Kontakt 3 User Experience: Adventures in mixing.
Well.. I’ve gotten rather into this sound project, and it seems to involve learning Kontakt 3 in at least some depth. So far the experience of this is mildly painful.. One thing Native Instruments sucks at is user experience.. making things simple.. thinking about the experience of trying to learn this stuff and making it “just work.” Excuse my Apple prejudices.
Examples of obvious problems: You have this manuel… printed, which is nice. In my instance I’m saying “I want to set things ups so that I have a convolution reverb that I can send all the instruments in my kontakt Instance into and automate. One would think this would be fairly straight ahead and obvious.. I mean how many production environments have I used before? But no.. this is stuff you gotta go to the manual for.
I wouldn’t mind if going to the manual was something you needed to do to get a complex piece of technology working… It’s that the manual is designed all wrong. What you want to do is figure out how to do one thing.. you go to that section of the manual and you realize that it’s description of how to do that one thing presumes you understand 5 other things.. and it doesn’t tell you where in the manual those 5 other things are located.
Eventually it seems to come down to trial and error… the manuel gives you some clues.. and you fiddle around and if you’re lucky you work it out.
The production I’m working with starts out, of course.. with a quarter tone tuned piano.. and what I want to do is create a string section that.. is more atmosphere then anything.. It’s something going on in the background. I don’t really want you’re attention to be called to it to much..
The way I’m working at the moment.. well I have a limited understanding of some of Native Instruments tools.. so this is all a learning exercise.. at any rate Kontakt 3 includes stuff from the VSL library. The VSL library is one of the top libraries you’d go to if you wanted to emulate real orchestral music on your computer.. Its the kinda stuff they use in Hollywood films if they can’t afford to hirer and orchestra.. and perhaps even if they can.. (so you can give the director / editors / whatever.. a kind of demo-ized version of your score prior to bringing in the orchestra.. and its a good way to work stuff out to, right?)
The VSL library you get with Kontakt, of course, is limited compared to the full VSL library.. but it’s still the best stuff I’ve got. So I start out by loading up a Violin Section. By default you can control.. would you call it the intensity or volume or? Well you can control it via you’re modulation wheel.. and it’s roughly the equivalent of “how hard the violin player is bowing the string.”So.. what I do is.. inside Digital Performer.. as I’m programing out the violin section.. I’m sorta making the violin swell a little bit.. It all ends up being somewhat complicated as I’m controlling key velocity, modulation, and pitch bend…. so far.
Tuning was, and still is, a big question mark for me. Ideally I might like to make the string section set out in quarter tone tuning.. but its not quite clear to me how to go about this, or what the implications might be. It might very well turn out that it’s a real workflow issue.
Lets explore the problem conceptually.. you have these things called “sample maps.” The sample map tell the sampler what samples to play depending on what note you play and how hard you play it.. So in our case all the notes of a violin are set up in that sample map. If you want to make that quarter tones.. do you have to do something along the lines of.. making it so that as you go up the keyboard… it only goes up a quarter tone per key.. and does that mean you have to radically change the sample map? If so, if you’re dealing with a complex sample map… that’s a task that could take a while to achieve.. and if it’s not really clear… all the details of how you do this.. you could very easily make a mess for your self.
Consequently I’ve decided to skip trying to deal with the tuning issue. A number of Native Instruments instruments are actually amazingly good on this front.. but its not clear to me how Kontakt works.. so screw it!
Now I’ve spoken a little about microtonalism.. and its implications.. in this blog.. as well as the implications for how I’m taking on this project. What I’ve decided to do is go with the usual tuning and just pitch bend stuff around. Trouble is.. for who knows what reason.. #1 Pitch bend is not enabled by default and #2 once I figured out how to make Pitch bending happen.. it wasn’t really clear to me how much pitch bending I was setting up..
Ok, let me explain. On you’re keyboard you might have a bitch wheel.. in your sampler you have a pitch wheel range.. You could make the pitch wheel range one semi tone.. which would mean if you move the pitch wheel on your keyboard all the way up while playing a note.. it will be the equivalent of playing the next note up on the keyboard. If you set the pitch bend wheel to an octave.. you’re going to get a pitch that is 12 keys up..
So.. the problem is.. it’s not clear what I’m setting the pitch bend range to.. so again.. I’m force to fly blind folded.. or lets say it’s as if the readouts in my cockpit are giving me information in a foreign system.. the equivalent to driving a car where you don’t get MPH, you get it in the metric system, while the speed limits signs on the highway are all based on MPH… and now you gotta try and do math in your head.. if you’re lucky enough to know the metric system and conversion rates.. but imagine you don’t even have that.. because you really don’t know what the hell is going on.. .
So the results:
The piano part.. I wasn’t sure if I was 100% happy with.. as far as I’ve written it. Some of it sounds a little flaky.. or.. I’m not sure exactly. However, there’s a lot to love in the piano part: It has the very emotional kind of feeling.. a kind of ambience to it.. it’s own sorta impressionistic quality.. Once the strings are added, the parts of the piano that sounded flaky to me.. well they no longer sound flaky. It’s as if, the flaky of it,now sounds as if it has something to do with it’s interaction with the strings.. so now the flaky has been transmuted into interesting. Yup, that’s how we like to roll… But.. the problem is that the strings are calling too much attention to them selves.. It seems that we are not quite getting enough control over them via simply programing there performance.. it’s sounding like what we need to do is control them via mixing.. which brings us back to the earlier issue of how do I automate aux send effects in Kontakt.
I haven’t worked this all out yet. I really want to avoid making it sound like what you are listening to is the result of a lot of mix engineering…. I don’t want it to sound like my music normally sounds like… At least not at this point in the production. I want it to sound like you’re listening to a group of instruments play..
To achieve these results.. my plan is as follows:
<editors note, I’m now writing from the perspective of a couple days latter in the production:>
When doing the mix engineer roll you’ll more or less start by creating a “virtual stage.” What this means is you define where various instruments are in space. How far an instrument seems to be from you is largely defined by the ratio of a dry signal, to that signals sound going through some sort of a reverb.. So to make an instrument sound more distant you both pull down it’s level and add to how much of that channel’s audio is going into the the reverb.
The problem was.. I could never figure out how to automate this in Kontakt.. I can set it easy enough, but automation is a bitch… and then there are the work flow issues related to how you go about this:
Kontakt is a pretty complicated program… You can set the pan position of an instrument in multiple places.. which is to say how much of it’s sound is going to the left versus right speaker:
You can set this on the level of sample maps so.. lets say you have a sample map with percussion sounds.. you might like to make it so that every percussive instrument has a slightly different pan position.. which will give your mix a little more interest.. you do that here.
I’m not totally clear on how this works but.. you can set up an instrument so that it’ll receive MIDI data that will set it’s pan position.. which is easy enough to set up.. you can set the pan position for the instrument in it’s editor.. and you can set in on the total instrument.. (I know these distinctions aren’t totally clear)
As if all this were not enough.. you can give all you’re instruments in Kontakt there own audio out.. and give them all there own mixer channel in you’re DAW (where you can again set pan positions).
So lets talk about some of the pros and cons of various approaches this presents us with:
I started going down this route with the idea that I wanted to use Kontakts internal audio engine to mix it’s instruments. The main reason for this is that Kontakt has a convolution reverb effect.. that’s more realistic then the reverb effects I have in Digital Performer. Of course the problem is that I was never able to figure out how to automate aux sends…
In this sorta set up.. what you want to do is set the pan position of the instrument prior to the aux send.. generally.. that way the sound of the instruments stereo position in the aux send will be the same as the dry signal. There’s reasons why you might not want to do it this way.. but doing it this way will help reinforce the spacial sense of your mix.
Doing it this way means you pretty much need to control the mix via MIDI. This creates a couple problems for you. The first problem is that MIDI only has 128 increments.. meaning you’ve just limited the resolution of your pan positions…. Kind of a minor issue.. and Kontakt even has ways of dealing with this.. but still an issue.. that becomes more serious for other sorts of parameters, like aux sends, that you might want to control.
The other issue with this approach is that you have to control it via midi channels in your DAW…. as a pose to by audio channels. The MIDI channels would probably be the same channels where you are programming the performance of the instrument in question… and the way DP’s editors work.. its not always easy / obvious.. what’s going on with all the parameters of a given channel..
The final problem is.. One of the things you want to do is make it so that all the instruments in the mix sound like they are in the same space.. you do this by putting at least a little bit of the same reverb on all the instruments.. so the convolution reverb you’re using inside of Kontakt is not something you can put on instruments out side of Kontakt… so.. you’ll at the very least have to put some reverb on the master out of Kontakt. The trouble is.. for various reasons, you really want a more fine grain control over how much of that reverb goes on what instruments.
What I eventually settled on was giving each Kontakt its own channel.. and mixing via audio channels in DP.. which gave me my better work flow..
It turns out that nearly every instrument in Kontakt.. and even on my piano, have the same convolution reverb effect on it… so they are all rather consistent.. Normally the problem with going this kind of a route is that convolution reverb is a processor hungry effect.. but seeing as I’m working on a Mac Pro with 8 cores.. this would seem to pose no problems at all.
A few Days Latter:
I actually like the resulting sound better… and there’s a couple of things worth talking about here: First of all, one thing you want to do in any mix, 99% of the time, is have some reverb effects that go on ALL the instruments.. to various degrees. This unify the mix, making it sound as if everything in your mix is more or less happening inside the same space. The second thing is that we are now working with a reverb that isn’t terribly realistic.. but it doesn’t really call attention to its self as “super unrealistic,” or at least it doesn’t when its stacked on top the individual instrument’s uber realistic convolution reverb.
This brings us into a complicated subject of the aesthetics of reverb.. It’s complicated because there is a history of reverb in music production that.. influences the aesthetic implications of a reverb. The reverb in DP is a reverb that is.. well lets call it “historic.” Basically the reverb effect..
I don’t know the dates of it.. but digital reverb has been with us for a long time now.. prior to which echo chambers where what you’d probably use.. and you would really have to go to greater lengths to get that sound.. And it was also a period where certain studios had an incredible amount of value because of there unique sound characteristics… the dawn of the digital reverb marked the start of a movement out of all that. Reverb is merely.. Well all materials reflect and absorb sound.. and they’ll reflect and absorb different frequencies differently. So… to model that realistically was not at all possible in early digital reverbs.. and I dare say the actual issues are a little more complex then what I’m pointing to now.
Digital reverbs have a more simplistic sound then do real acoustic spaces. In my philosophical point of view I think of this as Plato versus Buddhism: With Plato you have the ideal that gets degraded when it gets into earth.. in Buddhism everything is ideal, its just a question of your psychological attitude towards it. In a sense the simplified digital reverb I think of as plato’s ideal.. and convolution is more like a Buddhist ideal..
I’ll end this conversation more or less here.. without digging much more deeply into the matter.. and just going so far as to say that the simple digital reverb really does add something to the convolution reverb.. making the sound sound that much better.
In any event, I’d be interested in knowing you’re reaction to all this: Have you played with mixing? Have you played with Kontakt? What’s your experience been like? Hell, do you have your own solutions to my problems?