Using Kontakt 8

Add a new track to your project and position yourself on it.

Add an instance of the Kontakt 8 or Kontakt 8 Player plug-in to the selected track.

Press the Browser button on your Kontrol keyboard. Once you are in Browse mode, the Buttons and Knobs above and below the screen display change their functionality.

Buttons 1 and 2 move you between the previous or next instrument slots. You can ignore these buttons for now, as you do not have any instruments loaded at all.

Turning Knob 1 Allows you to select an instrument from a particular brand (manufacturer). For this exercise, please turn the knob until you hear “Native Instruments”, as you should definitely have some Native Instruments products available to you, if you have completed the Prerequisites to this guide. If you turn Knob 1 and hear “empty”, this means that the following steps will include instruments or effects from all brands that are present on your computer, so turn the knob clockwise until you hear “Native Instruments”.

Turning Knob 2 allows you to select a particular product from the brand that you selected with Knob 1. Please feel free to select any product by turning the knob. Again, if you hear “empty”, the following steps will apply to all products.

Turning Knob 3 allows you to select a bank of instruments from within the selected product, or choose “empty” to allow the following steps to choose from all available banks. Please note that not all products provide instruments organised into banks, so you may find no entries using this knob.

Turning Knob 4 allows you to select a sub-bank of instruments from within the selected product, or choose “empty” to allow the following steps to choose from all available sub-banks. Please note that not all products provide instruments organised into sub-banks, so you may find no entries using this knob.

Turning Knob 5 allows you to select an instrument type from the available types offered by your previous selections. Depending on your selected product, you might hear types such as “Piano”, “Organ”, and so on. Again, “empty” allows the following steps to choose from all available types. Not all products classify their sounds using types, so you may encounter entries using this knob.

Turning Knob 6 allows you to select an instrument Sub-type from the available Sub-types offered by your previous selections. For example, if you selected something like “Pianos” using Knob 5, you might hear sub-types such as “Grand Piano”, “Upright Piano”, “Electric Piano”, and so on. Again, “empty” allows the following steps to choose from all available sub-types. Not all products classify their sounds using types, so you may encounter entries using this knob.

Turning Knob 7 allows you to choose from any available sound “characters”, such as “Acoustic”. “Empty” allows you to select from all characters. Not all products will offer a range of characters to choose from and the names of the available characters is up to the plug-in’s developers.

Turning Knob 8 or the 4-D encoder allows you to choose a preset based on the selections you made with the other seven Knobs. You should hear your computer’s speech announce the name of the preset as you turn the knob or 4-D encoder and you should also hear a sample of the sound come from your main speakers or headphones. The PreHear function controls whether you hear these samples as you browse – you can turn the PreHear function on or off by pressing Shift+Button 8.

Press Button 8 or the 4-D encoder to load the currently-selected instrument preset into Kontakt’s first slot.

Play some notes on your keyboard and you should hear the selected instrument preset.

Repeat steps 5 through 13 if you do not like your chosen preset and wish to change it.

Once you are happy with the instrument that you loaded into slot 1, press Button 2 to move to the next instrument slot and repeat steps 5-13 to load a second instrument.

Press the DAW button on your Kontrol keyboard to return to DAW mode.