Commanding Kontakt 7 from the S61 keyboard

1

Here’s Kontakt 7, loaded with our installed collection of instruments and a helpful look at pay-for items at the bottom of the screen. Our connected Kontrol Mk3 keyboard has sprung into life meanwhile, showing the available instruments too.

2

Here we can browse all patches, or narrow it by Type, Sub Type and Character. No point wading through analogue drum machine patches when looking for a soaring string section. We can press the chunky joystick button to make our final selection.

3

This Lineage Percussion patch is a kit of snares, bass drums and cymbals. We can do our usual work here in the Kontakt interface, but we can also control all of the vital parameters directly from the keyboard.

4

Even the light guides match the Kontakt instrument’s keyboard colours, once only possible when loaded in Komplete Kontrol. Different instrument types in a kit, as well as keyswitches, are simple to spot without breaking focus.

5

Changing parameters in Kontakt via the Kontrol keyboard keeps things moving, especially when macros are well chosen. Having those DAW controls is useful, although currently you can’t return back into plugin control over Kontakt.

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Of course, you can build up multiple Kontakt Instruments in a project and tweak each while messing with their notes, though currently just Kontakt 7 offers the integration experience, so old projects may take a bit of manhandling to bring over.