Best Vst Sampler?

Hi to everybody! :walkman:
I’ve been away for many years from this forum (my old nickname was “j_petrucci”), but today I came back here to upgrade my license to enjoy another great time with this wonderful piece of software! (I am an old-fashioned AMIGA lover, I fully understand the power of trackers… :guitar: )

Before, I used to work with Renoise using SampleTank XL as the main instrument repository, since at that time it was considered pretty good… in next years, instead, I worked a lot with Reason (plus Adobe Audition for final mastering), which provided me a really good and comprehensive integrated soundbank and together with some Refills I had everything to produce high-quality music (you can find some of my songs here) :yeah:

I am pretty focused on using real-sounding instruments (drums, bass, guitars and some keyboards) to produce almost rock-progressive songs, so, since now I’m coming back to Renoise, I would like to know some opinions about the most suited sampler for my needs… I heard about Kontakt, but since I never had the opportunity to try it, I don’t know if it’s too much for me! :huh:

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

I’m all for Kontakt. Sampletank has many good sounds out of the box, but lacks many features (RAM usage optimization, to name one).

I can’t name a good Kontakt-based guitar, though. I use MusicLab RealGuitar (and RealStrat).

on a side note: why didn’t you use your old forum account? if you have problem with it, contact me privately

Kontakt is good, but again, can’t name a good guitar for it - since I play real guitar.

Ehehe yes, I also play real guitars, in fact in my songs I limited the sampled guitar parts to some arpeggios or power chords, but I think that in the future I can add also something directly recorded using Guitar Rig. The built-in sounds that I loved the most in Reason (mainly because of Hypersampling) were Drums (from Drumkit 2.0 Refill), the electric Basses, the Strings section and acoustic Pianos… that’s what I am mostly looking for in other sampler to be used in Renoise. Unfortunately Reason doesn’t support VSTi, so their ecosystem is closed, but Renoise can be used as a Rewire Slave so maybe some interaction can exist… ;)

PS: I noticed also Battery and Drumkit from Hell for Drums… what do you think about them?

Battery can be seen as a reduced Kontakt for drums, I would never recommend it.

DFH is designed in collaboration with Meshuggah band, and it also looks like they use it in composition sessions and maybe also in some recording session. surely it’s recommended if you are looking for a quality out of the box solution for drums

Yes, DfH is pretty great.

I also have Battery since it’s part of Komplete, but I’d only use it for it’s electronic drums and not turn to it for acoustic style drums.

Ok, so maybe I will rely on RealGuitar (I already used sometimes in the past, it’s good!) and on DfH for drums. Did anyone try Superior Drummer for rock/metal too? Isn’t it an improvement of DfH?

Kontakt is definitely THE thing you want to get and it’s really cheap at the moment.
And it’s really cheap now. They have a crossgrade offer for 124,5 eur. It requires that you have some Kontakt Player instrument and propably cheapest one you can get is Infinite Player. It’s only 50 dollars. So basically you get it for less than half the price.

Infinite Player
NI summer sale

Kontakt has a great strumming guitar out of the box, but other factory preset guitars won’t fool guitarists.

Thanks for your info, sauli! :)
Ok, I think I’ll definitely go for Kontakt (it sounds like a movie title…)
What do they mean for “Crossgrade”? Is it an offer only for Kontakt customers?

PS: I also found that the free Kontakt 4 Player comes with a free 500+ MB sound library… do you know if the player can be used as a VSTi in Renoise? ^_^

a crossgrade offer is a special offer dedicated to people who own a product and want to buy another product by the same producer.

in this case, sauli is proposing a crossgrade from Kontakt Player to Kontakt.

Kontakt Player is a reduced version of Kontakt in which you cannot change parameters of the instruments you are using. It can be used as a VST plugin exactly as Kontakt.

Kontakt Player is distributed together with a lot of libraries which are based on it, such as Samplemodeling’s ones