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 3.The fun stuff.

This part of the tutorial focus on some of the more special features of Kontakt 2. Having said that there are much more than what's presented here.

Its very important that you spend time to explore what you have learned, trying to find sound that appeals to you.
Working wit sampling the way we are doing here is really all about spending time to explore what these techniques can do.

Playback engines.
Kontakt has several different ways of playing back a sample. So far we have used DFD, DirectFromDisc. That means Kontakt loads the start of the sound files that the instrument uses, in to the computers RAM (memory) and play the rest from the hard disc. The advantage is that it reduce the amount of RAM (computer memory) used. Some of the instrument in the libraries, like the Steinway D, uses a lot samples and requires loads of memory (500Mb). As most of our computers have 1024 Mb of RAM or less, its getting crowded and that means less simultaneous instruments. The DFD solves this by loading just the start of the sound and plays the rest from disk.

Beat Machine.
Beat machine is one of the other ways of playing back a sound file in Kontakt.. It works almost exactly as Hitpoints in Cubase, but maps the slices to keys on the MIDI keyboard.

Let`s try this with a drum loop (pretty boring, but it is easy understand how it works). You can download the sound file here (right click and choose Save target As).

• Open a new Cubase project.
• Create a new MIDI Track.
• Insert an Kontakt 2 VST instrument (F11).

Look and listen to the video below, it shows you:

• How to select the Drum Machine playback engine.
• How to slice a sample and edit slices.
• How to map slices to individual MIDI keys.

There are several annoying things with the Beat Machine/slices possibility.
-To me the most irritating is that you cant move the slice start point.
You have to delete the slice (using the delete button) and then add a new one (using the + button).

The MIDI file.
We created a MIDI file when we sliced the sound file, what can we do wit it?
The Video below shows you:

• How to import the MIDI file into Cubase.
• How to change tempo.
• How to rearrange the drum loop in an flexible way.

Time Machine.
The video below describes.

• How to loop a sample
• how to choose Time machine 2 (and what it does)
• What the legato option does.

Multi:s what's that? Using more than one instrument!
The video shows you:

• How to use more than one instrument.
• How to assign and change MIDI channels in Kontakt 2 and Cubase SX
• How to save a Multi.

Physical outputs.
-How to get more than one stereo output .
You can have a maximum of 32 outputs in Kontakt 2. Ther are two other Kontakt instruments, one with 8 outputs and the other with 16.

Next page please.