With an itch to get dive back into Kontakt, I wanted to have a second stab at a guitar-based sample library. My previous attempt revolved around sampling G, B and E strings with a strip of paper wedged in between the strings near the bridge, leading to an vaguely interesting sound (although not close to the banjo sound initially anticipating). From that attempt, I knew I wanted to do a set that included the low strings as well. I also wanted to play around with multiple microphones, allowing blending to be a part of the UI.

Annoyingly, I couldn't find a second XLR cable - must have lost one in the Alps... so only one of the SM57's could be used. Instead of a second mic, I decided to record DI into the Focusrite for the second option. I then created a quick Reaper template and sampled from E2 to E5, just picking whole tones, allowing Kontakt to fill in the semitones. Once I had the samples, regions and tracks all named, I exported ready to dive into Kontakt. The auto-mapping is definitely a bit temperamental - requiring quite a bit of brute forcing to get everything in, and a little manual help.

Immediately, this quick sketch spawned an idea - the sample pack is a quick, rough and ready project, without much polish, and the UI should reflect that. And so handwritten fonts and some link to roughness/sketchiness would be preferable in the final design.

A quick mockup shows some glaring problems. The weighting felt way off, and the repetition of the same knobs caused a mess, rather than looking easier to control. To help solve this, I decided to keep the primary volume control as a knob, but change the FX and mic-balancing controls to sliders.

I moved the text out to the left, and stacked it vertically (mimicking the Fink Signature design). I also reduced the overall size of the panel, and instead gave it a background, made up of sketched lines, blurred a little to make the non-retina resolution of Kontakt less apparent than it was with crisp lines that ended up obviously pixellated. To make the dial work in Kontakt, I was able to use my Kontakt Knob Rotator plugin to generate the frames. I haven't yet built a counterpart for the sliders, and with time running out on this little one-day project, I had to resort to grabbing a slider from g200kg in order to finish the project on time.

Lessons!

Spend more time editing the samples... I ended up with some samples being clipped and it creates a clicky sound which is difficult to not hear, especially once volume is boosted to compensate for the original quiet samples.

It is by no means a perfect library, but to me, it captures the fun and excitement of a challenge like this, and its rough and ready state holds a certain charm. Next time, I can save work by writing another Figma plugin to handle the faders as well as the knobs. I would spend more time getting the volume right at the beginning, as I ended up spending too long trying to do noise reduction to compensate with the volume boost I was applying, and the library came out a little quiet. I'd like to figure out some ways to create pad tones from the guitar, as a complete tonal contrast to plucks that I can use to start building presets. Finally, I need to start making these instruments in Kontakt 5 so that other people can use them without being restricted to 6.