Review: Native Instruments Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition

Welcome to NI’s kitchen sink, 1TB+ ‘kompendium’ of all its hits.

10 February 2023

What do you give the producer or composer with everything? Well, you could do a lot worse than the Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition. This is Native Instruments’ ‘kitchen sink’ bundle — everything the team have been able to throw at its hugely successful Komplete platform (including a surprising number of new products), and redefines such terms as ‘epic’ and ‘feature rich’.

TSUNAMI!

Native Instruments’ Komplete software and Kontakt sample player are an industry standard. If you tune into Top 40 radio or pay heed to a movie score, chances are you will hear sounds generated by a Komplete instrument of some type. With the release of the Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition, NI is making available not so much a balanced/curated music software suite as a veritable tsunami of music-making tools that will keep users delving back in and discovering new sounds and features for years to come. All of the familiar tried and tested sample libraries and virtual instruments, such as Battery, Massive, Absynth and Reactor, are retained in expanded and augmented form, but then there’s more….oh so very much more!

Ashlight-screenshot-pichi — Screen composers will love instruments such as Ashlight, Straylight and Pharlight.

WIDESCREEN SOUNDS

Those who choose to spend the extra bucks to spring for the Collector’s Edition will doubtlessly include many producers and recording musicians looking for a sonic edge, whether in the form of a fresh expansion packs by the latest flavours in electronic production or in more flexibly articulated and lavishly-sampled acoustic instrument libraries.

Arguably, the biggest beneficiaries of this new release are screen composers who will find some outstanding new creative tools at their disposal. The headline items here are the Straylight, Pharlight and Ashlight sample-based instruments. All of these utilise what is now a fairly common NI approach to sound-making: blending two different looped sample sources through an X/Y matrix. By independently selecting the sample sources, modifying the loop in and out points, and playing with the X/Y matrix, a huge range of melodic, rhythmic and noise-based sounds can be generated. All three of these instruments excel at creating complex, evolving modern soundscapes that are powerfully evocative. It is hard to classify them too precisely but Pharlight is the most organically ethereal and Ashlight the most digitally brooding and avant-garde, with Straylight somewhere in the middle. Even the GUI artwork is a standout. If you just signed on with Netflix to make a sci-fi movie soundtrack, then these instruments have you covered and then some!

NEED TO KNOW

Native Instruments Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition
Sample, Instrument & FX Bundle

PRICE

A$2699
CONTACT

CMI: (03) 9315 2244 or [email protected]
PROS
- Vast array of quality sounds
- More efficient browser courtesy of Kontakt 7
- Playability of sample instruments continues to improve
CONS
- Dedicated external hard drive storage is required
SUMMARY

The most complete Komplete yet, brings more variety, depth and usability to an already feature-rich package. An improved browser, stunning new instruments and refined presets and tweakability make the Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition a must have for serious music makers in almost every genre.

HYBRID SOUNDS: ARKHIS, SEQUIS ET AL

NI appears to have really mastered some interesting sonic territory: that in-between zone of acoustically-based samples that, via the judicious use of effects processing and juxtaposition, achieve a hybrid modern sound. Nothing illustrates this better than Arkhis, an instrument that blends three sound sources to generate some stunning rhythmic and melodic effects. The source instruments are traditional, such as mandolins, hang drums and violins, but the outcomes can be very stylised and ‘now’ sounding.

Sequis uses diverse sources such as voices, mallet instruments and flutes to generate rhythmic and melodic arpeggios that are great song starters or feature hooks.

Lores explores softer organic textures that can take you to some very beautiful places through blending various instruments, including medieval pipes, hurdy gurdies and harps.

Yet another of these wonderfully open-ended hybrid instruments is Piano Colours. This is ostensibly a piano instrument but it can get you anywhere from off-kilter toybox tonalities to complex auto-arpeggiated percussion, to evolving atmospheres and, like its brethren, is highly tweakable if you care to delve beyond simply dialling up the eminently useable presets.

VOICE & MUSIC: OMNIA & MYSTERIA

Filling what was previously a bit of a gap in the Komplete universe, NI has brought several great choir instruments to the table here.

Omnia is a very versatile and beautifully-executed choir platform that allows for both subtle and overt manipulation of a multitude of basic choral tonalities. The combination of numerous vowel and consonant options and the onboard sequencer makes for very powerful and convincing results. When I first fired this one up I couldn’t help but to think about the many projects I’ve done over the years that would have benefitted greatly from this brilliant sample instrument.

Mysteria is a vocal instrument more focussed towards scoring and sound design with atonal atmospheres and chord clusters taking centre stage. Again the tonal range and choice of voicing makes for some very powerful and (you know you want to go there) unsettling effects.

If you just signed on with Netflix to make a sci-fi movie soundtrack, then these instruments have you covered and then some!

BROWSERS WELCOME

After many iterations without significant change, Native Instruments has finally given the Kontakt sample player a very welcome makeover. The new Kontakt 7 GUI allows users to more quickly scroll through a tile-based instrument library as well as search via sound type or character. If you search via the latter two, only instruments’ tiles that have that sound or characteristic will be displayed. Single clicking on a tile brings up that instrument’s presets menu on the right hand side of the main page, and single clicking on the individual preset names plays the sound and allows you to quickly audition a ton of sounds without having to open and close individual instruments. Double clicking on a menu preset or tile loads that instrument and functions as in earlier versions. The single click topology really speeds up the increasingly daunting search for the right sound and is very welcome when deciding which of the 27 orchestral and cinematic instruments, 19 synthesizers, 48 sampled instruments, 15 percussion tools and 103 expansions’ sounds is the right fit for your new track. As if that wasn’t enough, the factory library has also been enlarged in Kontakt 7 and includes many useful and tasty new additions.

Reaktor plug-in Knifonium. Sample instruments Glaze and Playbox.

ARCING UP

Moving somewhat sideways towards more synthetic sounds there are also some very tasty new offerings that are more overtly digital. Modular Icons is a ‘two-sample blend’ instrument with a more muscular digital signature. Perfect for hard hitting monophonic leads and edgy chord work. The filter and effects are also nice and punchy on this one.

Glaze and Playbox bring instant colour and digital sheen to the table, while Lo-Fi Glo and Stacks each have their own retro futurist vibe and pack a serious punch as pad or lead instruments.

Over in the Reaktor plug-in lurk many more new sounds courtesy of deeply tweakable synths like Knifonium, Monark, Rounds, Super 8 and Prism to name but a few.

Session-Bassist-Prime-Bass-screenshot-pichi

Session-Guitarist-Electric-Mint-screenshot-pichi

SAMPLE & HOLD

New additions to the sampled instrument content are headlined by the Spotlight Series East Asia. The tonalities of things like the Chinese Guzheng and Korean Janggu are stunningly realistic and this is another area where NI has really perfected the capture and playability of these types of acoustic sounds.

Komplete 14 also sees new additions to the range of Session Guitarist and Session Bassist libraries which expand these instruments into new areas. Keyboardists can now explore the realms of their fretboard brethren via Electric Vintage and Picked Nylon instruments among others.

DOWNLOAD DOWN-LOW

The gateway to all this Komplete 14 fun is a somewhat daunting download and data storage process, and I got off on the wrong foot by initially trying to put most of the data on my iMac’s main drive — big mistake! There’s just too much data here and the Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition package demands a separate and dedicated drive formatted correctly to minimise lag when calling up new instruments. In the end, it was easy enough to migrate the bigger data sets to a portable hard drive but be warned, you need to allow some serious time to get all this material off the NI website and into your system. Once you’ve got all these countless billion of ones and zeroes in your personal possession, there’s another daunting, though much more enjoyable process involved, namely exploring all these sounds. As with any instrument it takes time to learn the intricacies of many of the synths and sample libraries in the Komplete canon, but it is also an easy platform to get up and going. Many of the new instruments sound fantastic right off the bat and the menu libraries are stacked with extremely useful presets and easily tweakable parameters. Once you’re more familiar with an instrument, you can get under the bonnet and really fine-tune things to taste and, of course, save your own presets to the database.

40s-Very-Own-Drums-screenshot-pichi — Komplete 14 has beatmaking covered with the likes of 40s Very Own Drums.

THE BEAT GOES ON

Last but not least, the Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition brings some very welcome new beatmaking tools to the table. Butch Vig Drums is a plus-sized collection of heavily produced and hard-hitting pop-rock drum sounds. As well as sounding very, erm…’butch’, they are nicely balanced and fun to play with, lending productions a hyped quality that sits well with contemporary styles.

40s Very Own Drums supplies lots of modern synthetic beatmaking sounds, while Empire Breaks (my personal favourite) takes care of the hip hop side of things with some truly great-sounding ready-made beats and individual sounds.

If all that doesn’t yet satisfy your endless hunger for more tasty audio morsels, there are the 32 effects that come with the Komplete 14 Collectors Edition package. These include NI’s own extremely handy and great-sounding Solid EQ and Solid Bus Comp, Softube’s equally useful passive four-band EQ and Vari Comp as well as the bx range of processing plugs. The icing on the cake here is the Ozone 10 Standard dynamics and mastering plug-in courtesy of partner iZotope which takes very good care of the final spit and polish on your mix bus.

you could justifiably make the argument that this is the best value-for-money ‘instrument’ ever brought to market in the history of the world

Console-Focusrite-Brainworx-screenshot-pichi — 32 effects/processors come with the Komplete 14 Collectors Edition package.

MY LIFE IS KOMPLETE (AS IS MY HD)

The Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition takes up a whopping 1.125 terabytes of storage for the full installation, and will cost you around two and a half grand. Before you recoil, remember that you could easily spend as much on a mid-range Fender Telecaster or a Dave Smith Instruments analogue synth. In fact, you could justifiably make the argument that this is the best value-for-money ‘instrument’ ever brought to market in the history of the world. The range and power of the tools in this package is outrageous and allows you to make cutting-edge music in just about every musical genre imaginable, from avant-garde soundscapes to electro pop to classical to trap to jazz to RnB to world music to classic rock. If you are serious about making music using a computer, then Komplete 14 is one of the main tools you should have in your kitbag. If you can stump up for the Collector’s Edition you won’t regret it.