Review: Native Instruments Komplete 8 (Highlights)
Every software program on earth is running up the numbers – Native Instruments’ Komplete is now locked in at No. 8. But is it complete yet?
28 October 2011
Review: Graeme Hague
It’s the Murphy’s Law of software reviewing. It feels like only a few months ago that I was writing about Komplete 7 and all it had to offer, and yet already Komplete 8 has been sitting on my hard drive for the past three weeks. A bit of digging around reveals it was Issue 79 – that means it’s still in the toilet magazine rack, right? This latest incarnation of this Native Instruments bundle of almost everything the company produces has, as you’d expect, a lot in common with K7 so I’m not going to rake over not-so-old ground here. More importantly, there are a couple of stand-out additions to NI’s stable of software thoroughbreds that come with K8 that you should know about. You can buy them separately, but here we’ll deal with them as new components of the Komplete 8 bundle.
Briefly, just in case you inexplicably didn’t read my earlier review, Native Instruments’ Komplete is a software suite of virtual instruments, plug-ins and effects that pretty much covers the entire spectrum of any DAW tricks and treats you’d need in a virtual studio. For the record, you can go one better than the ol’ garden-variety Komplete with ‘Komplete 8 Ultimate’ which does have absolutely everything they make, and comes included with a USB 2.0 external hard drive to handle all the samples. Aside from the Solid Series of EQs and effects being available as stand-alone components (more about these later) and the Vintage Compressor plugs, the extra Ultimate content is a little like scraping the bottom of NI’s barrel with some stuff you might never install. Still, you can’t argue that Ultimate represents an enormous cost saving compared to buying everything on its own, so make sure you consider it if Komplete tempts you.
Right, let’s get back to the new goodies in K8.
STUDIO DRUMMER
Straight away, I’m going to say that Studio Drummer has set the bar considerably higher when it comes to virtual drum samplers. ‘SD’ has been threatening to appear for a while as the next logical step after NI’s Abbey Road series of drum collections, except it was always a bit of a puzzle whether or not NI might finally revamp its venerable Battery 3 drum sampler instead. Well, I’m guessing Battery 3 is heading for the scrapheap – sadly, it’s been great – now that the new Studio Drummer has so much more.
Studio Drummer is a Kontakt instrument so you’ll need the latest Kontakt 5 (or the free Kontakt 5 Player) to launch it. Selecting an SD drum kit as an instrument brings up the tasty Studio Drummer GUI with an impressive illustration of your chosen drum setup. There are three drum sets to choose from: the Garage, Session and Stadium kits. They’re faithful to what you’d expect: the Garage kit – a Sonor SQ2 system – is a little loose-skinned, the cymbals are a bit trashy and it has one less floor tom; the Session kit – a Yamaha Maple Custom Absolute – is the opposite with tight tuning, quality cymbals and a second floor tom; while the Stadium drums – a Pearl Masters Premium Maple kit – sounds big with ringing toms and thumping kick drums. Just in case it needs stating – these are real drum samples folks. The three kits were painstakingly recorded at the Teldex Studio in Berlin.
All three kits can be loaded in as ‘Full’ or ‘Lite’ configurations, with the latter sacrificing some samples – and therefore a degree of potential realism – to make life easier on your system resources. There’s also supposed to be a ‘Template’ mode where nothing is loaded and you choose the individual kit pieces one by one to make up your own, but don’t spend ages trying to find it – it doesn’t exist. Turns out it’s an error in the manual.
TWEAKING THE GROOVE
Studio Drummer has a large library of pre-programmed Grooves to play. However, there is no means by which to compile a drum track inside the software. Anything you do must be dragged into a timeline track on your host DAW software. However, SD has some neat tricks to try beforehand. For example, after you’ve loaded a Groove into SD’s preview player you can then alter the overall velocity, apply swing and adjust the tightness (how strictly quantise settings are applied), and then drag the Groove into your host with all the tweaks automatically applied. It’s like instant, yet complex editing. Next, you could return the settings back to default before dragging the exact same Groove into your project again where it’ll play back unaffected. It greatly simplifies what could otherwise be some time-consuming MIDI reprogramming to create that elusive ‘real’ sound in the dynamics of a song. The Tightness control, by the way, is quite cool. At 50% it’s as the Groove was originally recorded, at 100% any human quirks have been quantised into extinction, while at 0% your virtual drummer needs to be taken home and put into virtual bed to sleep it off. Funny.
Each individual kit piece can be fine-tuned for attack, hold and decay levels, the amount of overhead and room mic mix, and actual tuning. When you’re finished with that, you can turn your hand to Studio Drummer’s own mixer.
NEED TO KNOW
The Session Kit in all its glory. Shiny drums without any stick marks, shiny cymbals without any fingerprints, shiny floor… hmm. Where’s the beer-stained, fag-burned drum mat? They call this real?”
The Studio Drummer mixer section showing a Solid G-EQ tab open. Nothing to do with SSL… no sirree, nothing at all. Just one of those crazy coincidences.”
Guitar Rig 5 with the new Van 51 Amplifier ready to rock ’n’ roll. Guess which famous guitarist it’s probably named after? Clapton? Stevie Ray Vaughan?
Retro Machines Mk 2. Old keyboards never die – they’re resurrected as ‘retro’ sounds. Which means disco isn’t dead either.
THE MIXER
First of all, the mixer is well laid out so you’ll probably find you want to use it, unlike others of this type. Seriously, usually these sorts of inside-the-plug-in mini-mixers are too finicky to work with. Most users end up routing the individual drums directly to their host DAW’s console instead. But SD’s mixer is different. It’s large and detailed enough to operate without breaking out your best bifocals. Standard channel assignments are there with overhead and room mic faders, too. Even better, it has a range of EQs and effects that are probably superior to anything your DAW can offer. They’re called the NI Solid Series of EQ and Compression, and any resemblance in appearance, operation and audio quality to Solid State Logic plug-ins is, of course, entirely coincidental and unintended – although there is a small concession to SSL in the manual – the compressor design is apparently based on something ‘legendary’. Maybe the legal dudes at NI are nervously watching the caller ID on their phones with a serious block on SSL’s number… maybe not. All we care about is that these Studio Drummer mixer effects are excellent.
There’s also a Tape Saturation plug-in and NI’s new Transient Master plug-in (more on that in a moment). Effects can be re-ordered, bypassed or routed to a different bus for further processing. The final result is a vast range of possible sonic flavours for each kit piece or the drums overall. If this amount of mucking around seems daunting, the mixer has its own selection of presets that apply specifically to each kit. Thus the Stadium Kit has a “Metal-o-Rama” preset among the choices, while the Session Kit has “Power Punch” on offer. Both work really well. It’s worth noting also that the ranges of presets can’t be used on the wrong kits.
Studio Drummer has plenty of other now-standard tools such as Randomise settings, Humanise… plus the Kontakt 5 shell around it offers even more. Before you twiddle or turn anything, the sound of SD is brilliant, the Grooves library is useful and extensive without being bewildering, and I’ve already raved about the mixer.
HANG ON, BUT…
You may have guessed by now that I’m impressed. Surely, there must be something wrong?
It’s a niggle, but SD has no method of importing your own MIDI drum programming into the browser without you being clever. Lots of keen drum programmers like myself like to start with a groove of our own and embellish it with the fills, flams and such from SD’s library. If you could, then those nifty Velocity, Swing and Tightness functions might be applied to your original programming, too. But the only way to do this is create a new project in your DAW, compose any programming you want, then export it as a MIDI file to Studio Drummer’s library folder. Some DAWs will give you better workflows to achieve this, but you’ll still have to create a new MIDI file somehow. The kicker is you can’t refresh the Groove Library to access them. Only quitting Studio Drummer and restarting it will allow your own, new Grooves to appear. If you have the full Stadium kit of over 400MB loading each time… face it, it’s a workaround for something NI didn’t provide.
Also, in Abbey Road Drums a dialogue box tells you which drum piece you’re playing and how. Like “Snare left of centre,” “Kick drum, wooden beater” and even “Snare, tea-towel” (really). It’s not included in SD. I realise you’re supposed to know these things by the actual sound – but hey, would it be so hard to have it in SD, if it’s good enough for Abbey Road?
Anyway, enough complaining.
ANOTHER STRING TO THE NECK
Guitar Rig gets a promotion to Guitar Rig 5 with additional modules that’ll satisfy any Big Hair Band fans. It’s time to dig the spandex pants out again folks. No prizes for guessing where the inspiration for the new Van 51 amplifier came from. The Hot Solo + Amp comes from the same vintage and both have a huge, authentic guitar sound rather than seemingly emulating a CPU trying to rip up a paper bag. There are also new effects and improvements to components that were introduced in GR4 for Guitar Rig’s significant makeover following GR3 (which worked fine, so the redesign copped some flak). The GR5 fixes look sensible and should appease the critics. Personally, I’ve been using GR playing live for some time and I can’t wait to stun the punters with a face full of Van 51, but my initial experiments are hinting that GR5 has perhaps left NI’s own hardware and drivers behind a little. In the studio and safely cocooned in a DAW, GR5 is exciting. On the road, and subject to the vagaries of different laptops and different controller hardware, stability issues can make you nervous. You might want to extensively test the performance first. The truth is, Guitar Rig has always been a little intolerant, although it works great once you iron out your specific computer’s requirements.
TRANSIENT MASTER & AFRICA DISCOVERY
The aforementioned Transient Master is a new plug-in that NI is promising will transform your mixes to sheer genius. It’s a simple compressor effect that can be applied to any DAW track or bus from inside Guitar Rig 5 or the free GR5 Player (the freebie plug-in host for the likes of Transient Master), and it’s also there as that effects option in the Studio Drummer mixer. As the name suggests it focuses all its energy on transients, so drums can work well. But things like plucked strings or percussive organ sounds can also benefit. The concept is to push back or bring to the fore those fleeting, transient parts of the audio – the clicks, pops and blats of percussive instruments – and the results are surprisingly effective, if subtle (although the best effects often are). Since it’s included in Komplete 8 you’ll probably try it out on everything. Being a trifle esoteric, I’m not sure it’ll be high on the shopping list as a stand-alone product.
Likewise, the Discovery Series West Africa instrument is a collection of (take a wild guess here) African rhythms and single drums that may only appeal to a dedicated enthusiast or film post-production facilities, so you’d think it’s not going to fly off the music store shelves in droves. As a part of Komplete 8, it might come to mind more often when you’re searching for something different. There’s plenty of variety and the rhythms are cool. You will find a use for it.
RETRO MACHINES MK2
Finally, Retro Machines MK2 is a suite of 16 vintage analogue keyboards. Most of the sounds emulate keyboards that you can buy for five bucks on eBay and if you ask me it’s a mystery why anyone would want any of them back. After all, we’ve just spent a trillion dollars on software development to get away from these cheesy sounds. Okay, there are some classic sounds, but you know what I mean…
An extra 1300 presets have been added in K8 across the board to NI’s whole range of instruments like Absynth, Massive and FM8. It’s always fun to devote a few hours purely to checking these out and filing them into Favourites for future reference.
Talking of which, the future will no doubt bring us a Komplete 9, Komplete 10 and so on, and it can be difficult to decide which update to buy and which one to skip until next time. For mine, the inclusion of Studio Drummer alone makes this a worthwhile investment. The rest is a happy bonus.
RESPONSES