Stoopid question about loops - be gentle!

[ulrichburke]

Dear Anyone.

I'm much better at thinking of toons than understanding the VST science to WRITE the things, but am trying to learn, honest!

Currently I'm trying to get nice pad sounds to use in my New Age pieces. Heard a loop on a free loop download site (legit.) loved it, downloaded it. Put it in Kontakt - and discovered if I play it on anything that's NOT the note it was born on - C# in this one's case - it just sounds plain weird. It only sounds good on its original note. Going up, it goes squeaky very quickly (like within 3 tones!) Going down, it goes grunty within a few tones.

Now I don't know why this is - how do I get round it? Is there a Magic Way to turn it from a C# loop to a Kontakt Preset so I can just play tunes with it like I do with other Kontakt Presets? Unless you go ridiculously high/low with the presets, they sound great. How do I do that with loops I download?

Yours uselessly

Chris.

[resistorman]

It's called multi-sampling. Overview:

https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/multi-sample/

[ulrichburke]

Dear Resistorman.

So basically downloading a single loop/sample is useless, you've got to have a tuned-to-different-notes bunch of them to be any good for playing tunes.

Would I be able to use a pitchshifter - I don't have one at the moment, only just read about them, never heard of them before 4 mins ago! - to retune the loop up and down the scale so I could map it across the virtual keyboard? And if that's a 'yes', would I need to drag each retuned loop into Kontakt individually and put it individually onto a key (I've never done this before so again, if it sounds dumbass that's why!) or could I somehow group them all together and drag them into place - says he vaguely - as a group and then map them across the keyboar in Kontakt, or is there another, better way of doing it?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm trying to understand all of this, not doing too well with YouTube vids.

Yours respectfully

Chris.

[James Perrett]

If this is a voice like sound then take a look at formant corrected pitch shifting. This will sound more natural than straightforward pitch shifting.

[RichardT]

Dear Resistorman.

So basically downloading a single loop/sample is useless, you've got to have a tuned-to-different-notes bunch of them to be any good for playing tunes.

Would I be able to use a pitchshifter - I don't have one at the moment, only just read about them, never heard of them before 4 mins ago! - to retune the loop up and down the scale so I could map it across the virtual keyboard? And if that's a 'yes', would I need to drag each retuned loop into Kontakt individually and put it individually onto a key (I've never done this before so again, if it sounds dumbass that's why!) or could I somehow group them all together and drag them into place - says he vaguely - as a group and then map them across the keyboar in Kontakt, or is there another, better way of doing it?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm trying to understand all of this, not doing too well with YouTube vids.

Yours respectfully

Chris.

Hi Chris,

I doubt that you’d get significantly better results that way than you’re getting in Kontakt. Pitch shifting is what Kontakt is doing internally already.

The best way is to find online a complete Kontakt instrument (.nki file) that someone has put together with all the multi samples and note mappings in place.

Of course, you could build your own .nki yourself, but it’s a lot more work.

[forumuser931182]

You need to look for synth presets rather than loops. A synth pad preset will play across the full keyboard whereas a loop is more useful to be triggered in a composition ( as a single sound instance )

[Kwackman]

Have you looked in the Kontakt factory library to see if there's a synth pad patch that would work? Or depending on your DAW, there might be included sounds?

[Drew Stephenson]

If you were to post a snippet of the sound as a private link on something like soundcloud people here could probably advise on a playable close match.

[The Elf]

Samples would not be my first thought for 'pad' sounds. Most simple (and many free) VST polysynths will produce superior pads than mucking around with samples.