Kontakt Surround Sound Instruments

Ok. The first thing I would do is make sure you really understand signal flow in Kontakt. Start with the output section of Kontakt and all the different ways you can get audio from Kontakt back into you DAW. You’re already familiar with multi-output instruments in Logic. Figure out how Pro Tools handles this.

Then start at the “Group” level in a Kontakt instrument and trace all the ways that you can route a single group from its source (the sample) through to the Output section of Kontakt.

I haven’t watch the full length of these videos but they seem like great starting points/reviews:

The next layer is the “Surround Panner” effect in Kontakt. Let’s you take an input source and pan it to basically any speaker configuration. For it to work properly you need to setup the Output section of Kontakt, routed everything into you DAW, and set the outputs of you DAW to go to the correct speakers. Here is a vide on that:

Before things get too complicated, it is worth remembering that for music we really only need to think about the front left/right and rear left/right speakers. Almost all the music goes in the front left/right and a little bit of special “sauce” goes in the rear left/right.

So what I would do is start super simple. Reserve some time in the MFA Lab or Mixroom and see if you can create a single note Kontakt instrument where when you hold the note it goes around you in a circle (front left > front right > rear right > rear left).

Achieving this requires a good understanding of modulation in Kontakt. Here is a good video on that:

Next see if you can create a new version of the kontakt-building-the-ccc-c-piano that has the main piano sound in the front left/right with a super washy reverb tail only in the rear left/right.