Dear fellow Doricians,
I’ve been searching for this today, and thought it could be nice to share a simple recipe.
It can happen that when you call some Kontakt instrument (like a string quartet from Spitfire or Cremona) or any other marvellous sampled instruments that play in Kontakt, you have only one fader in the Dorico mixer that receives all the audio signal.
I find the UI of Kontakt to be everything but nice to the user. Because there are two UI on top of each other, Kontakt’s UI and the instrument’s UI. Sooooo many little buttons, so many different settings, etc…
Kontakt’s documentation does exist, but I found the answer to that question in a Kontakt 5 documentation — that’s like 5 or 6 years old?
Here’s the thing : there is an outputs window in Kontakt. Yes. And that’s the answer, pure and simple. And for an obscure reason, it’s hidden by default.
Click on the fourth icon of the top left row of icons (red rectangle here) and… tick the unticked Outputs line (yellow rectangle) and the outputs window will appear under your loaded instruments (pink rectangle):
Once you’re there, you’re almost done. You can tweak them as you want, or use the Preset/Batch Configuration (which has a Factory>32 st outputs that should tackle all your needs, honestly), and then you can use the different available outputs to route your loaded instruments and control them directly independently on the Dorico console.
In Kontakt 7, it’s now possible to show the plugin in a kind of “minimal state” to earn real estate on the screen. Then you cannot show the outputs window! So it’s compulsory to exit that minimal state to set the outputs right. Hope it helps!
Thanks Marc, I have just purchase Cremona String Quartet (it came with Kontakt 8) and for the life of me I could not get Cremona SQ to come out of any channel but No. 1. I opened the Classic View in Kontakt and found the mixer. Wahoo, I have more than one channel! Cheers, Stephen
I thought I had the Cremona Quartet in Dorico channel issue solved (see above). I had two separate channels working ok but when I tried to add a third channel it was playing sort of in channel 1. I tried all the various possibilities but no luck. Has anyone successfully worked with Cremona in Dorico?
Cremona quartet works fine if you have each instrument in a separate instance of Kontakt.
@Thurisaz produced some very useful expression maps for the earlier release of Cremona (search the forum). But it was limited in the number of articulations you could define. The current version allows you to define 32 articulations per instance, which gives much greater control.
Personally, I have not yet come up with totally satisfactory expression maps for the quartet. It is still a work in progress.
Thanks Janus, I think I was doing this - a separate instance of Kontakt for each instrument but I will give it another shot in the morning. I have the expression maps from Thurisaz and I am using them.
The problem is not (AFAIK) a problem of instances. It’s a problem of setting the outputs correctly in Kontakt, which is far from easy when you have never done it. I wrote a tip thread about that very subject some months ago (and it’s this one and I just notice now )
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