Native Instruments Kontakt AU

I'm reviewing Kontakt 1.5.2 for Audio Units on a G4 800MHz running OS X 10.3.3. I use it mainly with Logic Pro 6.3.3 at the moment, and am strongly considering using it live.

About me: I've been playing for about 20 years, classically trained on piano, caught the synth bug early and never looked back. I do techno-pop basically with a ton of jazz influence. I also play in a classic rock cover band, just for fun. I've done a bit of production work too, with two albums and an EP under me belt.

My first sampler was a Roland DJ-70. I fell in love with its sounds, but it had no SCSI. Had to sell the DJ-70, eventually picked up a used Akai S900. Made some interesting music with it. Eventually bought a Roland S-760, which I still have. When I got into OS X, I decided to pick up Logic again, and I bought a bundle which included EXS24. This was my first exposure to software samplers (other than a little drum machine I wrote for Linux a while back).

EXS24 sounded great, but mapping samples with it was hopeless. EXS24's user interface makes sense from a purely logical point of view, and there are probably guys out there that can work with it, but to me it's absolute frustration. I went back to my S-760. Far better UI.

Then my S-760's CD-ROM went south, and I started thinking maybe I should look at trying a software sampler again. I didn't want to get locked in to Logic anyway so I looked at a few different ones: Unity, for instance, which seemed very clumsy, and the demo kept crashing - BAD sign - and its mapping interface was little better than EXS24's. I bought Reason, but it has no MIDI out, and I couldn't get used to the two-application thing (i.e., Logic + Reason with ReWire), and it would freeze my computer sometimes.

Then I heard about Kontakt's mapping UI, and the more I read about it, the more convinced I was that this might be a goer. Took the plunge last week. This review is the result of many very enjoyable hours spent making music with Kontakt.

Kontakt has a great UI: it's very much like what the S-760 might have been had they had a bunch more programmers, a colour display and a big fast processor instead of an 80186. (No, that's not a typo, there really was a 186.)

The sample mapping system is 85% as great as the reviews make out. The basic idea behind it is how ALL mappers should be made. Great stuff, and fast. I don't even think much about doing multisample mapping now; I've already done a couple of pretty complex velocity-switched Rhodes patches, and they sound and feel great. I used to leave that kind of work to the hardened pros. Now even I have the patience for it.

There are some things I wish it had, like the ability to copy modules from one instance to another. There's no undo function, and there's no "Save" for instruments, only "Save As ..." This is a bit of a pain, but none of this stuff is show-stopping. Kontakt makes up for these silly things with the speed with which you can do stuff. I've done more with it in a few days than I could do with EXS24 in a month.

It's not true that all samplers sound the same. Playing back a recording is one thing; pitching it up and down and handling crossfade loops is quite another.

To put it simply: Kontakt's sampler module sounds fantastic. It has no character at all; it simply doesn't get in the way. Whatever you put in is what you get out. I'm sure it has nonlinearities, but they're below the threshold of hearing. Whoever wrote this module has some serious DSP chops.

There's also pitch and time-stretching modules, which work based on granular synthesis instead of LPC (as far as I can tell). They're not in the same league as VariPhrase, but still very useful. (To their credit, NI proffers no hyperbole about these - they're nice extras, probably lifted from Reaktor.) And 1.5 comes with Beat Machine, which is like a small built-in ReCycle. *Very* useful.

Kontakt comes with about 3GB of sounds, but don't get too excited - a good many of them are samples from NI's other plugins, like Absynth and FM7. Some of these samples are actually really good, but they're HUGE - basically ads for the software. Good ads, mind you, but ads nonetheless.

There are some gems in the disc set: the orchestral percussion samples are amazing, as are some of the guitars. The electric slap bass is one of the best I've ever heard. Pianos are a little disappointing, though. My S-760 came with much better samples than these. And there are no "real" electric pianos, just a couple of sample sets from FM7. I've always hated the DX7 electric piano, and this one is very authentic.

But if you don't like the way something sounds, no problem - you can tweak this thing 'til you're blue. The "rack" interface isn't exactly what I'd call modular, but it's a great metaphor and very easy to work with - no pages and pages of fixed parameters here.

The filters are fabulous - very warm, none of the annoying nasal quality you sometimes get with straight biquads or bilinear transform hack jobs. In fact, they are - dare I say it - just about as good as the S-760's filters. That's about the highest praise I can bestow.

The effects are a really nice touch, and of uniformly high quality, if a little processor-intensive - especially the reverb. But it sounds *very* nice. The great thing is the ability to assign different effects to different groups. I've been wanting a sampler like this for a long time.

Overall, sound quality gets a 10, because I don't like to knock samplers for their factory patches.

I'm now thinking that maybe it's time for me to relegate my Motif to the road. I bought it as a ROMpler / sequencer, but now that I've got Kontakt, I'm starting to wonder what exactly I'm going to do with it - and there's a *lot* of stuff in my little studio.

Working with Kontakt reminds me of working with my old SQ-1, except that I have a universe of sounds now and no serious track or polyphony limitations. The SQ-1 was a very fluid machine, and I wrote more music on it than I have on anything since. But Kontakt has put me back in the zone several times, and I've only had it a week.

It's also reminded me of how much sense it makes to put a sampler inside a computer. I held on to my beloved S-760 for a while, and I'll still keep it to make sure I can transfer samples, but once my library's all moved I'm probably going to give it away. Kontakt is the new core of my studio.

I did a good bit of shopping before settling on Kontakt. EXS24 sounds great, but it's a real bear to use and is tied in with Logic. I looked at SampleTank but got scared off by the reports of crashing. Ironically, IK released a major bugfix update the day after I bought Kontakt .. too late there, guys .. BitHeadz Unity just felt clunky, and I didn't like the demo crashing on me. Mach Five looked nice, but I have my own reasons for not buying MOTU stuff. I do own a copy of VSampler, but it embarrassed me at a rehearsal once and I haven't run it since; besides, it's not really a fair comparison anyway. You can use Reason as a sampler, but it doesn't have much of a mapper to speak of, doesn't always play well with others, and hogs CPU.

Was Kontakt worth the price to me? Oh yes. Every penny. Frankly, I'm amazed it's not more popular.