Is anybody else obsessed with buying little bespoke Kontakt instruments that sound like a broken organ crossed with a shortwave radio?

Yes yes yes, to the point where I had to consciously stop myself from checking out new instruments because I was getting zero done.

Have you used many Soniccouture instruments? If not, you might a bunch of their stuff. Nothing all that wacky, but I loooove using their Novachord instrument. Another VI of theirs that I use constantly is Scriptorium-- the instruments included are all pretty fun, but there's a pack of ksp scripts that have come in handy. Assuming you go under the hood and use the Kontakt scripts section a lot, you might want to give that a try. Their Philcordia has a great sound, too.

I love a lot of those Hollow Sun VIs but I found that there maybe seemed to be a lot of retread in sounds after a certain point?

But if we're just keeping it to weirdo cheap/free Kontakt VIs, Atom Hub has a ton of cool free percussive collections, esp. Candlestick and Cottage (Mr. Pot, Empty Playground and a few others have some usable stuff, too). I've found that I hate a lot of the reverbs they use on initial loading, but once I have those turned off, lots of great sounds.

Oh, and another cool little bespoke Kontakt free instrument is Bolder Sounds' Ebow -- very lightweight, too.

Now you can replicate Boredoms in Kontakt for a mere 50 clams.

http://www.wavesfactory.com/drumcircle.php

https://itunes.apple.com/app/virtual-ans/id711384847?mt=8#

Virtual ANS is a software simulator of the unique Russian synthesizer ANS - photoelectronic microtonal/spectral musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin from 1938 to 1958.
The instrument was used by Stanislav Kreichi, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Edward Artemiev and other Soviet composers.
You can hear the sound of the ANS in Andrei Tarkovsky's movies Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker.

I can't even believe how good it sounds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwwvLRDqHYM#t=42

i hope they're paying royalties to rotterdam termination source

shameless advertisement for a friend who makes some of these. they're great and cheap (£10-£30). there's a free tom drum sample pack on there too.

http://www.rattlyandraw.com/store.html

These are cool, right up my alley thanks

The Puremagnetik Toybox collection includes some fun stuff-- lapharp, toy synths and pianos, Stylophone, Melodica, few other things.

This new/old Soundiron thing looks kinda interesting and it's only 5 bucks.

This unique vocal instrument is based on a simple concept with a rather remarkable pedigree: chromatically sampled vocal sustains captured over 150 years ago. This original method of recording, called ‘Phonautography’ was invented in the early 1850s, by French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The sounds were captured by projecting the voice and other sounds into a cylindrical horn attached to a stylus, which in transfered the vibration into lines over the surface of oil lamp soot-blackened sheets of paper. These raw archival recordings were preserved by the French Academy of Sciences and finally decoded by First Sounds with the help of laser scanning equipment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

http://www.soundiron.com/instruments/micropaks/phonautograms-2/?utm_source=Soundiron+Mailing+List+10-20-13&utm_campaign=779566fcbd-Littlewoodflutes&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_259d52aa42-779566fcbd-297601773

^^^^^^^^ max level bespokeness.

i bought kontakt

it begins..

Okay, so I bought this, it was super cheap though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnTzrIrSUsU

Kontakt is half price atm and I am tempted.

Is it worth getting as a stand-alone if you already have sampling / sample pack access in Ableton?

It probably depends how you plan on using it. Why standalone? I like it mainly for the huge number of free and paid libraries and utilities rather than as a sampler. But then I'm a sampling imbecile.

I was thinking stand-alone in the sense of not packaged with Komplete / Maschine - i am just not sure how great the sample library that comes with it is. That said, a lot of the free / paid libraries look very cool.

Gotcha. I've got to admit I had forgotten about the factory library, which maybe says something about it? I just had a quick get reacquainted session and it's...ok. I don't think its highly regarded but it is NI so it's clearly not rubbish.

Each different instrument having its own GUI makes kontakt a different way of working than sampler/simpler .

I think there's a steep learning curve if you're thinking of using Kontakt as a classic sampler; nothing impossible, but I think it has a rep of being a little complicated for easy/quick sampling needs. However, using it for paid/free instruments and sample libraries (or, eventually, making your own instruments) is pretty easy, and it's not difficult to find instruments/libraries that sound great and are easily tweakable.

Excellent. Thanks both.

Kontakt 6 on the way: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2018/09/06/native-instruments-intros-kontakt-6/

A trend I've seen in the run up to Bandcamp Day tomorrow: "buy my album of modulated electronics on Bandcamp and you'll receive the AU/VST plug-in I authored to make it with"

I've got a couple of Puremagnetik things like that and tbh they're pretty useless

pianobook.co.uk is good for free community made sampler instruments

Hollow Sun has a free library if you buy TAL Sampler (retro sampler) that has a lot of good stuff

There a little bit of Hollow Sun's SOTU in my track on the latest ILX comp.

cheers for pianobook milo, just grabbed a bunch to play with.
any ones to particularly look out for?

I haven't gone back and downloaded many again since I switched computers but I was a fan of several of the guitar/bass ones that aren't just trying to be a straight sample library - thrumming guitar textures & bass harmonic chimes, ambient guitar tremors all quite good IIRC.

Pianobook looks insane, I don't use Kontakt though (although I think I do have Kontakt Player installed?). It seems like a huge wormhole to go down and is very appealing on one level, but also it feels weird to plug-and-play other people's homemade samples. Better to record my own to keep the personal touch and limit option paralysis.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Tcp6ld2KVfVlonh-X2-83TFaOd1_8qhB

Tried making a Kontakt instrument last night to see if round robins are a pain in the ass - apparently they are without scripting, and my guitar is noisy as hell

12th fret harmonics, six round robins per string

lol just realized that doing this at 3 in the morning I inverted the guitar strings vs keyboard so the high E is on the bass side and the low E on the treble side

Not Kontakt, but does anyone mess with the Reaktor user library?

I finally got over my annoyance with the NI infrastructure to start learning Razor (which is amazing), and I think at this point I could delve into the infinite number of user-created synths if I wanted to (only have Reaktor Player, not the full version).

I guess I could delve into Kontakt too, but it still feels weirder to me to fully use someone else's samples rather than making my own, whereas I'm definitely not going to make a synth from scratch.