Whenever I use a soft instrument, it is 99% certain to be in Kontakt. It’s a superb sampler, easy to use and with a colossal library. And I like that you can, if you want, get into all the settings for sample control. I like using some of its weirder piano packs, like the Braunschweig Upright from Imperfect Samples. I generally prefer to use real acoustic instruments, but when you don’t have the budget to say, hire a string section, or you want a more ‘treated’ sounds, then Kontakt is my go to tool. I would also mention Battery, which is Native Instruments single shot sample player as it’s my first choice for any drum or percussive sample use. If I want to trigger samples from the drum performance, I use Massey DRT drum replacer to create a MIDI note on each hit. I like doing it this way because you can tune, mix and manipulate samples easily and create the ideal sound; often a stack of several samples. The other great thing about Kontakt is, that before the computer digital recording era I had amassed a large collection of samples for the Akai samplers and Kontakt will play all those too, with a bit of faffing around. That’s much handier than busting out the old Akai S5000.
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