Review: Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S49 Controller & Komplete 10
While Kontrol’s berserk LED Light Guide and ribbon controllers might seem gimmicky, there’s method to the madness behind NI’s first keyboard controller.
By Brad Watts
3 December 2014
Review: Christopher Holder
I honestly thought I’d seen everything there was to see in the world of controller keyboards, but Native Instruments’ Komplete Kontrol controllers have relieved me of that claim. With the various sized Kontrol S-Series keyboards, NI has gone utterly berserk with LED lighting — this thing lights up like the Sydney Harbour Bridge on New Year’s Eve. The Komplete Kontrol keyboards sport this crazy feature called ‘Light Guide’. Every key on the keyboard has a multiple colour LED situated at the rear of each key. Upon boot-up this array of lights goes through a Las Vegas display, pulsating every colour the system allows, blue, red, green, purple, yellow, orange etc, before settling into a subtle blueish hue. Absolutely fantastic look, and perfectly suited to a dimly lit studio atmosphere. If sci-fi aesthetics are your thing the Komplete Kontrol keyboards are the only keyboard worth owning. Much sensation indeed! However there’s more to ‘Light Guide’ than whiz-bang lighting effects, and I’ll expand on those features a bit later, in the meantime, let’s look at the more traditional features of the Komplete Kontrol series.
KOMPLETE KONTROL INDEED
The Komplete Kontrol keyboards come in three typical keybed sizes: 25, 49, or 61 key models, dubbed S25, S49, and S61 respectively. For review purposes I received the 49-key, S-49 model. In terms of sound generation, the S-series are strictly controller keyboards, and are designed to helm the Komplete suite of virtual instruments and sample players. Included in the review setup was a Komplete 10 software package which, in itself, is a formidable sonic arsenal, but again, more on that later.
The S49 presents as quite an attractive piece of hardware — it’s a very impressive effort when you consider this is Native Instruments’ first crack at a keyboard, but then remember, NI has put some pretty sturdy runs on the board with Traktor and Maschine. With the overall finish a glossy mirror black it looks every bit the modern studio accoutrement (and all those pretty lights… ooh la la!). Bear in mind the keyboard requires power — no USB power-only option — no doubt due to the plethora of LEDs. The unit includes sustain and expression pedal inputs, and sports real MIDI DIN-plugs for MIDI in and out. These are, however, only accessible when the keyboard is connected to a computer via USB and you instigate the Controller Editor software. So remain aware that this keyboard only functions with a computer attached.
The actual keybed is manufactured by Fatar, long-time manufacturers of primo electronic keybeds. The Italian company has been in the business since the mid 1950s, having started out supplying keyboards to electronic organ manufacturers. It’s the pinnacle of keybeds — with a duty cycle of three million key presses per key. The semi-weighted keybed is quite firm to the press, with a solid stop at the bottom end of the key’s travel. It also transmits channel pressure. It’s a great feeling keybed, and one that will probably outlast the electronics surrounding it.
Centrally located on the upper panel are eight continuously variable pots which can be freely assigned within the Komplete 10 software instruments to activate or adjust all manner of parameters. Below each variable pot is a display to represent what each pot is assigned to, and a level display. These displays seem to be of the OLED variety, and are invisible until turned on. When switched off (or unassigned) they disappear beneath the black translucent panel. What’s even cooler is the pots are sensitive to capacitance, so the slightest touch of a knob immediately alters the display to reflect the numeric or text status of the assigned parameter. To the immediate left of the rotary controllers are two buttons to scroll through additional sets of assigned parameters, so you’re not limited to eight parameter controllers per patch. NI refers to this controller mapping system as ‘Native Map’, and there are thousands of patches across the Komplete range of instruments which have been mapped to suit the Kontrol keyboard.
Off to the left again are transport buttons, backlit of course. These link with whichever DAW platform you’re using, with support for Ableton Live 9.1.4, Cubase 7.5.1, Nuendo 6.0.7, and Logic X 10.0.7. Ableton requires some tweaking for complete integration, but NI provides explicit instructions for the setup on its website – I’m sure Ableton users are easily up to the task of installing a few extra files here and there. I ran the unit alongside Logic X and the integration was utterly seamless, and extremely responsive.
Speaking of responsiveness, below the octave +/- buttons are two vertically-oriented ribbon controllers. These replace the more traditional pitchbend and modulation wheels. My initial scepticism was that it was a cost cutting measure, but in use I found these to be very acceptable. Both ribbons have OLED indicators flanking their sides, and these represent where the ‘virtual controller wheel’ is set. In the case of the pitchbend controller, the lights remain at middle position until the ribbon is touched, with zero ‘null-point’ anomalies as you’d normally experience with a mechanical pitchbend wheel or stick.
The modulation controller has some extra tricks up its sleeve. From within software (i.e. any Komplete instrument’s preferences), the modulation controller ribbon can be set to ‘ball’ mode. In this setting, the virtual mod wheel will ‘bounce’ back and forth — ping-ponging between zero and full modulation. The speed at which this change occurs depends on what speed you run your finger along the ribbon controller. Additional ‘gravity’ and ‘friction’ control levels let you adjust the ballistics of this behaviour, and defeating the ‘Walls’ setting renders the modulation to scroll from zero through to full in a continual cycle. It’s a whole new slant on the modulation wheel and will invariably reveal new and exciting performance methods. My only quandary is not being able to alter this setting on a per-patch basis — it’s a global parameter that applies only to the hardware unfortunately.
Moving on to a bit of note-modulation, the Kontrol keyboards feature a very nice arpeggiator function with control over rhythm divisions including dotted and triplet timing, swing, dynamics and gating, direction and so forth. And while I found it an excellent, traditional-style arpeggiator, I couldn’t find a way to record the arpeggiated notes within Logic. After wading through the 244-page manual I concluded it to be impossible. This really annoyed me as it seemed to render the arpeggiator useless in a DAW scenario, which is where this system unequivocally resides. Then, assuming the function was missing, I changed tracks in my DAW, instanced another Komplete Kontrol instrument, and the arpeggiator on the previous instrument kept going! How do they do that?! I stand here undeniably impressed.
NEED TO KNOW
BROWSE KOMPLETELY
The major integration factor with the Komplete Kontrol keyboards and the Komplete software suite is an additional layer of software between the controller and the software. Komplete Kontrol is a separate application which presents the entire Komplete sound library and range of instrument plug-ins. You can either use the standalone version of Komplete Kontrol, or instigate the VST or AU plug-in within your DAW. Once either of these are running, a quick prod of the ‘Browse’ button on the controller brings up a browsing window. This floats entirely above your DAW windows and sets out a hierarchy of patch choices, beginning with your choice of plug-in instrument, then differing library styles. This is then broken down into categories such as bass, strings, horns etc (in the case of a synth-style plug-in), and then on to the actual presets. Unlike other similarly integrated systems, you must choose your instrument plug-in first, rather than selecting from a list of patches and the software instigating the relevant plug-in. This may seem restrictive to those who may not have a handle on what each of the 26 plug-ins actually do, but a little play-time with each will get you in the picture pretty quickly.
Once the Komplete Kontrol window is open, all navigation is via the keyboard controller — there’s no functionality available via mouse-click. That said, scrolling through plug-in instruments, categories and patches using the keyboard controller’s browse button and notched data entry knob is super intuitive. You simply scroll through the options using the knob, then press the knob down to instance the patch. There are also N, S, E, West navigation buttons and preset up and down buttons if you want to just march through the available presets. Incidentally, when the Komplete Kontrol browser window is closed, those N, S, E, West buttons also provide navigation within your DAW. Nice!
LIGHTS, ACTION!
Now, about these lights. As mentioned, NI’s coup de grâce with these S-series controllers is ‘Light Guide’. Light Guide encompasses multicolour LEDs for each keyboard key. I initially considered this to be a gimmick, with throwbacks to the days of the Thomas Organ Company’s ‘Color-Glo’ organ training system (Google that one — the keys lit up with the note names on them — it was pretty lame). Beyond the initial frivolity and sci-fi chic aesthetic, there are a number of benefits to NI’s Light Guide other than it looking ace in the dark. For starters, the LEDs show a different colour depending on the plug-in creating the sound: blue for most of the synths such as Absynth, Massive, and the Retro Machines instruments, and green or various shades of purple for others. Not a game changer, but a nice touch.
What’s more interesting is in the case of using mapped instruments such as drumkits — instruments such as Battery, Kontakt, and the drumkit specific instruments such as Abbey Road ’60s Drummer. Pull up one of these style instruments and the Light Guide LEDs map out your keymaps according to colour. Kicks will be red, snares orange, hi-hats are sky-blue, cymbals are green, and so forth. This is extremely useful. The visual sensory cue as to where your sounds are placed really does make a difference, especially in a heat-of-the-moment recording, or indeed moreso, on a dimly lit stage.
Yet another Light Guide system application is relevant to the controller’s ‘Scale’ feature. Hitting the ‘Scale’ button on the controller instigates a mode whereby the keyboard’s LEDs highlight the notes across the keyboard applicable to your selected scale. To remain in your chosen key all you need to do is follow the lights. This can be further idiot-proofed by a function where notes not used within your chosen scale are defeated — they’ll no longer produce a sound. Absolutely brilliant if you’re one to ‘stick to the black keys’ and attempt to compose every single composition in Gb major. Those scales can also be set for various modes such as blues, major and minor pentatonic, diminished, etc, 14 types in all. While in Scale mode, you can also set the controller to play chords from a single key, and choose the style of chord and inversion. Like the arpeggiator, these chords are stored with your instrument choice as you skip to the next track in your DAW.
THE SOFT BITS
It’d be remiss of me not to mention some details regarding the Komplete software instrument package. As mentioned, the review system came with a copy of Komplete 10, but the S-series controllers will also work with Komplete 9. Dyed-in-the-wool NI advocates would be aware of the star players such as the Battery and Kontakt sample players, Absynth, Massive, FM8, and Reaktor. These instruments are available as ‘normal’ instrument plug-ins – they appear in your plug-in list. The remaining 20 instruments are only available via the Komplete Kontrol browser plug-in. That said, many of the newer instruments I found to be excellent sources of inspiration. Here’s a few of my favourites:
Abbey Road ’60s drummer: Offering a Ludwig-looking kit on a nice parquetry floor. This kit provides four variations of the drumkit, with infinitesimal adjustment of room and overhead microphone levels, kick beater type, velocity curves, along with a bunch of grooves which can be altered according to groove, speed, tightness, etc. The mixer for the kit even incorporates an SSL G-series channel strip for each drum which includes transient augmentation, compression, EQ and tape emulation.
Drumlab: A drum workshop with all the bits you need to create nasty loop-style grooves. This includes mapping for various electronic kits so I instantly fell in love with triggering this from my Roland kit.
Monark: Looks like a Minimoog. Sounds like one too!
Beyond the initial frivolity and sci-fi chic aesthetic, there are a number of benefits to NI’s Light Guide other than it looking ace in the dark.
Polyplex: Utterly brilliant. Polyplex maps eight complex hit sounds wherever you like across the keyboard. Those sounds you hear at the opening of a cinema release promo, an advertising agency showreel, or littered throughout forensic cop shows, sci-fi movies and foreboding psychological thrillers. This is where you get them. And if the presets aren’t quite what you’re after, each of the eight sound slots has a variable randomisation feature to quickly spit out another option. If soundtracks are your game you must own this. Definitely one of my faves.
Prism: Physical modelling out the proverbial, with the simplest opening interface ever. Open the additional views for access to six-point envelope generators for modulation and the exciter/filter. Pads, pads, and even more pads.
Kontour: More physical modelling based on phase modulation, only this instrument has a knob for ‘drama’.
Retro Machines Mk2: Juicy Roland-style analogue synthesis. Includes a very programmable arpeggiator. You know what to do.
Rounds: A combination of subtractive analogue and frequency modulation synthesis with some insane modulation possibilities. Another must-have for the soundtrack people.
Spark: Fizzy filters and ring modulation. Driven by Reaktor.
Then there are a number of real-world-style instruments such as Session Strings, Session Horns, Studio Drummer, Scarbee Vintage Keys, Vintage Organs, along with a number of real piano instruments. It’s possibly the most comprehensive instrument suite available. I’ll also mention the excellent processing plug-ins included in Komplete 10. These are supplied courtesy of Softube and include SSL-style bus compression, dynamics, and EQ switchable between G and E-series EQ designs. There’s also NI’s Supercharger for stonking compression duties and Guitar Rig 5 for amplifier/cabinet/pedal emulation.
There’s a lot to this package. As far as the instrumentation and effects go this could be the only ‘outboard’ software you’ll ever need. Combine this with your favoured DAW and an S-series controller and you’ll be sitting pretty for years to come. Compatibility extends to OS X 10.8 and 10.9 on Intel Core 2 Duo machines, and Windows 7 or 8 on an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD AthlonTM 64 X2. Be prepared to install 13 DVDs of material.
I remain suitably impressed with the S49 controller. Not only is the keybed a fantastic player, the cutting edge features like the arpeggiator and scale rendering, along with those excellent Light Guide LEDs really sets this keyboard apart from the pack. For fast, vast and varied composition I’d honestly look no further.
RESPONSES