Native Instruments - Komplete Kontrol S-Series

  • Share
  • With a package as large as Native Instruments Komplete, it can be easy to get lost. The latest incarnation of the flagship music production collection, Komplete 10, offers 12,000 unique sounds across 39 different products. Getting your arms around all of this content when it comes time to actually make some music can be intimidating. For many, the answer to this was Kore, NI's now-retired modular audio environment with its integrated hardware. Kore could browse and search the Komplete library, making it a key tool for many producers, myself included. For reasons that remain unclear, Native Instruments retired the Kore ecosystem in 2011. This made it surprising when, this September, Native Instruments announced the Kontrol S keybord series, a set of MIDI controllers designed to browse, play and control the Komplete instruments with the help of an integrated software environment called Komplete Kontrol. This rightfully led many to begin drawing comparisons with Kore, even though it was made clear that Komplete Kontrol is a completely new product, with no built-in compatibility for Kore libraries or hardware. I was curious to dig in and find out what Native Instruments' vision was this time around. There are three keyboards available, differentiated only by the number of keys: the S25, S49, and S61. The keybed is a Fatar semi-weighted model with aftertouch, and it feels very impressive from the get-go. The responsiveness and velocity accuracy was probably the best of any MIDI controller that I've tested. A pair of LED-edged touch strips sits off to the left of the keyboard, where typically you'd find the pitchbend and modwheel. These send what you'd expect them to—pitchbend and mod—by default, but they can be configured with gravity or elasticity to add life to your performance. A somewhat unexpected feature on the Kontrol S keyboards is the multicolored light that sits above every key, which NI calls the Light Guide. This can serve as a helpful guide for instruments like Battery that house a huge amount of individual sounds spread across a keyboard, or for Kontakt instruments that feature multiple instruments in a split keyboard configuration. For more custom needs, the Light Guide can be configured programmatically within Reaktor and Kontakt, or within the controller editor for MIDI templates. When playing back notes from a DAW to Komplete Kontrol, the Light Guide flashes to indicate the incoming notes—probably the Light Guide feature I found most useful. This can serve as a helpful reminder of the key of a previously recorded MIDI take. Moving up from the keyboard you'll find (from left to right) the performance and transport section, the device control knobs and the browse section. The one that draws the eyes immediately is the large device control section in the middle of the controller. Here you'll find eight touch-sensitive knobs, each with a nice OLED-style display beneath. While I would have liked to see a finer level of resolution here, the Kontrol S's displays are still an exponential jump from the original Kore hardware. When you load a Komplete instrument within Komplete Kontrol, the knobs of the Kontrol S keyboard are automatically mapped without any user intervention required. The downside is that you can't override these automatic mappings yet—hopefully that's coming in the near future. It would be nice to be able to place specific parameters next to each other for performance reasons, rather than having to navigate back and forth through multiple pages of possible parameters. The performance section off to the left of the device knobs is probably the most deceptive piece of the Kontrol S. I mean that primarily in a good way—it hides a powerful set of tools under an unassuming pair of buttons that activate and control the scale and arpeggiator modules within Komplete Kontrol. The former is where you can configure the keyboard to only play the right notes, so to speak. You can even configure one-finger chords, a feature that could be handy for producers still working on their piano chops. The arpeggiator module is even more powerful, with eight parameters allowing you to shape very dynamic and expressive sounding arps. My favorite aspect is its ability to retain the velocity of played notes within the arpeggiated sequence and even alter the velocity spread to increase or decrease the human touch. There's another factor that leads me to describe the performance section as deceptive, and that's because at the time of this review, the scale and arp engines can only be used when controlling the instruments within the Komplete Kontrol software. When playing the Kontrol S as a regular MIDI keyboard, the buttons just go dark. I can see this changing in the near future, possibly with the upcoming integration between the Kontrol S keyboards and Maschine, which NI says will come with version 2.2 of Maschine. It would make sense that this could bring back some of the original Kore features, like saving multi-device presets (which could include third-party plugins), and hopefully the ability to use the arp and scale modules to send MIDI out from Maschine. The Kontrol S has a higher price-to-feature ratio than most of the other options out there. But much like Maschine and standalone grooveboxes, that comparison doesn't really make sense. It's designed to serve as a well-integrated, tactile interface for NI's colossal Komplete collection. For owners of Komplete 9 or 10, the Kontrol S keyboard line is an indispensible when it comes to navigating that ocean of content. Searching by product, instrument type and mode (dry, evolving, etc.) makes it easy to home in on the right sounds, and can also lead to serendipitous discoveries when you stumble on something you never would have thought to dig into previously. Once you find the right sound, the playability of those Komplete instruments with the Kontrol S really impresses. Ratings: Cost: 3.5/5 Build: 5/5 Versatility: 4/5 Ease of use: 5/5
RA