Like a fat guy running down the street chased by wolves trying not to drop his ice cream.
As an owner of Komplete 9 I’ve been offered an upgrade to Komplete 13 at a reduced price. To only buy the two instruments that I really want costs a hell of lot more than if I buy the whole damn thing. Even if I go Ultimate it’s still the same price as Komplete (and yes somebody has already pointed out that once you’re Komplete there really shouldn’t be two levels above that).
In effect NI are paying me to take on the whole thing, which seems cool so long as you don’t try take on the whole thing – it’s rotund, corpulent, morbidly obese. I decided to pay for the whole and pretend most of it isn’t there – pretty much what I did with Komplete 9. You only have to download some of it, and that’s how it will stay.
What’s the matter with more? Most of the instruments are really preset sound libraries. They are solutions in that they are not creative spaces in which you will build your own sounds, but specific genres – orchestral horns, Beatle drums, Albanian zithers. If you are a soundtrack designer with a client standing behind you who wants ‘something Cuban’ and then download the Cuban sound set – you’re well served by Komplete. If you’re seeking to realise a personal sound the majority of Komplete is a bloated distraction. It is definitely not for a novice who wants to find their own path.
The major addition for me is Massive-X and I’ll be rave reviewing that in a separate page later. It’s an excellent synthesiser and makes me yearn for more like it in the collection. Although NI claim there’s 17 synthesisers included they’re a ragged assortment. FM8 and Absynth haven’t had an update in years. FM8 was once a leader, but has been seriously overtaken by opsix in every aspect. Absynth is still a cool sounding machine but the interface went out with the ancient Egyptians. It feels like abandonware.
Many of the others are actually plugins for Reaktor. I’m sorry but I’m way way over that. This probably allowed rapid development of new synthesisers at one point but no one is going to load up Monark as a plug-in for a plug-in in 2022 when there’s a heap of easier MOOG Model D clones out there. After thirteen iterations of the collection it’s time to make these into actual instruments – perhaps even allowing Reaktor to compile actual VSTs.
There’s a newish thing called Super 8 which is a reasonably dull Roland analogue clone – seeing as Roland is quite capable of their own range of dull analogues it’s a bit of a waste of NI’s development time.
I was interested in Pharlight and Straylight as potentially useful granular drone machines. They are flossy and pretty and seem able to be coaxed away from being solutions to some soundtrack cliché. I wasn’t happy that Straylight started to glitch and overwhelm my not inconsiderable CPU. This happened a bit with the first iteration of Arturia’s DX7 but they fixed it quickly, I hope for the same here.
Now that I’ve mentioned Arturia I have to point out that their recent Augmented Voices and Augmented Strings seem to cover much the same territory, look and work a bit the same but are substantially smaller and less taxing. Yes they are not quite as textural, because they’re not so sample heavy. I’ve also got to say that having one physically modelled piano is a lot easier than whole bunch of multi-sampled ones. Perhaps I can’t hear that slight difference of tone between them. Perhaps I should add that difference myself – after all a bought sample should be start of a process not the end of it.
If you get a new install of Komplete on sale it probably does no harm to have most of it sitting off line. But you’re only going to use about a quarter of it at most, with the rest of it being like a storage unit out back of the studio, ready for a jingle brief. I think that it has gone too far into quantity and not kept up the quality – particularly in terms of end user creative potential. Komplete 14 needs a serious and exciting new identity to keep in the race. NI’s new alignment with Brainworx and iZotope is probably the start of this new identity.