I was browsing the web for free instruments for Native Instruments Kontakt. I found close to 4 GB, not counting the Native Instruments User Library. Here’s the complete list.

BEWARE: I haven’t tried these yet. I don’t know the quality, and I don’t know if they all work.

They might work in Structure, or they might not. Structure supposedly supports the Kontakt format, but I’ve never had success importing my Kontakt 3 library into Structure.

Native Instruments Kontakt User Library – a little of everything.

Cinesamples freebies – Triangles, jam buckets and snaps & claps.

Audio Warrior Free Djembe – Djembe, a type of drum.

ModernBeats free sounds – supposedly hiphop sounds and loops. It looks like a magazine ad and they wanted my email so I didn’t sign up for them. But I’m paranoid, they might be good.

I found an entire blog for Kontakt 3 Resources – unfortunately a bit disappointing. It’s not active anymore, have very few entries, and a lot of the stuff is hosted on that crap site Rapidshare.

Sample Logic TryPack – a big download. I think I’ve posted about it before. You’ll need to enter email, name, address and so on. Interestingly ‘State’ was for some reason very important to them. It just so happens that Sweden doesn’t have any states.

Bolder Sounds free stuff – several free packs. You have to signup, then go through a shopping cart and checkout procedure. A bit of a pain, but at least they won’t ask you for your credit card.

Michael Kingston Riders – two drum kits located on a great looking website. Hopefully the Ruffrider kit is as rough as he says.

Babel Audio free percussion – four packs here, and it doesn’t look like your ordinary percussion stuff you already have either.

Autodafe – have two free packs. A set of Roland System 100m samples (which is a little unclear if it includes patches or not) and a drumpack.

Pettinhouse – a ton of free stuff. Mostly guitars and drums.

Soniccouture – includes, among other things, a brush kit, an acid pack and a thumb piano.

Busty Dozen Scrambled Vol 1 – a full CD for free.

3amnoise blog – here’s drum and fx kit for Kontakt. Check out the other posts as well, there aren’t a lot of them, and there’s nothing more in Kontakt format, but there are some samples and loops as well as patches for other formats.

Bo’s Bottles – click the oblong (funny word!) “download file” image, not the big round one.

Zvon – two confusing free pages.

Lx7 free drums – sounds like this could be heaven for people looking for vintage drum machine samples.

A vocal pack – not every day you find one of these.

Philharmonia Tuba – perhaps not the most common instrument to find either, but pretty cool. Tubas are very rock & roll.

Ourafilms – here’s a whole bunch of freebies.

Sonic Cinema Drill n Crack Pack and Jazzy Glitches – love the artwork on these. Have no idea about the sound.

Typhoon Sounds 8bit – 8bit-styled (think NES) free instruments. What’s not to like?

Precisionsound – I like that Precisionsound often sample more esoteric instruments. The have a couple of freebies: Cretone Time Tapper, Koestler, Red Grand Toy Piano (beware, .exe file) and Magic Music Box.

That’s all I got! Let’s hope they don’t all suck. If you know of anything else, let us know!

* * *

New additions November 2009:

Brendan Hogan – Brendan updates with new instruments every week.

The Lamb Laid Down on MIDI – So far only one instrument, Arp Pro Soloist Steel Guitar.

Human Workshop – three freebies here, AnaSynth, ArabFlutist and PadMeister.

Metallic Dreams, aimed at the more cinematic side of sounds, and Advanced Distortion. Both from Brickwall Audio.

Be sure to let us know if you know of any Kontakt instruments not listed here.