Multi-Timbral Automation with Kontakt and Logic Pro

One of the greatest abilities of Kontakt is to produce incredible multi-timbral ensembles that can really bring your projects to life. This lesson shares how to set up multi-timbral automation with Kontakt and Logic Pro.

What multi-timbral refers to in this situation is the ability to output multiple patches from Kontakt to your DAW. In this lesson Logic Pro is used, but really and DAW will allow you to accomplish the same thing in the end. You need to start with a multi-timbral project in your DAW. Next, you can begin to set up Kontakt, which will be loaded into the first track of your multi-timbral setup, running in multi-output mode. Getting this all set up right form the very start is the most important thing, especially if you plan on using multi-timbral automation with Kontakt and your DAW. In this example, four patches are chosen and added to the rack within Kontakt. Now you need to set up the routing in the Kontakt mixer. Lucky for us, Native Instruments included a preset to make this easier.

Once you have Kontakt set up properly, you can begin to finish setting up your DAW. You will need to add one extra Auxiliary track for each additional patch beyond the first one in Kontakt. This will allow you to add insert effects, etc to each sound in your DAW. This completes the process of setting up a multi-timbral instrument, but we are still not ready for multi-timbral automation with Kontakt and your DAW. This is because at this point, all of the tracks in your DAW are still tied together. As you can probably imagine, with so many individual parameters across all the patches in Kontakt, automation is a bit cumbersome. But you can simply drag and drop individual automation assignments for the parameters you wish to automate within your DAW, such as volume or panning.