Native Instruments. I have a bunch of their stuff. But I fear they have 
lost their way...

Way back when, NI used to produce various award-winning synthesizer 
software. Most famously, Absynth is a semi-modular synthesizer with 
ludicrous amounts of modulation options. It excels at creating bizarre 
evolving soundscapes. (And somewhat sucks at producing sounds that you 
can actually play a tune with.) They also produced FM7, a frequency 
modulation synthesizer with some unusual features. It has the obligatory 
DX7 file support and lots of other bells and whistles. More recently, 
FM8 is the latest version of this product.

The also made an award-winning drum machine called Battery. And they 
made strange effects processors like Spektral Delay. And then they came 
out with a thing called Reaktor.

Think about what MS Access does for databases; as well as creating 
tables and queries, it lets you built primitive user interfaces and run 
automation and so forth, to create psuedo "applications". Reaktor lets 
you take DSP modules and interactively wire them together to make 
sounds, and then interactively stick a GUI on top of that to control the 
parameters. In this way, you can "build synthesizers".

Reaktor comes with a small library of such instruments, and you can 
build your own and share them in an online forum. (Obviously, nothing on 
this forum even remotely compares to the quality of the standard 
library.) You have things like Carbon 2 and Green Matrix, which are 
fairly standard subtractive synthesizers. You have Skrewell and Space 
Drone which spew forth randomly-generated sonic mayhem. And you have the 
excellent Steam Pipe, which does waveguide synthesis. Plus Rectory (a 
drum sample masher), Space Master (reverb unit), Travelizer and Grain 
States (granular resynthesis), and so on.

In later versions of Reaktor, they added the "Reaktor Core" technology, 
which allows you to build new DSP elements down to the sample level. 
Whereas before you had filters and amplifiers and oscillators, now you 
have individual ring buffers and numerical operators and signal routers, 
so you can *design* filters and such.

NI also had a few other products that I was never really very interested 
in. Things like Akoustik Piano, Elektrik Piano, a tonewheel organ 
simulator, and so on.

Eventually, NI came up with Kontakt, a generalised high-tech sample 
player. Akoustik Piano and so forth all became mere instruments that run 
inside Kontakt. When you buy Kontakt, you get something absurd like 12 
DVDs of sample data, covering everything from an entire orchestral 
string section, right down to bagpipes and sitars.

When I first got to play with Kontakt, I was pretty amazed. It's not 
that it's an especially brilliant sample player; it's more that the 
samples are astonishing. Load up the "violin ensemble" instrument, and 
each time you press a key, it plays back a recording of 12 professional 
violinists playing expensive antique violins. I can sit here playing 
1-finger melodies and it sounds insane. I don't even *need* to play big 
chords; the sound on its own is already so rich.

And then of course, not only do we have sustained violin, we have 
staccato, pizzicato, tremolo, sforzando, and so on. And not just violin, 
but viola, cello and double-bass as well. And then you've got horns and 
harps and flutes and... And you can change the sonic space they sit in; 
from recording studio to concert hall to cathedral.

Perhaps most impressive of all, there are three pipe organ sounds. Call 
up one of these, and when you play Bach organ toccatas it *sounds* like 
you're playing a cathedral organ.

In the latest version of Kontact, they promised even more organ sounds. 
Actually they delivered a piffling two. They also promised a choir; the 
choir sounds are utterly astonishing. Every key brings forth a recording 
of a professional choir of 25 voices. Press a 3-note triad and that's 75 
singers calling at you. Major chords sound like pure liquefied joy. 
Minor chords sound so hauntingly laden with sorrow as to rend your 
heart-strings asunder. The other night I played Bright Eyes, and 
actually made myself physically cry. (My God, I'm such a pussy...)

The only problem, of course, is that the thing that makes strings and 
voices sound so expressive is the way the sound delicately swells and 
diminishes in intensity. All these Kontakt sounds have at least a dozen 
velocity layers. (And their tone actually changes from layer to layer, 
not just the volume.) But only the key-down velocity affects this. Once 
a note is struck, it is apparently /impossible/ to raise or lower the 
velocity. I've tried every MIDI message I can think of; none of them let 
you get dynamics. That's a pretty big limitation, right there.

But I spoke of NI becoming "lost". What did I mean by that?

Well, once upon a time, NI used to sell new products. New synthesizers, 
new effects, whatever. With the arrival of Kontakt, they started selling 
"sound packs". A Kontakt sound pack isn't just a box of samples. There's 
programming in there so that, for example, if you have a harpsichord 
instrument, there are multiple samples for different notes, different 
articulations, different velocity layers, attack samples, sustain 
samples, release samples. (Harpsichord in particular has a 
characteristic sound when the keys are released.) When you use the 
soundpack, you see "harpsichord". It's actually made up of a bazillion 
samples, with lots of scripting to tell the sampling engine (i.e., 
Kontakt) what samples to play when. But that's all set up for you. You 
just play stuff.

There are sound packs for Absynth or FM8 as well, of course. For a while 
NI had a product called Kore, which was supposed to be some kind of 
sound library manager or something... it was their flagship product, but 
now they have discontinued it, which is a bit of an abrupt U-turn.

With the stage now set, it seems an awfully long time since any "new 
products" came out. Instead, we have sound packs. Reaktor in particular 
allows fairly radical "new instruments" to be produced without doing any 
"actual coding", as such. (I.e., without needing a C++ compiler.) For 
example, recently we had The Mouth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzyr66QhrOw

We also had Reaktor Prism, a really lovely waveguide synthesizer that 
picks up where Steam Pipe left off. And then there's Razor, an additive 
synthesizer which produces "unheard of filter effects" [which all sound 
exactly like normal filter effects, BTW].

For a while NI went on producing things like the Trip to West India 
soundpack, or the Urban Arsenal pack, and so on. Things started to look 
slightly iffy when they tried to sell Reflektor, which is basically an 


Remember Akoustik Piano? You get 4 different piano recordings - one is a 
Steinway concert grand, the other is a Bechstein, another is a 
Boesendorfer, and finally there's an upright piano if you want that 
imperfect "this is somebody's house" sound.

Well, guess what? These are now 4 separate, full-price product. The 
Steinway has become "Concert Grand", the Boesendorfer has become 
"Concert Vienna", and so on. No new content, just a new higher price.

But the thing that *really* makes me think that NI have lost their way? 
They now sell compressors as full-price products.

Literally, they now sell VC-76, VC-2A and VC-160 as three separate 


every pro-audio application ever made already includes a compressor, 
right? And who *wouldn't* want an authentic emulation of 30-year old 
studio equipment which by definition doesn't colour the sound it's 
processing?

Better yet, now there is the Solid Mix Series, consisting of Solid Bus 

bundle. WTF?

And to top it all out, there's Transient Master. The product blurb even 


Who in the hell actually needs no less than 7 different audio 
compressors? What are they smoking?!

Just to be fair, I sat down and listened to some of the audio demos for 
the compressors. I was very, very hard-pressed to actually tell the 
difference between the compressed and uncompressed sounds. It was even 
harder to tell the difference between different compression settings. 
(There isn't an option to compare different compressor products on the 
same input.)

It's also entertaining watching some of the product videos. One of the 
more useful products lately is Studio Drummer. The idea is that not only 
do you get drum samples and software to play them, you also get software 
that supposedly auto-generates lively and organic drum rhythms for you - 
useful if you're not a professional drummer yourself. In the product 
video, you see the crazy German guy who designed this thing 
demonstrating how he buys brand new cymbals, and then bends and distorts 
them, and finally buries them in his garden to give them a more "gritty" 
sound. Weirdo...

Perhaps more hilarious are the Traktor and Maschine videos. There's one 
where some Hip-Hop producer is in his personal home studio. He's sitting 
there at a 100-track mixing console that probably cost tens of thousands 
of dollars, and he's all pretending that he totally uses Maschine (a 599 

****ING RIGHT! :-P Yep, I completely believe that...

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