Kontakt Library Keyswitches

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I have a number of Kontakt libraries, and have run into a problem, in that they have a habit of putting keyswitches in awkward places. This is mostly for their Session Musician guitar libraries, but also with a violin library as well. When doing scoring and composing, it isn’t a problem, but when playing live in Cantabile with multiple vsts it creates problems.

The obvious thing is to set keyboard ranges in Cantabile, and this normally works fine, but not with these Kontakt libraries, which simply ignore the range limits. As such when playing live the library will suddenly change to a different articulation. Is there something I can do within Cantabile to force the vst to obey the range limits?

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Not sure how Kontakt can ignore a limit. Any other info?

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I find this strange - have you checked with the MIDI monitor? When a key is outside the range for a route, there shouldn’t be any MIDI messages arriving at the Kontakt input. Maybe there’s more than one route to this Kontakt instance somewhere?

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I find this strange as well, but I shall check this. It happens with a number of NI vsts, of which I have 5 where this is relevant to live playing. I shall compile a list later today on the vsts when I get back home, at which point I will check the monitor as well.

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I’d say the list of VSTi is pretty much irrelevant - what I’d be interested in is the actual MIDI stream that arrives at the plugin.

Right-click the plugin and open a MIDI monitor for its input; then you’ll see what actual MIDI notes come into the plugin.

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Then you can start the detective work regarding the ways the notes actually get to that plugin; check the routes, bindings etc that have that plugin as a target.

There should be no way that MIDI notes arrive at a plugin out of thin air in Cantabile.

One suspicion I have is around note number naming: It could be that Kontakt uses a different note number system than you have set in Cantabile

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So if your keyboard range definitions in Cantabile should exclude the keyswitches but Cantabile and Kontakt disagree on the octave numbers, your key range may be set too wide, so that the key switches are still within the range.

Cheers,

Torsten

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I just checked this with my installation: Cantabile is set to “Display middle C as C4”. Kontakt OTOH seems to interpret middle C as C3. So when I hit a middle C on my keyboard, classified as C4 in Cantabile, Kontakt sees is as coming in octave 3:

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If you now set the key range for Session Guitarist to start at C2 in order to exclude the key switches, the lowest note sent will be note number 36 (since that is C2 according to Cantabile). But: for Kontakt, the note #36 will be C1, and it will trigger the key switch assigned to it.

This means that you’ll need to set the keyboard range in Cantabile to actually start at C3, not C2 - this should effectively exclude the key switch keys.

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I just tested this, and key switches are correctly filtered in my setup.

Of course, this depends on the setting of “display middle C”, so be sure to check that in your Cantabile setup.

Hope this helps!

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THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH, TORSTEN!!! Your advice is a Godsend! I was beginning to look at using MIDI filters, which was all new to me, and you have saved me that for now! It also means I can now use the NI Guitar libraries live, which i couldn’t do before!

My problem is that I lost 30 year of playing time to RSI, which manifested just as MIDI arrived, so missed out on its development over the years. I am in my late 60s and have a lot of catching up to do, and find it a bit overhelming at times, but this has given me a new lease of life!

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