# Kontakt with Logic



## willie45 (Jul 3, 2020)

Hi all, 

I just managed to understand that I need to adjust the Kontakt instruments so that they all take input from port A and use channel 1 so that I can play them all in the same window. (Previously, I was getting frustrated by only being able to play one instrument at a time then the others were silent.)

Now I have a new issue. It's pretty basic so I'm hoping its a really quick fix. 

Anyway, if I open a new project in Logic, start a new track and add any Kontakt instrument eg a Violin it works fine. If I create another track and try to open another instrument, lets say a piano, in Kontakt with the intention of having it play separately in that track, what I actually get is the same Kontakt window with the violin from track 1 on it and also the piano which both play at the same time on track 1 but ( IIRC - I'm confused ) nothing in track 2.

I am not sure how to have two separate instrustment running; one for each track, independent of the other.

I wonder it it's my use of Kontakt or Logic. I'm messing up the settings in something, because honestly, this input/output/bus stuff makes my head hurt.

I'd appreciate any help available.


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## NoamL (Jul 3, 2020)

Hi Willie,

you'd have a much easier time *using Kontakt as a multi instrument*. This is kind of the standard workflow for doing what you are trying to achieve, and it is simple & powerful once you master it.

All the stuff with routing & bussing can be a headache initially, but once you "get it" it really unlocks some neat features.

So here's the basics of how to create a Kontakt multi instrument.

1. Click the *+* button at the top left to create a new instrument. Select Kontakt, then check the *Multi-Timbral *box and enter however many instruments you want. I've selected 3. You can also add or subtract later.






2. You will get three new tracks in Logic, notice that they say "Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3"








I will explain what these do in a moment, so hold on. The key thing is that all of these tracks are *sending MIDI towards the same Kontakt instrument*, in this case the not-named-yet "Inst 2."

Let's suppose you want to add or delete tracks with different channels.... For example if you only need two, you can delete the "Ch 3" one and the others will still work. Supposing you need FOUR tracks instead, you can add a "Ch 4" track by selecting the Ch3 track, going to the Track menu and selecting "New Track With Next Midi Channel." It'll automatically create an* Inst2 | Ch4 track *for the instrument you selected.







Troubleshooting - should anything go wrong, the actual data-bit that controls the MIDI Channel is here in the Track sidebar. *MIDI Channel: 1*, see? That means all outgoing MIDI will be sent to Channel 1. You can change this data to 2, 3 or any other number. This is how you can get "Ch 15" if you want without having to create and delete 14 other channels.








One thing you should keep in mind right now is, at least for the basics, you have a maximum of *16* channels to play with. You can't/shouldn't create more channels than that right now.

OK this is all fairly abstract so far, the question is what can you do with it.

Click on Kontakt to open it up. Let's load two instruments. To load the 2nd instrument you can just drag it from the menu or from your desktop files, into the black space beneath the first instrument.

Now you have two Kontakt *instruments* inside the same Kontakt window, or *Instance.*







Look at the *MIDI Ch* information under the name of each instrument. The Flute is using MIDI Ch [A]1, and the Clarinet is using [A]2.

In practice until you get to much more advanced workflows the letter is irrelevant. It should always be A.

The number is the MIDI Channel. Kontakt will automatically fill up A[1], [2], [3] etc as you load instruments into that instance. You can also click and change the number.

The magic here comes from the number. As you might guess, now you will be able to control the Flute with your track *Inst2|Ch1* (which you can rename "Flute" if you like with no ill effects) and the Clarinet can be controlled by the *Ch2* track. You can write different notes, different modwheel etc on the two tracks and they will both work. But you still only need to have *one Kontakt window open* to see both your instruments.

This workflow has some big advantages, and should solve the problem you are immediately facing. You can even do creative things like change the Flute & Clarinet *inside Kontakt* so they are both assigned to [A]1. Then, *inside Logic*, you will find that when you play the Ch1 track you are playing the Flute & Clarinet simultaneously!

One of the disadvantages that you might discover is that the Flute & Clarinet are mixed together before they are sent to your DAW. If you wanted to do something like EQ them separately, that can be achieved with a slightly more advanced workflow which I can show you if you're still curious. But master this workflow first to the point where it's clear & 2nd nature to you! 

Hope this is useful. -Noam


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## Traz (Jul 3, 2020)

Are you trying to output multiple instruments through one instance of Kontakt? If so, you'll need to open a multi-output instance of Kontakt(i.e. 16x stereo output, 8x stereo output).

Go to the mixer page and at the bottom of the track you'll see a little + and -, hit the + symbol for each instrument you want to add in Kontakt. (If you want to see the added multi out tracks in the main window you'll need to highlight the tracks in the mixer, right click, and choose to create tracks.)

When adding the instruments in Kontakt, make sure the channel for each one is in ascending order(i.e. Violin-channel 1, Piano-channel 2, xylophone-channel 3)


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## willie45 (Jul 4, 2020)

Thank you Noam and Traz for your help and for all the detail you put into your reply, Noam; it's like a tutorial and I really appreciate it. This is good information. I will give it a go today and see how I get on. 

I'm assuming Traz's suggestion about the + and - in the mixer page will overcome the mixer issue Noam referred to in his answer?

I'm finding the whole Kontakt thing quite a mindset leap and the output and aux stuff to be pretty confusing so this is really great.


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## NoamL (Jul 4, 2020)

Yes, that's a separate but related thing! 

What I showed you before is how to make a multi-*timbral* instrument (that is, one Kontakt instrument controls multiple sounds).

What Taz is talking about is creating a multi-*output* instrument, where sounds can flow out of Kontakt into multiple auxiliary tracks, each of which can be controlled separately (for example, you can EQ one output while leaving several others untouched).

These can be combined to make a multi-timbral, multi-output instrument which is how the pros work.

I still advise you to work with multi-timbral instruments a few times & wrap your brain around it before proceeding, but when you're ready, here's how to create a multi-timbral multi-out instrument.

First you want to open Kontakt, and navigate to the Output section.







Click the + button on the Outputs tab and make the menu look like this.








This will just set up Kontakt so that you're ready to do multi output instruments. You only need to do this step once - it's changing your Kontakt preferences basically. It's been so long I don't recall if Kontakt comes configured this way by default, so it's good to make sure you are set up correctly.

As you can see these preferences will make Kontakt create, by default, 16 outputs, each of which are stereo (2-channel). So channels 1+2 will be the first stereo output, 3+4 will be the second output, 5+6 will be the third, and so on.

Therefore, your Kontakt output page should now look like this:






Great, now we can close the Output tab, and not worry about Kontakt outputs again.

Now you can create a new Kontakt instrument. In addition to setting it up multi-*timbrally* with 3 or however many tracks, you can also click on the menu and select multiple outputs. 16x Stereo is the option you want. This tells Logic: Hey, we're gonna create a Kontakt instrument that will be sending US up to sixteen stereo audio streams. Normally Logic only expects ONE audio stream coming back from Kontakt, so we have to specify the Multi-Output x16 Stereo option!







In the mixer view (Command-2 to open), you will now see there's a +/-* sign *on the instrument track. Clicking + several times will open up *auxiliary tracks*. This only works if you had specified Multi-Output when you *created* the Kontakt instrument in the menu - you can't add these auxes to a Stereo version of Kontakt. So if you have Stereo instruments that you want to turn into multi-Output, you gotta remove Kontakt from the track and load up a new Multi-Output Kontakt.






Notice how at the top it says Kontakt 3-4, Kontakt 5-6, 7-8, etc? Those are your outputs. The track actually called "My Instrument" will carry stereo output 1 (that is channels 1+2), the track called Aux 1 will carry stereo output 2 (that is channels 3+4), Aux2 will carry stereo output 3 (channels 5+6) and so on.

You can click the *-* button to remove aux tracks you don't need.

Great, the last step now is when you load in instruments. Look at the Flute + Clarinet screenshot above. See how they both say *Output: St 1* ? That means they will both send audio to Stereo Output 1. If I change the flute to *Output: St 2* the audio will flow onto the aux track "Aux 1." And if I change the Clarinet to *Output: St 3* it will flow onto Aux 2. Now I can eq the flute BUT NOT the clarinet, simply by inserting an EQ onto the Aux 1 in the Mixer view. Likewise I can use the volume faders to give a different loudness to the two instruments if I want. Basically anything you can do to 2 separate instruments, you can now do by controlling Aux1 and Aux2.


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## willie45 (Jul 4, 2020)

Hah! Right, I get it. I have managed the Multi-timbral thing now and it's doing what I want. I will add the second part in due course. 

This has made quite a difference to my grasp so thank you very much once more.


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## David Han (Jan 23, 2021)

I know this is an old thread, but I'm on Logic for the first time ever and this thread helped me a lot! However, I was following the instructions here and I faced this problem.




Whenever I play the Ch1 track of Kontakt, it shows it's playing from all the tracks instead of one. Can anyone help me fix this?


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## Dewdman42 (Jan 23, 2021)

it shows that on the track header, but not on the mixer, right?

you are using LogicPro in multi-timbral mode. The track header of all those 4 tracks are all associated with the single multi-timbral instrument channel. They do not show the meters of the aux channels. Also the fader/mute/solo of those track headers only effect the primary instrument channel in the mixer...not the aux channels.... so what you see on the track headers will always be linked to the main instrument channel...not the aux channels. that is just a quirk of LogicPro and the way they have made multi-timbral functionality work. I tend to disable faders/mute/solo on the track headers just to avoid any confusion.

if you want something more, then you can route through the environment instead. Then each source track will be a pure midi track...and the meter will show values of the midi activity, rather then audio, the mute/solo will effect midi, not audio...but all the track headers will be completely separated.. 

In the environment create a multi instrument that cables to the instrument strip with Kontakt. Then reassign the tracks one at at a time to up to 16 midi channels of that multi-instrument. Then you'll see what I mean.


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## jcrosby (Jan 24, 2021)

willie45 said:


> Anyway, if I open a new project in Logic, start a new track and add any Kontakt instrument eg a Violin it works fine. If I create another track and try to open another instrument, lets say a piano, in Kontakt with the intention of having it play separately in that track, what I actually get is the same Kontakt window with the violin from track 1 on it and also the piano which both play at the same time on track 1 but ( IIRC - I'm confused ) nothing in track 2.


The main thing, as others have pointed out, is that you need to make a multi-timbral instrument.
But it also sounds like you were using one of the options shown below in the screenshot. All of them could result in very confusing results if you don't understand what each mean.

*New Track with Duplicate Settings *will create a duplicate of the current instrument you're using. It's an entire new instrument with all of the settings copied over to it. You might use this for example to process a copy of the same instrument differently. A bass guitar for example... You could have a DI sampled bass guitar and keep one track as the DI, and process the copy through an amp sim... (The MIDI Doesn't copy over, you either copy it manually or use MIDI aliases.)

*New Track with Next Instrument *This makes more sense when you're using a multi instrument. It creates a new midi track that sends midi to the current instrument, but the MIDI will be routed to the next channel. Confusingly if you have a multi instrument inserted the name changes to *New Track with Next MIDI Channel.* So for example lets say you create a _multi_ instrument with 8 channels but later realize you need more (E.G. a VEP instance you decide to add more patches to later...) Your multi would be assigned to channels 1-8 by default, this option lets you add MIDI tracks for channels 9-16.

*New Track with Same Instrument* This does just what it says... It creates new MIDI tracks that are all routed to the same instrument. Probably the most obvious use of this is using discrete MIDI channels on a single channel drum kit instrument... So for example you could create 1 MIDI track for the kick another for the snare, etc. This can actually be really useful. You could Bounce each track in place, (soloing and bouncing one midi track at a time), and you'd wind up with discrete audio files for kick, snare, etc, even though they all originated from a single channel instrument...


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## Kent (Feb 9, 2021)

I always hide the level meters and volume faders in the track headers anyways—props to anybody who can use those to mix accurately!


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