Understanding the Session Strings Pro Animator in Kontakt

This helpful video tutorial helps shed some light on how you can use the Session Strings Pro animator in Kontakt to deliver beautifully complex arrangements.

As with many automated articulation interfaces in Kontakt libraries and instruments, the Session Strings Pro animator may not be completely intuitive at first. But, with the help of this video and some practice, you should be able to put together some impressive string arrangements even if you’ve never played in an orchestra before. It all comes down to understanding how the instruments within a preset interact with the MIDI that has been programmed to trigger and control them. When the Session Strings Pro animator is being used, it will deliver your MIDI data as it has been interpreted according to the currently selected articulation settings. This may sound a bit complex, so let’s just jump right in and walk though the steps.

First, you need to load up an instance of Kontakt and select the appropriate Session Strings Pro preset for your project. You can either begin programming some MIDI in your piano roll at this point, or simply interact with the sampled instruments directly. As you can see from the video, it’s easiest to simply jump right into the Session Strings Pro animator controls to begin to get an idea of what’s going on here. There is a separate velocity control for each step in the sequence. There are several sequence presets available, and it also gives you plenty of space to save your own presets as well. You also have other general parameters to tweak, like groove (rate/tempo), dynamic (velocity impact), swing and note length. You can also run the Session Strings Pro animator in several arpeggiator modes and articulation types.

Now that you have the basics down, you can begin to experiment with building custom phrase presets and assigning your own keyswitches so you can easily move between the different articulations and other settings you have programmed into each one. This is where the power of Kontakt meets the power of the Session Strings Pro animator, and how you can create those beautifully complex arrangements mentioned earlier!