What's new

I've started making my first Kontakt Sample library! Any advice?

jononotbono

Luke Johnson
Feeling really excited. I've finally started making my first Kontakt Sample Library. Yesterday I had my first recording session and have many more booked. It's too early to share any specifics of what the library is going to be but I will say I am doing this with a good friend who has a great studio and live room and we can record there as much as we need to (when there aren't clients in there). I've already got a huge amount of pre planning done and the google sheets look scary with number of articulations, RRs, Dynamic Layers, One Shots, and much more.

Yesterday, as a first test for recording, I recorded an Octave of an instrument (with a specific articulation I chose for a test) and each note has 16 RRs (I'm adamant that details such as numbers of RRs need to be thorough), and 3 Dynamic Layers (3 to start with). More octaves will be added as I go but the workload doubles each time which is fine but I just need to find my feet first.

I'm a KSP noob and have bought David Healey's Xtant KSP Lesson 1 and 2 so I'm going to redo those (I did them over two years ago but life changed dramatically for me which stopped me going down this road). No doubt I will be frequenting this part of VI-C quite a lot from now on so I can definitely promise you I'm going to annoy with my questions! 😂

Anyone got any advice on making sample libraries? Any advice from experience that you learned from years of sampling? I'm very excited I'm embarking on this journey but also realise how little I know about actually sampling. Reading stuff isn't the same as actually doing stuff!

Anyway, I guess I'm just sharing my excitement as I literally don't have many friends that would find any joy in this endeavour. Let alone be able to share this with anyone whilst in a Covid lockdown. Mainly because they have real lives! 😂

Jono
 
I don't have any advice from a library developer standpoint, but as a customer I'll suggest taking a lot of care to edit all those RR's to ensure the timing is consistent. I just purchased a library from a first time developer and the timing was so off on some round robins that I ended up using another library, and it may make me hesitant to use it again in the future. Your probject sounds like a lot of work but very exciting! I'll be curious to see what you come out with. Good luck!
 
Don't just think about what you sample in terms of detail (dynamics, RRs), but also in terms of what will make life easier when you're in the programming phase, which means having a very clear idea of how you'll actually be building the patches from the start. Nothing worse than running into a problem with a patch that wouldn't exist if you'd planned the actual sampling a little better.
 
Feeling really excited. I've finally started making my first Kontakt Sample Library. Yesterday I had my first recording session and have many more booked. It's too early to share any specifics of what the library is going to be but I will say I am doing this with a good friend who has a great studio and live room and we can record there as much as we need to (when there aren't clients in there). I've already got a huge amount of pre planning done and the google sheets look scary with number of articulations, RRs, Dynamic Layers, One Shots, and much more.

Yesterday, as a first test for recording, I recorded an Octave of an instrument (with a specific articulation I chose for a test) and each note has 16 RRs (I'm adamant that details such as numbers of RRs need to be thorough), and 3 Dynamic Layers (3 to start with). More octaves will be added as I go but the workload doubles each time which is fine but I just need to find my feet first.

I'm a KSP noob and have bought David Healey's Xtant KSP Lesson 1 and 2 so I'm going to redo those (I did them over two years ago but life changed dramatically for me which stopped me going down this road). No doubt I will be frequenting this part of VI-C quite a lot from now on so I can definitely promise you I'm going to annoy with my questions! 😂

Anyone got any advice on making sample libraries? Any advice from experience that you learned from years of sampling? I'm very excited I'm embarking on this journey but also realise how little I know about actually sampling. Reading stuff isn't the same as actually doing stuff!

Anyway, I guess I'm just sharing my excitement as I literally don't have many friends that would find any joy in this endeavour. Let alone be able to share this with anyone whilst in a Covid lockdown. Mainly because they have real lives! 😂

Jono
Well... As someone who has been developing a library for 5 years now I can tell you it's a nightmare!!! Other than that I wish you the best of luck!
 
It's like any art form. Start small. Build lots of mini projects to test each idea before you incorporate it into a larger work.

As far as scripting is concerned don't stop at your first draft. It's like writing a book or a piece of music, you have to rewrite and refine it over and over to make it the best that it can be. Build on what you've done before, keep the good bits, rewrite the bad bits.
 
And why is it a nightmare? You just keep adding more and more and more and have no self control? 😂
Ha, ha, ha! Actually we did an extremely thorough and rigid plan. Then spent 4 years doing research which was very exciting, lot's of successes. But for the last year we've been building the prototype and realising that it's just insane!!! We're in the two digits on sample alone and my partner is going crazy with trying to script 4 types of legatos, infinite RR, 127 levels of portamento and over 40 different articulations and effects... We went a bit crazy with the design really... But it'll be the most complete and realistic instrument ever built!!!
 
Luke. Start with a preorder button on some website. I’ll bite - whatever’s the weird-ass Isle-of-Wight-y contraption you are recording at the moment.
I will say this. There are some very weird and wonderful locations on the Isle of Wight and we are planning a lot of on location stuff. The first planned expedition into the field is to a few haunted toilets to capture the perfect sound of the islands most popular dogging spaces.

Every good library has a good story. 😂
 
Ha, ha, ha! Actually we did an extremely thorough and rigid plan. Then spent 4 years doing research which was very exciting, lot's of successes. But for the last year we've been building the prototype and realising that it's just insane!!! We're in the two digits on sample alone and my partner is going crazy with trying to script 4 types of legatos, infinite RR, 127 levels of portamento and over 40 different articulations and effects... We went a bit crazy with the design really... But it'll be the most complete and realistic instrument ever built!!!
Ok, you've now really got my attention! 😂
 
I will say this. There are some very weird and wonderful locations on the Isle of Wight and we are planning a lot of on location stuff. The first planned expedition into the field is to a few haunted toilets to capture the perfect sound of the islands most popular dogging spaces.

Every good library has a good story. 😂
As long as this new new thing won’t hurt Jonoland The Game TM, I am all for it!
 
As long as this new new thing won’t hurt Jonoland The Game TM, I am all for it!
Nothing will hurt JonoWORLD. Except myself. The game is getting so advanced I think development time now has an estimated 38 years at this point. Gotta stop adding ideas. 😂
 
@Markrs Remember that livestream the other day? We should sample that weird audio loop of a thousand Lukes and sell it to 8dio as “The new Luke”
The funny thing is initially the polyrhythmic sound as great, but then it started getting chaotic as more and more voice layered on top. Great fun though!
 
Top Bottom