Pam Marshall's notes about composing music, teaching, improvising, music software, nature


Author: PamelaM

  • Turning Raindrops into MIDI

    I spent way too long last night trying to find a free tool to translate my recording of rain dripping beside my window into MIDI notes. I wanted to capture the rhythm and the varying volumes so that I could map that onto musical timbres. I didn’t come up with anything free, and I didn’t…

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    image of audio and midi signals
  • Keyswitches in a Kontakt 3 Virtual Instrument

    If you have a multi-timbre or multi-articulation instrument, but no documentation, how do you figure out how to switch between different sounds? What is a keyswitch?One common technique is a “keyswitch”. Playing a MIDI note of a specific pitch turns on a particular timbre. The MIDI note is out of range for that instrument so…

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  • Mapping Editor Basics in Kontakt 3

    In the Mapping Editor you set up Zones for each sample that will be part of an Instrument. A Zone is a sample, plus its root MIDI note and the range of velocities that trigger it. The manual doesn’t say so, but it seems to me that the Zone also includes the range of notes…

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  • Hearing Your Kontakt Instruments

    There are various ways to hear an Instrument: Click notes on Kontakt’s on-screen keyboard. However, they will all be the same velocity, about 120. (Click the Keyboard icon in the Main Control Panel at the top of the rack to show or hide the On-Screen Keyboard panel.) Use a MIDI keyboard with Kontakt in standalone…

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  • Using Kontakt Standalone with Digital Performer

    I don’t know why these things are sometimes so not obvious to me, but it took me a while to figure out how to connect my MIDI tracks in MOTU Digital Performer to a Kontakt instrument, when Kontakt is running as a separate application (rather than as a plugin on a DP track). I didn’t…

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