In this video tutorial, Dubspot Electronic Music Production and Sound Design instructor Evan Sutton demonstrates loop slicing and resampling in Native Instruments’ Kontakt 5.
The first order of business is to create a loop that you want to resample. For this first one, I recommend something melodic that is around 2 or 4 bars long. In the video, Ableton Live is being used to render (or ‘rinse’) the sequence to audio, and bring it into Kontakt. Any DAW will be fine for this technique, however the exporting functions will vary.
To bring the audio into Kontakt, create a new instrument, and go under the hood by clicking on the wrench. Then, open the Mapping Editor, and drop the audio file over one key. The Mapping Editor is where Kontakt lets you handle samples and their mapping to key and velocity zones. The Wave Editor will let us customize and edit individual samples (sometimes called ‘zones’).
Once you’ve opened the Wave Editor, head on over to the Sync/Slice tab. This is where we handle beat syncing, as well as loop slicing. The idea here is to use a slicing function to cut the loop into multiple pieces, each of which will be assigned to an individual key. Using the Grid, we can set markers to tell Kontakt where exactly we’d like it to make slices in the loop. When your markers are in place, hit the Drag MIDI to Host button, and away we go.
Now that the loop is sliced up, the fun can really begin. Kontakt has a sophisticated organizational system based on the use of groups. Each group can have its own set of effects and modulation functions. What we’ll do is make it so that each slice is in its own group, and process each individually, which is a fun way to get a complex, glitchy sound. Spend a little time customizing each individual slice, and you can end up with some very expressive sounds, from the beautiful to the turbulent, to the Kafkaesque.