Kontakt, Komplete, and Kore 2

[Arcana]

Hey, I'm thinking of grabbing Kontakt 4. Not only does 78.41% of OC ReMixers seem to recommend Kontakt, but it is also the preferred sampler of famous names like Zircon and Rellik.

What I'm wondering though are the benefits of these bundles - namely Komplete and the Komplete + Kore 2 kits where you add about $100 extra for a bunch of softsynths.

Does anyone have an opinion on how good Komplete is for me? At the moment I use Logic Pro and most of their default plugins - it has a decent guitar amp (Guitar Amp Pro), a good drum machine (Ultrabeat), decent synths (subtractive and FM, along with some cool modeling synths) and a really cool impulse response reverb (Space Designer) and I'm pretty happy with them so far.

What I'm mostly aching for are good orchestral/ethnic/world samples, and possibly Shreddage

How are the synths in Komplete? Anyone got some user reviews? Is it worth the extra $100 or 200?

Also what exactly is Kore? The guy in the store was saying that it's for "managing my instruments" but I'm wondering if anyone has a bit more information. Kore 2 seems like it's meant more for live performance, but I'm wondering if it's been useful for anyone for tweaking parameters.

Thanks guys,

[Rozovian]

I actually ordered Komplete this week. Looking forward to the FM synth, and Reaktor. Not sure which I want more, but I'm getting both.

Basically, you get so much more with Komplete than with just Kontakt, so for the miniscule price difference it's definitely worth getting. As for KORE, if it's anything like KORE Player (which is free, btw) it's convenient but not necessary. Dunno for sure tho.

[zircon]

OK! So, I've been using Komplete since version 2, and while I don't have KORE, I'd say it's the best purchase I've ever made - and I paid $1400 for it ($1k for v2, ~$200 for the upgrades to v4 and v6.) Here's the breakdown of Komplete.

* Kontakt 4 - As you know, this is THE sampler, and you need it to run all the best third-party libraries. However, the built-in library is also fantastic. I've been using the organs and orchestral sounds extensively on the Monkey Island 2 soundtrack. I haven't explored the ethnic/world section in great depth but what I've played has been very usable and high-quality.

* FM8 - This would be an awesome synth even if you could only use the presets, of which there are literally thousands that come with it. You can also download original DX7 banks and load those in too. Besides the standard variety of bells, pads and solid basses, FM8 has a lot of really nice moving and arpeggiated sounds. I've been using FM7/FM8 since 2004 or so and it's very useful for adding some interesting sonic character to a piece. A hidden bonus is the "FM8FX" plugin which lets you run any synth through the FM8 mod matrix (ie. modulate audio in real-time!) as well as the FM8 effects themselves. The Psychedelay is one of my favorite effects ever.

* Massive - An excellent synth for electronic and hip-hop music. Very gritty and nasty with lots of ways to overdrive, distort and shape the sound. I never got into programming with it, but for electro-house and big beat, I love the presets (and tweaking them is a breeze.)

* Absynth 5 - This is a synth I've been using for awhile too, and it's another one that can add really unique sounds to a mix. It's particularly good for drones, pads, textures and atmospheric parts, though it CAN do some interesting variations on bread-and-butter patches too. Programming it isn't too difficult but the real benefit is the Absynth FX plugin which, like FM8, lets you run audio through the Absynth shaping and FX matrix. Very powerful stuff.

* Guitar Rig 4 - Unquestionably better than Guitar Amp Pro, though as guitar amp sims go, I think most would say it is not the very best, merely "good". Still, I use it all the time for amping up Shreddage and sometimes for processing bass parts.

* Battery 3 - If you're looking for the best acoustic drum plugin, you might look elsewhere, since the kits in Battery 3 pale in comparison to those in major drum plugins like BDF2 or S2. However, its world and ethnic percussion is definitely solid, as is the GM2 kit (again, used extensively in MI2). Also, the "Production" and "Electronic" kit categories are extremely unique. I've used them in countless electronic tracks.

* Reaktor 5 - Unless you're a maniac, don't even bother learning to really program this thing. If it sounds interesting to you, go for it, but IMO there is such a wealth of material in the free Reaktor libraries out there that you can spend weeks just playing with what people have already done. Subtractive synth emulations, crazy FX, compressors, and everything in between.

So, I would definitely say that for an extra $100-200, Komplete 6 is unquestionably worth it. For about the same price (maybe a bit less), you could get Quantum Leap RA, and while that would be slightly better overall for a greater variety in ethnic instruments, you're missing out on so much that I'd say it's not worth the trade.

[Palpable]

Kore is pretty much a system that lets you access and configure presets in other NI VSTs. NI uses a categorization system across their VSTs, and Kore lets you search across all of them, and gives you easy access to 8 parameters that you are most likely to want to mess with for each preset. It also comes with a fairly big library of sounds itself. I got it as part of a package with Komplete and it's my go-to VST when I'm not looking for a specific type of sound (e.g, if I want orchestral sounds, I go straight to Kontakt). I'd say it's more useful the more you use presets; if you create a lot of your own sounds from scratch, probably not worth getting. My method of working is usually finding a preset close to what I want then tweaking it, and Kore works nicely for that. It also does some cool stuff for live performance, but I haven't touched that yet.

But definitely go for Komplete over Kontakt, you just get a freakin' ton of stuff. I bought Komplete 5 almost two years ago for $700 (more money than Komplete 6 costs), and it's been an excellent purchase. I still feel like there's a lot to explore in it.

[avaris]

IMO I agree with zircon and palpable about Komplete and Kore. Although if you are only looking to make OCR mixes I personally don't see the need to spend that massive amount of money. How do your current mixes sound? Got an example? IMO learn to build and mix/master a song properly before upgrading your set-up. For example this mix was mixed and mastered entirely with the default Logic plugins:

http://ocrmirror.iiens.net/files/music/albums/xenogears/1-01%20Quickening%20(Faraway%20Promise)%20[Avaris,%20Level%2099].mp3

Although I did use Omnisphere for the FX and pad sounds. (despite Level 99's guitars which were modified after the recording using Logic's plugins) I would almost suggest Omnisphere for the money you are looking at spending. Although it does not have the FX and ethnic library you are looking for, It's individual sonic quality far exceeds Komplete IMO. My opinion on this is highly debatable, but IMO take it for what it is worth.

Omnisphere does lack somewhat in the ethnic instrument category. Although most people who find ethnic instruments appealing are often looking for unique and captivating timbres, Omnisphere is WAY more capable than most in conquering this realm of sonic potential. While EWQL RA is an excellent library for ethnic sounds, Omnisphere beats the pants out of it 10x over in terms of unique organic sounds.

[Meteo Xavier]

So, I would definitely say that for an extra $100-200, Komplete 6 is unquestionably worth it. For about the same price (maybe a bit less), you could get Quantum Leap RA, and while that would be slightly better overall for a greater variety in ethnic instruments, you're missing out on so much that I'd say it's not worth the trade.

Speaking of which, did you send me mine yet, or did that check come in yet?

[Arcana]

IMO I agree with zircon and palpable about Komplete and Kore. Although if you are only looking to make OCR mixes I personally don't see the need to spend that massive amount of money. How do your current mixes sound? Got an example? IMO learn to build and mix/master a song properly before upgrading your set-up. For example this mix was mixed and mastered entirely with the default Logic plugins:

At the moment most of my output is spent doing one-hour compos, which pretty much don't demand good sound quality at all. Right now I'm using a lot of the EWQLSO Play! stuff for the orchestral samples and quite simply I have more fun laying down haromines (and spend less time doing humanization) with the expensive libraries vs. something like Squidfont.

But you do bring up a good point, maybe it'll be good to finish a few songs before I go around buying new tools and I thank you for the reality grounding.

Still please feel free to extoll the virtues of Kontakt and Komplete, especially since it appears to be quite popular on OCR and other people may wish to learn about it.

Also please feel free to discuss orchestral libraries since I've been curious about them for a while, one reason I'd get Kontakt is for orchestral stuff. I asked the guy at the store what the differences between Kontakt are and the EWQLSO stuff was and he didn't really give me a great answer, mostly that the Play! engine sucks. He told me that the Vienna String Library stuff is more "classical" and dry compared to East West.

[dannthr]

Kontakt is a minimum requirement these days if you're going to do any professional (or professional-grade) work, in my opinion.

The organs are actually pretty snazzy and there's an incredible variety of 3rd party libraries (including Zircon's) available ONLY to people with the Kontakt sampler software.

[SnappleMan]

I don't think any of the Kontakt libraries are worth buying Kontakt over. The sampler itself though, is easily the best sampler I've ever used, so yeah.

[zircon]

Regarding VSL vs. QLSO, here's something from a post I made on AudioGANG:

On a category-by-category basis, here are my thoughts (I have QLSO Gold for Kontakt and VSL as part of Kontakt 2/3/4). Keep in mind that I'm more referencing the basic VSL collection, rather than the specific expansions like Appassionata strings.

* VSL has the better legato, by far. QLSO simply does not have true legato.

* VSL has better woodwinds, without question.

* VSL's horns are better for subtle passages, partially due to the legato which sounds especially good on the french horns. However, QLSO is better for bombastic, bright and aggressive brass.

* QLSO's percussion is more dramatic and 'large'. The anvils, timpanis, roto toms and bass drum are all fantastic. VSL is better for 'small' percussion, and of course dry stuff.

* Strings are close. I think I like the VSL solo strings more, particularly the cello, but QLSO's section strings sound smoother to my ears. In terms of raw power for a huge Zimmer/trailer sound, QLSO's marcato/staccato samples cannot be beat, especially since they have 6-8x RR. VSL's staccatos are nice too and actually work well when they are layered, but even the full section legatos don't quite have that same power.

I've seen people rag on QLSO for being too identifiable, over-used or only useful for dramatic music. However, even today it's still a really great library that is especially useful for layering with other sounds (or even live performances.) A friend of mine who works at a major game studio has used or has access to basically any library but still prefers the sound of QLSO over most anything for layering, and the strings (with some patch tweaks and EQ) over libraries like LASS.

The short answer to your question is that I actually do use both frequently, sometimes with both in the same project, other times not, and I would be hard-pressed to pick one as being better overall than the other. Sometime I look forward to buying VSL Special Edition to get access to even more instruments + legato patches... though I'll miss being able to load it in Kontakt!

[Moseph]

Regarding VSL vs. QLSO, here's something from a post I made on AudioGANG:

Also, for what it's worth, I like the VSL (post-Kontakt) sampler more than PLAY.

[Arcana]

I really do enjoy the bombastic, aggressive sound of the EWQLSO free stuff I've used so far (yes their strategy is working, using their limited selection of about 15 instruments has gotten me to consider buying their program).

[dannthr]

I don't think any of the Kontakt libraries are worth buying Kontakt over. The sampler itself though, is easily the best sampler I've ever used, so yeah.

Maybe not the libraries that come with Kontakt, but there are libraries FOR Kontakt that are just spectacular and available exclusively to people who own the Kontakt sampling software.

[SnappleMan]

Maybe not the libraries that come with Kontakt, but there are libraries FOR Kontakt that are just spectacular and available exclusively to people who own the Kontakt sampling software.

I am well aware of that. But even then, they're not the best around.

[dannthr]

I am well aware of that. But even then, they're not the best around.

"they're?"

The library that ships with Kontakt is pretty lack-luster compared to what is available for Kontakt. But if you're saying that all Kontakt libraries are not "the best around" then I'm not sure exactly what KIND of libraries you're refering to as I would say there are several libraries which could be counted as among the best if not THE best for what they do which are available only for Kontakt.

[Hy Bound]

For what its worth, i absolutely love the default library on Kontakt. It works really well with the sound from EWQLSO, Colossus and StormDrum. Their key-switching choir patch is da beezkneez. I also have True-Strike Tension library for Kore (free) and it is quite useful.

[LuIzA]

Kore is pretty much a system that lets you access and configure presets in other NI VSTs. NI uses a categorization system across their VSTs, and Kore lets you search across all of them, and gives you easy access to 8 parameters that you are most likely to want to mess with for each preset. It also comes with a fairly big library of sounds itself. I got it as part of a package with Komplete and it's my go-to VST when I'm not looking for a specific type of sound (e.g, if I want orchestral sounds, I go straight to Kontakt). I'd say it's more useful the more you use presets; if you create a lot of your own sounds from scratch, probably not worth getting. My method of working is usually finding a preset close to what I want then tweaking it, and Kore works nicely for that. It also does some cool stuff for live performance, but I haven't touched that yet.

I'd been wondering that too recently. is Kore ONLY for organizing presets? what about its sample library that ships with it? what's the difference between the paid version and the free kore player?

[Palpable]

I'd been wondering that too recently. is Kore ONLY for organizing presets? what about its sample library that ships with it? what's the difference between the paid version and the free kore player?

I think that's the primary feature of it, yeah. It also has some features like morphing between two different sounds or presets, step sequencer, and velocity layers but I haven't ever used those. The sample library is all over the place and is fairly big. It has some good stuff, but also some not so good. Comes with some FX as well. It also comes with a little hardware controller only designed for controlling it that I haven't found useful at all.

According to this, the free player comes with a smaller sample library and can't be used to organize sounds outside of Kore, which is most of the appeal for me. But it'll probably give you a sense of the interface.

[Kanthos]

The Kore Player is basically a VST with a small preset library and potential to expand it by buying Kore Soundpacks from NI. It's really not good for anything else, and has virtually no editing potential. If you're looking for a few more sounds and don't have other NI products, by all means download it.

The Kore Controller that comes, optionally, with the full Kore 2 (there is a software-only version) is actually quite useful; NI released a patch almost a year ago that lets you configure it to be used as a generic MIDI interface, so you can use it outside of Kore if you like. And, of course, you can control virtually everything within Kore using it.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about Kore is that it can import presets from non-NI plugins, though there are some limitations. Kore will only go through banks of presets that the plugin has loaded (so if your plugin loads a bank of 128 presets at a time but has its own way to load other banks from disk, you import presets for a bank, load the next, import, load, etc.) This doesn't work if the plugin expects the host to provide the interface for loading presets - Kore doesn't do so, and when I asked NI support about it, I was told they had no plans to add that feature. So, it can sort of load presets from other plugins; your mileage will vary. And, of course, you'll have to tag those presets on your own if you want them to be searchable in Kore's database, which'll be tedious.

I used Kore 2 for a while as the host for my live keyboard setup, and, honestly, it was pretty bad. I'd set it up so that I loaded single instances of a bunch of VSTs and was using Kore to filter, send program changes, and such. It had some issues with saving states correctly - I used 13 MIDI channels fed into Kontakt for an orchestra where I could use individual channels to let me customize which instruments I had playing, and Kore screwed that up in some of my live presets (live presets are different from the Kore Sounds that you'll make and that all NI plugins use for their preset format now; those are handled much better). The worst was when I made a minor tweak in rehearsal the first time I tried to use Kore live, tried to save my Kore performance, and had Kore crash and corrupt the savefile, making me have to redo it all in the 30 minutes between rehearsal and the performance.

In short, don't use Kore as a standalone host for live use. There are better tools out there: Brainspawn Forte (I have a copy of it I'm trying to sell) and Cantabile for Windows, and I hear that Apple's Bandstand (part of Logic or Logic Pro or something) is quite good as well for Mac users.

However, I do still use Kore in my live setup. I use Cantabile as my host and have two Kontakt instances and one Kore instance loaded. This time around, I make a Kore Sound for each song we do in Kore (using MIDI channels within the Kore Sound so that I can still use different sounds within a song), and let Cantabile handle the rest of the details. All I have to do in Kore is drag out all the sounds for the songs that we'll be playing on a given night and quickly set up performance presets by muting all but one of the sounds. This seems to work much better.

[LuIzA]

well, I just bought Komplete 7. but basically, I'd have to buy the full Kore to be able to organize stuff?

is it some sort of sampler like Kontakt, or something else entirely?

[Kanthos]

To organize stuff *across plugins*, yes.

Each NI plugin in Komplete 7 has its own set of Kore Sounds. Within each plugin, there's a search mechanism to let you search by name, by attribute (search, for example, for a Bright, Warm Synth Lead), or both. Earlier versions of NI instruments used their own preset formats, but when Kore came out, they eventually reworked everything to use a standard format.

Without Kore, you can start, say, FM8 and search for your bright, warm synth lead. Maybe you'll find one you want, maybe not. The catch is that you had to choose FM8, and that it might not suit your needs, and it can't include sounds from other plugins, obviously. Maybe on some project you came up with the perfect lead that was made up of patches from FM8 and Massive; that sound doesn't live anywhere other than in the project you used it in (unless your DAW/host has a way of capturing plugin presets across multiple channels and combining them as one).

With Kore, you can search for those same attributes across all NI instruments plus any other plugins that you import presets for. The workflow, presumably, is that your projects will use Kore instances and within Kore, you'll find the sounds you want, and not have to care about which specific plugin it came from.

I'd say that the Kore way of doing things is definitely worthwhile, but can also be more tedious and requires a fairly high initial investment if you use plugins besides what NI offers or if you have plugins in a format other than VST (pretty sure Kore only understands VSTs).

Edit: Oh, there's no sampling involved either. Kore is just organizing the presets that your plugins come with, and when you load a Kore sound, it transparently loads the VST(s) needed to play back that preset.

[Arcana]

and I hear that Apple's Bandstand (part of Logic or Logic Pro or something) is quite good as well for Mac users.

I believe you mean "Mainstage"? (http://www.apple.com/logicstudio/mainstage/) This was a small part of your post but I just wanted to double check that there wasn't some part of Logic I missed out on.

By the way, for anyone wondering, I never did make the plunge to get Komplete, and instead have continued to use free sounds for the past eight or so months. It's a little less fun in a way (there have been many times I wished for a wider variety of instruments) but I decided that Komplete also isn't essential for someone like me who's still quite new at music.

Maybe when I graduate I'll get Komplete 7 as a reward for myself :3

[Kanthos]

Oops, I did indeed mean Mainstage.

[LuIzA]

Yes, that's the reason Kore seems interesting to me. I am somewhat new to synthesis, so being able to get the sound in my head or something that fits as well by searching "bright warm synth lead" sounds awesome to me. it's like a whole different paradigm, as opposed to getting my sound from guitars and what not.

I'm mostly interested in the idea of organizing my new Komplete stuff like that. but unless it's really worth it, I'm not planning on spending any more money any time soon.