).

You can then load an instrument by simply selecting the subfolder and then dragging the NKI file onto the main Kontakt window (or just double click it I suppose).

So what about the instruments?

Very, very, convincing material.



So here we have Kfootsteps (kind of hard to miss I guess? ) and it does a pretty good job. You can select 6 location types (2 indoor and 4 outdoor) and a specific selection of shoes depending on the location. For example, when using carpet (indoors) you can use sandals while you can choose between trainers, work boots, moccasins and pumps when you selected asphalt (outdoors). So the interface looks pretty professional to me. And the sounds? Very good as well, there's a lot of variation to be found here which makes it very easy to come up with whatever effect you want. Walking, running or jumping? Easily doable. There are even sound variants like harder stamping, pulling on the strings (at least that's what I think) and so on... very complete.

And this same thing applies to pretty much all the instruments here. Garage Foley... you get a ton of sounds which you might hear in a garage. Sorta.. most of these are percussion based, I was hoping it might include the sound of wheels getting attached but.. no Still, its a nice collection.

Anyway, I'm not going to go over each individual instrument here but one final thing...

Ever wanted to bash your pots and pans in the kitchen? You probably shouldn't do that otherwise you might risk upsetting your significant other or, worse, end up with a bunch of broken pots and pans. Fortunately we no longer have to worry because now we have:



Mr. Pot!

I can't help but grin when I see this one because it somewhat reminds me of a scene from 'Spaceballs': "Do you call this a radar? No sir, we call it: "Mr. Coffee!", care for some?".

It should be obvious what this is all about: banging on pots and pans. It's nothing super sophisticated but it's fun!

And what about Maschine?

Oh right, I almost forgot!

So when my first attempts of getting these instruments added to my Kontakt library failed I wondered how I was ever going to use these with my Maschine controller, also considering that I frequently use Maschine to play my "Komplete collection"; it's so darn easy to use! And then I discovered something cool:



Maschine did do what I was expecting Kontakt to do: it picked up on the folder I created, recursively went through it (meaning: it checked all the subfolders as well) and then it added all the new instruments to its own library, see above for proof of this.

Unfortunately it's not perfect because these instruments don't (fully?) support the NKS standard, ergo you can't really control much when sitting behind the Maschine controller. But playing these instruments is no problem at all. But then again one should not expect too much from a freebie I think.

In conclusion

If you haven't already you should consider checking it out yourselves. No download registration caveats, no installers which could install nasty stuff on your computer but still some very convincing sampled instruments & effects. Fully free for your to pick up & use.

Thanks for reading!

 

You can use the automation tab in Kontakt to map Host Automation parameters to the controls in the instruments/effects (depending on the type of control will determine if it can be automated) and assign MIDI CC values as well for standalone operation...

If you map the host parameters, when using Kontakt inside Maschine, in plugin mode, those parameters will will be mapped to encoders in the order you assigned them in Kontakt just like any other plugin...you just have to do some work.


Peace,

Blindeddie