This tutorial is mainly for my students at The Norwegian Academy of Music but everyone is welcome. Its not a complete tutorial, its intended as a support for the students at the academy, but it can be used as a self study. If you have any comments or suggestions please e-mail me.
I prefer positive an constructive comments :-) after all I'm doing this for free (its not a part of my work at the academy to produce tutorials on the internet).

	Mats Claesson`s guide to Kontakt 2.
	Part 2. Filtering and modulation with velocity and LFO.

This is the time to do some experimenting!

You have to do your own location recordings.
At the lesson you will be presented how to do this using the Roland R1 portable recording box.
You have to record(at least) two sustain type of sounds and two short percussive sounds.

Edit your recordings.
When you have made your recordings using the Roland R1 unit you have to transfer what you have don to the computer. Thats don by plugging the grey USB cabel to the computer. It is then recognised as a Removable harddisc. Copy the feiles from the removable hardisk to your hardisc.

You can edit the sound file in Cubase.
Personally I do all of my editing in Wavelab, we had a quick look at WaveLab earlier. You CAN do the same editing in Cubase.

In Cubase
- Import your sound file to the Pool. Double click on it to open it in the Sample edit window.

-In the Sample editor mark the part of the sound file you want to use (there are probably a lot of "throw away" stuff).

-In the Audio menu choose Bounce Selection.
You will then create a new sound file (almost, its not a sound file of its on yet).

-The new sound file has the same name as the old on with a number added, (2 in our case).
Mark/highlight the new sound file (Ctrl A).

-In the audio menu Process, choose Normalize. This will make the sound file as loud as possible

-In the normalize window click Process

-Go back to the pool window. The icon in the red circle shows that the sound file has been edited but the edit is not yet saved.

-In the Audio menu choose Freeze edits. The edit is then going to be permanently saved. And the sound file will become a file that other programs can read.

-In this window choose New. Its first here that the sound file really becomes a new sound file that other programs can read.

The small icon has now disappeared (the icon that was inside the red spot). Give the sound file a new name (if you think its proper).

Filter basics, the short version.
With filter we mean a unit that change e a sounds timbre. There are a lot of different filters. The most common in a sampler or synthesizer is:

LP-Low Pass filter
Low frequency passes. And high frequency are decrease.
In Kontakt a Low Pass filer is illustrated like this:

and like this:

They are both Frequency Volume graphs, frequency is on the horizontal axis and Volume on the vertical. The illustration above illustrates a cutoff frequency, the frequency where the filter starts to work, of 1000hz. From the lowest frequency up to 1000Hz there are no chang,e above the energy decreases.

HP-High Pass Filter
High frequency passes, and low frequencies decreases.
It is illustrated like this:

and like this

Thecutoff frequency seams to be 1000Hz.

BP-Band passes.
A section of the frequency spectrum is changed.
Its illustrated like this:

and like this:

Look at the video below, it shows you how to use the cutoff frequency.

You can try this yourself, download the noise sound in the video above here Noise sound download. Right click and choose Save target As.

Now try the different filters on some of your own samples.
You should defiantly spend some time with this. You have at least two important considerations here.

• There may be sound that simply doesn't respond to respond to filtering. Those sounds don't have any energy in spectrum. Try an other filtering type.
• Playing your sounds in a low (much lower) register or a high (much higher) register.
  Transposing the sound will make a large timbral change. You should try a low register and a 4 pole LP filter for scary low frequency textures......:-)

Save.
And please.....when you find something of musical interest, save the instrument!!!!!!!

Velocity to Cutoff.
One of the most pleasing and instantly playable programming you can do to make your instrument more expressive, is to make the filter cutoff controlled (modulated) by velocity (how hard you hit the MIDI keys). You have to use a LP filter. The harder you hit the higher cutoff frequency

This is what happens wit almost every sound source in nature. Hit something soft and you get a soft sound without many high frequencies, hit it hard and you get a lot more high frequencies.

Look at the video below it describes how you do this in Kontakt.

Try this on your own recordings.

As a composer you may find yourself in the situation where you have to build a sampled instrument for live performance.
You should then seriously consider using the technique described above. A keyboard player or a pianist will instinctively understand what's happens and adjust his playing accordingly. Having this programmed ( velocity to filter cutoff) makes an instrument so much more playable.

Resonance and LFO.
The next video shows:

• How the resonance works.
• How you delete a modulation programming.
• How you use an LFO for modulating the Cutoff frequency.

Now you know it all!
What you need to do now is to put all this knowledge into a lot of trial and error work. There are not two sounds that respond equally to a filter programming.
So lets put some time into this!

The fun stuff, next page please!