- Arturia is keeping an ear close to the ground these days when it comes to new advancements in music software technology. This past month, they announced that their iSEM virtual instrument for iOS would be one of the first on that platform to support the AU plug-in standard, allowing it to be more seamlessly loaded into DAW apps like GarageBand. They were also included in the list of the first software makers ready to support the NKS format, a new plug-in type introduced by Native Instuments for use in Komplete Kontrol and Maschine. Being a frequent user of both, I jumped at the chance to try out Arturia's NKS instruments and see how a third-party plug-in would fare in the previously walled-garden ecosystem of Komplete Kontrol.
If you're not familiar with the Native Instruments NKS standard, essentially it offers a way for plug-in makers to enhance their instruments so they mimic the same close-knit workflow of the NI plug-ins within Komplete Kontrol. This enhancement can be broken down into three main areas: native browser, light guide and parameter organization. Native browser is perhaps the biggest selling point of the three. It requires the presets of the instruments be tagged and organized for inclusion in the powerful Komplete Kontrol / Maschine browser. This lets you search by sound type (e.g. synth lead), character (e.g. dark), instrument (e.g. Jupiter 6V sounds) or a combination of any of the three. For people with a large number of plug-ins, this speeds up the process of finding the right sound for the job. The second enhancement, light guide, gives software makers a way to utilize the multicolor light strip found on the NI Kontrol S keyboards for visual feedback. This is most useful for controlling instruments that use the keyboard for more than just MIDI note input for a single instrument layer. For example, if an instrument allows you to split the keyboard to play two sounds at once, or if it allows you to trigger individual samples, the light guide can help you see what's going on without having to pull up the plug-in UI. Finally, with parameter organization, knobs and faders can be mapped to those on the Kontrol S and Maschine hardware in a logical way, with the option to group similar controls by page. This lets you, for example, jump to a page labeled Filter and find the set of controls related to controlling the filter all together.
Rather than extend just a single plug-in for NKS, Arturia swung for the fences by announcing that their massive V Collection 4 would all be compatible at the release of Komplete Kontrol 1.5, the effective public launch of the NKS standard. If you're not already familiar with the V Collection, it's essentially the full list of software instruments that Arturia currently makes. For Version 4, this includes 13 instruments, including heavy hitters such as the Jupiter-6V, SEM, CS-80V, and even their Spark drum machine / sequencer instrument. Extending each of these plug-ins for the NKS format is an impressive feat.
Installation of the V Collection 4 was pretty straightforward—a single installer took care of the necessary download and installation tasks. At first I was surprised not to see the NKS format listed alongside the other options for plug-in format, but that's because they categorize the NKS artifacts as "third-party resources" rather than a separate format, a distinction that may confuse some users. Once installed and activated, though, Komplete Kontrol saw the new plug-ins without issue and went to work pulling the sounds into the browser.
With that one-time integration in place, searching for sounds in the V Collection was quick and easy. Even with the odd preset names found in some Arturia instruments, the sound type and characteristic choices let you conveniently zero-in on the right subset of sounds. The light guide implementation is also well done. This is especially evident on the Jupiter-6V, which lets you set the keyboard to dual mode, allowing you to play two sounds on two halves of the keyboard. When you enable this mode in the plug-in, the light guide adapts automatically to show you where that split point is, with different colors showing the key ranges for the two different sounds.
The one area that I had trouble with on the Arturia Instruments was custom parameter assignments. Komplete Kontrol gives you the option to make changes to a preset's control layout by opening the plug-in panel, a dedicated area within Komplete Kontrol where you can either make adjustments to existing controls or learn and assign new controls for the purpose of hands-on manipulation. For the most part, this works fine, but a number of knobs on the Arturia instruments that appear to map correctly using the learn function end up doing nothing when you move the mapped knob afterwards. There were multiple examples of this, especially when trying to map to the effect parameters on the Arturia plug-ins. There were some issues with Arturia's out-of-the-box mappings as well. For example, on the SEM V, the LFO FREQ knob only works when SYNC is off; when it's on, the knob stops functioning.
The true highlights of the Arturia V Collection NKS integration are the sound tagging and light guide support. Adding the 6000 sounds to a Komplete Kontrol library and having the ability to quickly reach out and select the set of potential candidates for your current track is a pretty great feature. Hopefully with time there will be an update to address some of the parameter mapping issues, but until then, this massive collection is still worth a look to any Komplete Kontrol user looking to further supplement their sound library.
Ratings:
Sound: 4.6
Cost: 3.8
Versatility: 4.6
Ease of use: 4.2