SzcZ (also known as Fairly Confusing Waveforms) has released Beat Assembler, an impressive sequencer based drum machine for Native Instruments Kontakt.
Those of you who follow BPB on a regular basis probably already know how much we admire SzcZ’s crazy NI Kontakt creations. Their website is sort of like a mad scientist’s laboratory packed with Kontakt freebies, offering dozens of weird instruments and probability-based sequence generators that are unlike anything else you’ve ever heard or seen. We’ve even been lucky enough to collaborate with them on a project, an awesome Game Boy percussion sample collection that you can download for free.
See also: Free Game Boy Sample Pack By BPB & SzcZ! (WAV/NKI)Beat Assembler is perhaps their most impressive Kontakt instrument so far. It left us speechless, to say the least. Anyone who spent a bit of time messing around with scripting in Kontakt will tell you right away that the script for Beat Assembler is next level stuff. The user interface features a sequencer grid which can be edited almost as easily as a traditional sequencer in a DAW, but also manipulated and randomized in ways that most (if not all) DAWs can only dream of.
The recorded sequence can be transposed, stretched and condensed (both horizontally and vertically), scrolled, quantized and randomized, all of that while operating in playback mode. The sequence itself becomes an instrument, in a way, and your performance is defined by the manner in which you manipulate the sequence over time. The real fun begins once you map the controls to your MIDI keyboard and start experimenting with changing the values of multiple parameters simultaneously. It’s recommended to record your performance at all times, because you never know what sort of cool pattern or other happy accident you can come up with while jamming.
The functionality described above is just the tip of the iceberg, though. The instrument also features a note recorder, a manual sequence editor (for moving the notes around the grid), along with four voice groups with individual modulation and FX controls for each group. Beat Assembler is one seriously capable Kontakt instrument and it’s almost insane that this awesome music making contraption is being offered as a free download. Speaking of which, SzcZ has also released a commercial instrument called Rekombinator, an equally impressive granular sample recycler for NI Kontakt that can be purchased at Sampleism.
Beat Assembler is delivered with a set of 49 percussion and SFX samples, however it is possible to import your own sounds using Kontakt’s mapping editor. Needless to say, the full version of NI Kontakt is required in order to use the instrument without a time limit. Beat Assembler will work for fifteen minutes only in the free Kontakt Player.
UPDATE: An extended commercial version of this instrument (called Beat Assembler XT) is now available for purchase via Sampleism. The new version is priced at £13 and features drag’n’drop MIDI export, handling of bigger sequences (128 notes vs 48 in the free version), full range of Kontakt 5 filters available in the modulation panel, more options for creating custom drum kits, brand new Displacer control which shuffles some notes in a sequence, any number of groups between 1 and 16 instead of just 4 in the free version.
Video Demo
Check out the Beat Assembler demo video:
Download
Beat Assembler is available for free download via Fairly Confusing Waveforms (9.05 MB download size, RAR archive, contains 49 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format, 1 instrument patch in NKI format for NI Kontakt).
