Using Kontakt 5 with Abbey Road drums in Dorico

Dorico
1

I remembered that I bought this drum kit a few years ago but never touched it since I switched to Dorico.

How would I set it up in Dorico using Kontakt, and how would I know which notes correspond with which drum sound, is there a guide somewhere for all of this?

Could I use this kit for drums while still using NotePerformer’s internal sound engine for all of the melodic instruments, and get them both to play back at the same time?

2

Presumably Abbey Road has a manual with that sort of info, which one can use to make a percussion map in Dorico.

3

Yes Abbey Road works good in Dorico. And It does very well alongside with Noteperformer I use it very often like that.

  1. Add a kontakt instance in the VST instruments and load the drums in Kontakt.
  2. Assign in track inspector the drums to that Kontakt instance.
  3. Click on the little cog and set in the endpoint setup the percussion map to General Midi.
  4. In the Kontakt window where you loaded the drums you find in the tab “options” midi mapping presets. Set that preset to GM.

Now it should work. Most of the time the level is very low so you have to raise that in the kontakt mixer. Or find the solution in the mixer of Dorico.

In the Abbey road drums there are very specific samples that are not always accessible with the General midi percussion map. You have to use the manual of Abbey road to find the right midi note and adjust the percussion map.

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4

Great thank you, very clear steps. I only need a simple drum kit so hopefully the GM setup will be fine, takes me back to bashing out drum rhythms on a MIDI keyboard in the early 90s!

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5

Ok don’t forget if you combine it with Noteperformer. Start to set up everything with the playback template of Noteperformer and after that add the Kontakt VST and assign the drums to that instead of NP.

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6

If you’re planning on using Abbey Road Drums on a regular basis, I suggest you create a project where there’s nothing but those drums, make them work as you wish (including duplicating and correcting the GM perc map so that it becomes the Abbey Road Drums perc map), save the Endpoints and create yourself an Abbey road drums (manual)+NotePerformer (auto) playback template. You’ll be rewarded for your effort in the long run.

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7

Okay so this is nowhere near as simple as I thought it might/should be.

Kontakt Player 6 is loaded and working standalone, and I can load up the Abbey Road drumkits and play and hear them.

The only place Dorico 5 seems to be able to detect Kontakt is in the ‘VST and MIDI’ dropdown of the Play window. I can click the cog to get the Endpoint Setup window, but clicking the little e for Show Instrument does nothing.

I can’'t find Kontakt in the Playback Template window, nor can I find it in the Track Inspector window where NotePerformer is the only thing in the dropdown and everything in that window is greyed out. Does that imply that something somewhere isn’t set up correctly?

At this point I don’t care about setting up templates etc for future use, I just want to switch the drums from NotePerformer to Abbey Road in as few steps as possible. :-/

8

If I inderstand you right you did not load Kontakt from inside dorico.Do not use Kontakt Standalone but load it in Dorico.

Abbey01
Abbey01829×951 86.5 KB

Click on the + sign
Abbey02
Abbey02569×842 109 KB

Select Native instruments - Kontakt
Abbey03
Abbey03740×857 56.1 KB

In track inspector select Kontakt

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9

OK, here are the steps just to switch the drums (assuming you have a project open that is using NotePerformer and has a drum kit in it.

  1. Open Play mode and click on the VST and MIDI tab.
  2. In the section on the left under VST Instruments (in which you will see one or more little boxes that say NotePerformer), click on the Plus box (tooltip will say “add”).
  3. In the drop down, select NativeInstruments, then Kontakt. When Kontak has opened, load your AbbeyRoad drums. In AbbeyRoad drums, click on Options, and under MIDI Mapping, choose the preset for GM.
  4. Back in Dorico Play Mode, now click on the Track Inspector tab. Make sure you have selected your Drums instrument. Under Routing, there’s a drop down that will currently say NotePerformer. Change it to Kontakt.
  5. Click on the little cog button to set up the endpoint. In the first line, where it says Drums, click on the box where it says Percussion Map and choose general MIDI.

That’s it. Once you get that working, it’s only a few more steps to save that config in a new Playback Template, which I’ll be happy to share once you get this part done. Cheers!

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10

Thanks for taking the time write that out - I’d done step 2 but going back to the Track Inspector for step 4 it was all greyed out, and this was after multiple reboots and re-opening Dorico. It worked just fine when I tried it a minute ago so I have no idea what might have locked those routing options down, maybe there was something selected somewhere else.

Anyway, I’m hearing the drums now so thanks everyone for your input. :slight_smile:

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