Kontakt Gold

Play back with high-quality sounds and create CDs with Sibelius. Each sound has been carefully recorded from live instruments, then meticulously edited to ensure that it will play perfectly in a variety of musical situations.

You can even adjust each sound yourself, including its attack, brightness and reverb. Kontakt Gold uses 63 high-quality instruments and 111 percussion sounds, of which you can play up to 32 at once. It is available as an add-on to Sibelius.

A world of instruments

Kontakt Gold's sounds cover woodwind, brass, keyboards, percussion, strings, voice and guitars – just about everything you'll need for orchestral, band, jazz, vocal, chamber, rock & pop music.

A world of musical instruments is included, from piccolo to Bösendorfer piano to female choir – plus more specialized sounds such as bass clarinet, flugelhorn, marching toms and handbells.

Strings are provided in sectional and solo versions, plus techniques such as col legno and sul ponticello . Other special sounds include different sung vowels, drum rolls, cymbal techniques, and picked & fingered guitars.

Whatever kind of music you write, you'll find Kontakt Gold brings every score to life.


Native Instruments

Kontakt Gold has been created for Sibelius with leading software company Native Instruments .

Kontakt Gold works with Sibelius 3 or later. If you already have Sibelius, you can buy Kontakt Gold at a special discount with your Sibelius 4 upgrade .

Kontakt Silver and Gold sounds

Click the names of the instruments below to hear a short snippet in MP3 format. We recommend you use headphones or a good hi-fi system to listen to these sounds in order to get the best impression of their quality.

Sounds marked with a * are in both Kontakt Silver and Gold; those without ore in Kontakt Gold only.

Woodwind

* Flute (solo sound)
* Oboe (solo sound)
English horn (solo sound)
* Clarnet (solo sound)
* Bassoon (solo sound)
Piccolo (solo sound)
Recorder (solo sound)
Bass clarinet (solo sound)
Alto saxophone (solo sound)
* Tenor Saxophone (solo sound)
Baritone saxophone (solo sound)

Brass

* Trumpet (solo sound)
Trumpet straight mute (solo sound)
* Trumpet section (ensemble sound)
* French Horn (solo sound)
French horn section (ensemble sound)
* Trombone section (ensemble sound)
Trombone (solo sound)
Flugelhorn (solo sound)
Euphonium (solo sound)
Tuba (solo sound)

Keyboards

* Piano (Bösendorfer)
* Church organ
Rhodes piano
Harpsichord
Celesta
Drawbar organ
Reed organ

Percussion

* Glockenspiel (hard sticks)
Vibraphone (medium sticks)
Marimba (medium sticks)
Xylophone (medium sticks)
* Timpani
Tubular bells
Handbells
* Unpitched percussion : 111 sounds including GM standard drum set, drum rolls, marching toms & tonal bass drums, orchestral bass drum & tam-tams, tuned woodblocks, cymbal techniques, etc.

Voice

* Male voice ‘ah' (solo sound)
* Choir ‘ooh' (ensemble sound)
Female voice ‘ah' (solo sound)
Male choir ‘ah' (ensemble sound)
Female choir ‘ah' (ensemble sound)

Strings

* Harp
* String section
* String section pizzicato (ensemble sound)
Violin (solo sound)
Violin section (ensemble sound)
Viola (solo sound)
Viola section (ensemble sound)
Cello (solo sound)
Cello section (ensemble sound)
Contrabass section (ensemble sound)
Contrabass (solo sound)
String solo pizzicato (solo sound)
String section muted (ensemble sound)
String section tremolo (ensemble sound)
String section col legno (ensemble sound)
String section sul ponticello tremolo (ensemble sound)

Guitars

* Guitar (nylon strings)
Guitar (steel strings)
Electric guitar (clean)
Electric guitar (overdriven)
Electric bass guitar (finger)
Electric bass guitar (pick)
Slap electric bass guitar

System requirements

Requires 620Mb hard disk space (in addition to Sibelius 3 or 4); Windows XP (or some Windows 2000 configurations); Mac OS 10.3.9 or later. Additionally:

Scores that use up to about 8 different sounds:

Windows: 700MHz processor or faster, 256Mb+ RAM, preferably ASIOcompatible sound card

Mac: G4/G5, 512Mb+ RAM

Scores that use up to about 20 different sounds in Kontakt Gold:

Windows: 2.5GHz processor or faster, 512Mb+ RAM. ASIO-compatible sound card strongly recommended (not sound chip on motherboard), preferably separate graphics card

Mac: 1.2GHz processor or faster, 1Gb+ RAM

Scores that use reverb or more than 20 different sounds will need a faster processor and more RAM.