Sound Design Tutorial: Create Custom Scripts in Native Instruments’ Kontakt

In this video tutorial, Dubspot’s sound design course designer and instructor Evan Sutton shows you how to add, modify and customize existing instruments in Native Instruments’ Kontakt script editor.

Scripts are used to customize the way an instrument plays. In the factory library, the data involving the fancy Performance View is all created using Scripts. Many of the Scripts in the factory instruments let us customize how the instrument interprets incoming MIDI data. This is the area we’ll focus on in this tutorial.

To program scripts from scratch would take quite a bit of commitment and practice. Lucky for us, there are built in factory scripts that we can load up and customize. Many users will notice that the Scripts we talk about in this tutorial are not unlike Ableton Live’s beloved MIDI effects. What’s more is that just like Live’s MIDI effects, Kontakt Scripts work together and can communicate with one another, opening up a vast modular world.

Other scripts let us customize a sampler instrument and add features much like we’d expect to see on a synthesizer. No matter what the role of the Scripts, they can be used to take a solid instrument and make it perform in new and different ways. – Evan Sutton