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Advantages of Using Komplete Kontrol?

robgb

Genius. Idiot. You Decide.
Native Instruments is now offering Komplete Kontrol for free and I'm curious if this is worth downloading. I know very little about it. Is it worth bothering with?

What are the advantages of using Komplete Kontrol?
 
Native Instruments is now offering Komplete Kontrol for free and I'm curious if this is worth downloading. I know very little about it. Is it worth bothering with?

What are the advantages of using Komplete Kontrol?
Well, it's a free stand-alone plug-in player, so there's that. And you can load effects now as well, so if you want to mess around with your VIs without needing to fire up the DAW, it's kind of convenient for that. It also allows you to tag and audition sounds, so there's a theoretical utility to that, but I personally don't find that it is organized in a way that is really all that helpful to discovery. It also has a built in arpeggiator and maybe some other midi effects, which I never use. They've just added a sample player (different from Kontakt) for loading one shots and maybe other things. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.

If you have a Komplete Kontrol keyboard, it offers a lot more, including the light guide, the ability to browse your sounds on the keyboard, and automatic assignment of knobs. The light guide is marginally useful, especially for VIs with complicated sets of keyswitches and such, for instance, the Sonokinetic stuff. But mostly I find the lights to be just a nice ambience. And I don't use the KK software inside a DAW, even with the automatic mapping. I prefer to just create my own presets. I feel like KK is just adding another level of complication without a lot of clear benefit when I'm working. It can be useful when learning a new VI however to have everything mapped out that way, with the lights marking ranges and keyswitches, and the knobs all clearly labeled. I'm not sure how much of that utility is available if you don't have a KK keyboard, however.

That said, the latest update of the software has created problems using my S61 in Logic even when I don't use the software. Indeed, it now causes problems in Logic when I don't have a dummy instance of KK in my project. That's frankly kind of disturbing.
 
The main hook as far as I can see, is the ability to audition and load patches across all your Komplete and NKS libraries. For example, filter your search by “analogue lead” and KK will audition all your patches across all your libraries, only loading the plugin if you hear something you like.

I’ll be giving it a test run in this week’s coming productions. We’ll see how it goes..
 
The main hook as far as I can see, is the ability to audition and load patches across all your Komplete and NKS libraries. For example, filter your search by “analogue lead” and KK will audition all your patches across all your libraries, only loading the plugin if you hear something you like.

I’ll be giving it a test run in this week’s coming productions. We’ll see how it goes..
I'll be most curious if you find it useful. I've tried using the tags to search and find things, but haven't had much success in it helping me to discovery. Maybe I'm just approaching it wrong.
 
I downloaded it, but don't find it to be of much use. Doesn't seem to be any way to load more than one Kontakt instrument, like you can in Kontakt. Or maybe I'm just missing it. I let it sift through all my files, but the "organization" leaves something to be desired. There's probably a way to fix or improve this, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Oh, well. At least it was free.
 
The BIG avantage of KK is the fact that mostly all NI and major companies of sampling instruments are pre mapped on the keyboard. And it's a great saving time. It's very usefull to have a synth with all controls fully mapped on start and you can just turn your knobs and play straight with it.
But if you don't use NI stuff or even midi control at all, you can pass on KK.
Instead the full experience is with KK keyboard.
For loading few other intruments like in kontakt it exist a litlle tips to do that. But with KK you can just load multiples instances of it instead charging multiples instruments in kontakt. (the vst is not too much ram/cpu consuming => there is some video on youtube demonstrated this).
 
I do not love KK. I really tried because I want the integration with my S88. But it’s so clunky. The tag cloud search is a nightmare. Things get weird with high track counts. I really can’t imagine using it voluntarily.
 
I like it a lot for the convenience of searching, hearing, opening & tweaking (to some degree) VIs from the controller.

I hate that I'm almost hooked on it and have passed on at least 1 VI because it wasn't NKS. And I have a few non-NKS VIs from before buying the KK controller that I don't use much because of the now "inconvenience".
 
I've no experience of using it without a KK S-series keyboard. But with the keyboard I think it's really useful for the light guide. I still tend to do most things via the software rather than on the keyboard screens though. What's this about the sample player they've added? I hadn't even noticed that.

The Previews functionality is the most useful thing of all, although you have to download the relevant file from Native Access and I think it's over 7GB at the moment.
 
I downloaded it, but don't find it to be of much use. Doesn't seem to be any way to load more than one Kontakt instrument, like you can in Kontakt. Or maybe I'm just missing it. I let it sift through all my files, but the "organization" leaves something to be desired. There's probably a way to fix or improve this, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Oh, well. At least it was free.

If you open a Kontakt NKS instrument in KK, then go to View>Edit, you then have the normal Kontakt browser within the KK window. You can even then (I think) open non-NKS Kontakt libraries within that same window, from the Kontakt browser in the way you normally would, although the light guide won't work with these.
 
I like the scale function, but as others have said you really need the light guide of the Komplete keyboards to get the most out of it.
 
If you open a Kontakt NKS instrument in KK, then go to View>Edit, you then have the normal Kontakt browser within the KK window. You can even then (I think) open non-NKS Kontakt libraries within that same window, from the Kontakt browser in the way you normally would, although the light guide won't work with these.
The View>Edit View is also the way to open Kontakt multis. There might be another way to do it, but I haven't found it. (I don't think multis are included in the patch lists, and you can't save multis as your own presets within the KK software.)
 
I'll be most curious if you find it useful. I've tried using the tags to search and find things, but haven't had much success in it helping me to discovery. Maybe I'm just approaching it wrong.
I'm really liking the expansions and Sounds.com integration. Until now, my workflow has been something like: Download > Open new EXS24 sampler/audio track > Find downloaded file (where did I put it?) > Import.. etc etc.

Now, it all just appears in Komplete Kontrol, all nicely tagged and ready for use. The little "sampler" plugin in KK is a godsend for those quick "one shot" things.

It's also proving a quick way to switch between sounds across libraries without having to load a new plugin. I think having the preview sounds installed is a must here.

I'm liking it so far. We'll see how it goes. I can imagine KK would be much less useful in an orchestral template setting, but for the pop stuff I'm doing at the moment, it's great. There's a slight wiff of "kludge" about the plugin (not resizable etc) but I think that's to be expected - it's got to work across 2 major operating systems and a whole bunch of different DAWs.

Only problem is now I want a KK M32 keyboard..
 
I have KK S88 mk1
i dont use the kk app
i do all the midi in cubase.
but for protools users i think they might benefit from it.
 
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