I've messed about with the old Kontakt pianos that have a bad rep. Just using my basic shell and copying the samples (well the pointers to the encrypted samples) over and adding the pedal script seemed to improve the sound. It seems like the samples themselves are pretty nice, its just all the junk that was done to them in the standard Kontakt scripts they came with that screwed up the sound.
In messing with the old dimension pro samples, some of them actually sound pretty good in a Kontakt shell. If I'm reading the SFZ files right, many of the samples are never actually used. For instance the grand piano is only ever presented as every third or every fourth note sampled, yet in the samples directory every note is available in three velocities. Reworking it into Kontakt with AET and the piano pedals script makes a 3 velocity sample per note piano that sounds quite nice.
Some samples aren't great, like the softest layer of the saxophones, but still the top two layers make for a pretty nice sax. Again the SFZs never seem to use all the available samples in even the top two layers. Add in AET and WIPS and its quite passable in Kontakt.
Obviously these are only for personal use, but it is kind of fun to resurrect instruments I don't really use. Just wondering if anyone else does the same thing?
Rerolling old instruments
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- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 1367 posts since 30 Jul, 2013
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- KVRAF
- 25053 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
I'm interested in this. Do you mind elaborating?bigcat1969 wrote: its just all the junk that was done to them in the standard Kontakt scripts they came with that screwed up the sound.
I've used the pianos from way back in Kontakt 2, Steinway and August Foerster to be specific, a couple of times. My criticism of them is that they aren't deeply enough sampled, there are kinda gaps, there are tone gradations kind of missing, going from one velocity to the next one, difference = 1 is too pronounced in many spots.
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- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 1367 posts since 30 Jul, 2013
Its not perfect, but the auto AET velocity morph seems to help. It seems to smooth out the velocity layer jump some.
Also I tend to drop the velocity response down to 85% and set all the samples to volume 0. Then see which layers are a bit too loud and tone them down a touch. Usually it seems like a majority of layers are recorded at the same rough volume.
Also I tend to drop the velocity response down to 85% and set all the samples to volume 0. Then see which layers are a bit too loud and tone them down a touch. Usually it seems like a majority of layers are recorded at the same rough volume.
