Award Sounds

I'm glad that Kontakt and Logic work together. I just wish it were easier.

Versions

The upgrade to Logic 8 has helped a lot. For me, the Logic upgrade was a no-brainer. I waited a couple of moths to see what the bug reports were coming through, then took the plunge. Regardless of how it interacts with Kontakt, the Logic upgrade was worth it. If you include the tighter integration, then it becomes even better.

Templates

Setting up a few song templates has been key to using it neatly. I have 3 main templates, one for rock based (mainly real, non-sampled) instruments, one for acoustic with mid-side recording and one for more electronic music.

Each of then have the minimum amount of channels for what I generally want to do, I can always change it later. For instance the rock-based one has:

• a drum channel with a compressor, minimal eq and slight reverb off on a bus.
• a guitar channel for DI'd guitar so I can get to work quickly on ideas and sort out recording/re-amping at a later date
• a bass channel for DI'd bass
• a spare mono audio channel so I can quickly copy a setting or add a new instrument - I find it the easier way to add
• an instrument channel with Kontakt loaded but no samples loaded in Kontakt. This is one of the multi-output versions (2x16 I think). I've configured it so that 5 pairs of channels are set to route out to a separate aux channels in Logic. This is saved in both Logic and Kontakt.
• a second blank instrument channel, similar concept to the spare mono audio channel above.

Why do it this way?

I find it's the easiest for me.

It vastly reduces the learning time per session. I don't always use Kontakt, but when I do, I hate trying to remember out how to route any channels after the first stereo pair through to Logic. There's very little overhead or delay in load time with the basic Kontakt set-up and it's easy enough to delete it if I want to. I tend to leave it plugged in unless I'm running out of CPU/memory.

For Logic 7.2, I also set up another aux channel to accommodate an additional out from Kontakt. That also made it easier to remember what I had to do in order to expand the number of instruments. With Logic 8, it's a lot easier.

Versions

I'm using a slightly old version of Kontakt (2.4), it does what I need, however I'm using the latest version of Logic at the time of writing) 8.0.2

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