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How to do wavetables in Kontakt ?

Fredeke

Senior Member
Hello.

I was wondering if there is a way of building a wavetable synth in KSP ?

I see two ways of doing it, the first being maybe impossible, and the second one being impractical I guess :

1. Store the wavetable as a continuous wav and move around the looping points within it.
That begs the question: can you move looping points around in KSP ?

2. Have one single-cycle sample for every wavetable step, trigger them all simultaneously, and then fade or switch in and out of each in sequence. Triggering all samples simultaneously seems necessary to keep them in phase, but that would increase the voice count a lot.

Does anyone know the proper way to do this, if there is one ?
Do you know of a Kontakt instrument that already does this ?
And final question: would you recommend a more suited environment than Kontakt for doing this ?

EDIT: ok I just found out Kontakt 6 has a wavetable engine. Well, then I guess my question is less relevant, and only concerns Kontakt 5.
 
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If you're curious on how to do the scripting portion in Kontakt 6, I made a tutorial and video and free download for it here: https://www.generastudios.com/blog/kontakt-6-ksp-wavetable-control-ui_wavetable

I'm not exactly sure how to do it in Kontakt 5, but there is one library that has something similar to wavetable functionality (its not really a wavetable, but it functions in ways that are similar to a wavetable). Flutter Dust by Sound Dust - its an incredible sample library.

You could probably figure out what they're doing just by playing around or watching videos of it. It seems like they just loaded long samples in and then you get to control the start position and loop length, along with some 'flutter' of the playing position.

Another approach to get the sound of a wavetable might be to put samples of raw waves of varying wavetable steps, and then script a knob to fade between them. Again its not really a wavetable but if done right with enough steps it might seem like one to a listener. This sounds like it would be very tedious and not worth the effort in most cases.
 
If you're curious on how to do the scripting portion in Kontakt 6, I made a tutorial and video and free download for it here: https://www.generastudios.com/blog/kontakt-6-ksp-wavetable-control-ui_wavetable

I'm not exactly sure how to do it in Kontakt 5, but there is one library that has something similar to wavetable functionality (its not really a wavetable, but it functions in ways that are similar to a wavetable). Flutter Dust by Sound Dust - its an incredible sample library.

You could probably figure out what they're doing just by playing around or watching videos of it. It seems like they just loaded long samples in and then you get to control the start position and loop length, along with some 'flutter' of the playing position.

Thanks ! I'll check those out.

Another approach to get the sound of a wavetable might be to put samples of raw waves of varying wavetable steps, and then script a knob to fade between them. Again its not really a wavetable but if done right with enough steps it might seem like one to a listener. This sounds like it would be very tedious and not worth the effort in most cases.

I considered it but, two problems: if i am to fade between them, they must be perfectly in phase. To achieve this, they would have to be started all at the same time (assuming even that works) which i'm afraid would explode the voice count.
 
Just a note about releasing K6 instruments... For one of my recent libraries I accidentally made ~100 of my snapshot presets using Kontakt 6, so even though it was a K5 instrument I decided to release them as a bonus for K6 owners. Nobody threw a fit about it, but one person contacted me directly and urged me not to rush into releasing any libraries for K6 because they and many people they know haven't upgraded.

Originally I had wanted to start releasing K6 libraries very quickly, but I have a feeling the market hasn't really caught up like all of us hardcore users. So if you plan to release for K6 you should probably expect it to do more poorly than K5 libraries. Not sure if there are any references for what percentage of people have upgraded, I always upgrade right when NI releases something, but myself and the people on this forum probably represent the most hardcore users haha.
 
That's a very small pool of 200 users. There are thousands more out there in the wild (6 digit number of Kontakt users at the very least)...
 
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