Kontakt II piano adventures part I

[PhilAiken]

I've been mired in experimentation. There are many, many more variables to play with than with Kompakt. Maybe we should have a Kontakt II/Receptor tricks and tips thread.

For starters, DFD works MUCH better than Kompakt. Still not foolproof, and I still wouldn't trust it in a live performance - but you can get away with alot more in the studio, where if worse comes to worse, you can fix any glitches.

I have not yet messed too much with the DFD settings.

The key thing is the amount of customization and editing you can do. I'll use Post's Old Lady (16 bit version) as an example, but I've messed with a bunch of libraries. If you load the whole thing up, default settings on everything, you can play it at 128 sample buffer, and it won't mess up if you play very simply. You can't really even do this to a large extent on Kompakt. But, you can edit settings for groups of samples seperately from each other. So you can, for example set the maximum polyphony for the release samples to 8, while everyone else is at say, 64. Cool. You can also set the release samples to load into RAM and not use DFD. Even cooler. Most of the polyphony build up happens when you hold the sustain pedal down. You can reduce that using a self-masking script. You can also load all of the pedal down samples into RAM. Now you have a piano that is much harder to crash.

But wait, there's more. Thre's a global setting to cut voices at a certain CPU level. Play with that. There are commercially available scripts, (and some lesser freebies) that allow you to emulate the pedal down body resonace (and half-pedaling) without using the pedal down samples. Go ahead and delete those samples. But wait...now the WHOLE piano will fit into RAM. Tweak that script so the CPU demands aren't that great and VOILA. Non-DFD Old Lady. ( http://music.mezo.com for scripts... you need to jump through a few hoops to get it into Receptor as a preset- create an instrument on you computer with the script, save it, bring it to Receptor, load it, save the script as a preset. you can't get directly at the scripts folder on Receptor otherwise) You can get at the samples more easily as well..... so you can make say, the bottom octave use less samples, or get rid of the softest samples, etc., thereby making the piano even smaller.

Bottom line - You can tweak yourself a piano to gig on with a high degree of confidence, or a very small one to use in a multi, of a huge one to use in the studio. Still anxious to try Ivory, though.