A COLLABORATIVE POST BY CAROL MA
FOLEY EDITOR, BOOM BOX POST
As an editor for digital foley, every so often I am asked to link sweeteners for footsteps. Sometimes the footstep and the sweeteners are combined, which is more common in shows that have been established; and other times I am asked to keep them separate, which gives the mixer more control over what is heard. Since having the footstep and sweetener combined can be done by just Solo-ing the patches in Kontakt, I’m going to be focusing on the latter.
There are many ways to approach this task using Kontakt, but I feel the most efficient way routing Kontakt to multiple outputs in ProTools; allowing me to walk and edit both the footstep and sweetener at the same time, yet keeping them in separate tracks.
To begin, we would create a Pro Tools session and load Kontakt into an instrument track, along with the necessary audio track to record with.
Once we launch Kontakt, we want to open up the output settings found in the workspace icon next to the settings icon.
From here we can add as many outputs as necessary by clicking on the “+” icon, I would make 2 extra mono tracks in addition to the main default output we already have in order to keep it simple. By clicking the bottom of the extra tracks we could adjust the signal path for those particular tracks.
After setting this up, we could now load up the necessary patches. In this example, a footstep patch and a sweetener patch. From here we’re going to change the output on the sweetener patch to the path of the second mono channel we created earlier.
Going back to Pro Tools, find the designated sweetener track. From there, select the input on that track and scroll down to the “plug-in” option. Kontakt should pop up and give you a list of the available outputs. Select the output we chose earlier for second channel we created.
With everything set up, all that’s left to do is record. Solo the footstep and Sweetener track in Kontakt. Solo and record arm the instrument track and the tracks we want to record on, in this example: all of them. Then hit record.
From this we should be able to record the footsteps in tandem with the sweetener as we walk the character, keeping everything organized and in sync with little time consumption.