FM | MASTERCLASS
Get up to date with NI’s latest hardware ecosystem, discover how it works… and what all those acronyms are about
Native Instruments sells a lot of stuff. In addition to a huge history of developing its own plugin instruments and effects, it also sells those of its partners, Plugin Alliance and iZotope, as well as facilitating licensing and downloads for Kontakt and Reaktor developers. The company’s Komplete package has always been huge, but we didn’t think it would get quite this big! But that’s just the software side of the company’s offering – the hardware is where this all gets brought together.
NI’s hardware offering is led by the Maschine groovebox controller, Traktor DJ controller, and this, the Kontrol keyboard line-up. The idea is that you can use hardware to control NI-made and NI-supported software, preferably without ever having to touch your computer (although it’s not exactly mission accomplished yet). NKS (Native Kontrol Standard) is a standard that plugins can support in order to be usable with both Maschine and Kontrol, meaning that many third-party plugins are available within the ecosystem as well.
Let’s zoom into the specifics of how the Kontrol keyboards work in practice, and how they can help people to make music.
Klever Klogs
Once setup is complete, the intention is that you can load NKS-supporting instruments and control them from the Kontrol keyboard. Not only do the notes you press on the keyboard get to the instrument – which is standard of course – but the Kontrol keyboard’s light guides also integrate with the instrument, showing the correct colours for, say, a Kontakt instrument and its keyswitching.
Going further, each instrument also lets you control a selected range of parameters from its interface, using the knobs next to the screen, which of course also gives you some extra visual feedback. Some plugins give you access to their entire control set, thanks to those eight knobs and the left/right arrow keys to scroll through parameters. All without leaving the keyboard.
On the patch level
One of the huge revelations of this whole ecosystem is browsing at patch-level. Instead of choosing a synth and then finding one of the sounds within it, you instead search through patches from all your synths together. If you search by category – for a pad, say – then the list will be filtered down to just pads from all your synths. You browse through all patches and hear previews as you go.
Your chosen pad may end up loading in FM8, in Massive X, in Rounds, Form, or any third-party instrument you have installed. This lets you focus on great sounds rather than specific synths.
Taking Kontrol
While those are the two biggest factors, there’s plenty more to discover about Kontrol, and we’ll show you using our own Kontrol S61 keyboard
