Komplete Standard: which plugin for rock solid pop performances?

Nuendo

Hi everyone,

I'm mostly a hardware synth and workstation user. Due to some limitations with hardware rental availability around the world I have to use a MainStage based setup for an upcoming tour. I purchased the Komplete Standard package and I'm a little bit overwhelmed so I thought I might ask here for some recommendations.

I'm looking for very standard synth patches for pop performances, mostly from the 90s and 2000 era. Supersaws, the inevitable Korg M1 piano, some standard pads, nothing too fancy. Kind of "modern workstation replacement". No fancy synthesis required, only minor live modulations.

Is there a single plugin in Komplete Standard you would recommend for these kind of jobs? It has to be rock solid because the audience is usually in the scope of 4000 - 20000 people and the keys are quite important. It's not about realism but ease of use when preparing and browsing sounds at home and stability when performing live.

Thanks!

JesterMgee

Probably load up Kontakt as a starter and then check what libraries are included there which might offer what you need.

Initially it may seem there is a huge amount of plugins but there is only about 6 plugins with Komplete since most are libraries for Kontakt.

You can use Komplete Kontrol as a "browser" for all the content as it will allow browsing of all content with tagged filtering and sound previews so you can flick through sounds fast and it has a proper curated set of parameters you can use with your chosen MIDI controller (just need to open the MIDI map editor in KK)

BIF

"Rock Solid" and "Computer Based" maybe don't always go well together.

I just had a period of 3 months where both of my Windows based computers would occasionally crash without warning. And my M1 Mac has not been completely unscathed from the effects of an OS crash, either. On the Windows side, one computer would outright crash with a blue screen once a week, sometimes when I wasn't even using it.

The other would start to exhibit issues where it stops responding in some applications, but other apps seemingly would work fine for a period of time. If I neglect to get a timely reboot once those issues started to become apparent, eventually that computer would just not allow me to do anything but move the mouse around on screen. Several times, I'd be able to get Task Manager opened up, but couldn't do anything or terminate any tasks or applications. At that point, only a hard reset of the computer would get things going again.

Over time, both Windows machines stopped crashing, probably due to updates eventually being applied to fix those issues.

I get it...the synths of today are also computers. Some even allow file exchanges and firmware updates to be done by way of USB stick. Old school, they had floppy drives and SCSI hard drives. But in my experience, these are still maybe a bit more reliable than PCs and even Macs.

Sure, you can still use a laptop during your gig. But my recommendation is to always have a backup way to make your music. If the laptop is playing your backing drum and percussion tracks, maybe have a way to make those sounds if the laptop goes down for the count (or gets stolen).

Having a synth that has all of those "basic" sounds (piano, synthesizer, brass, woodwind, etc) might be the answer. It's not uncommon for major touring acts to have two exact copies of the computer(s) that run the synthesizers or the entire show (including lights, fog, etc), sometimes with the ability for a technician to perform a live failover from the primary computer to an alternate. Yeah, the current song being run might still fail, but at least the entire show won't have to be canceled.

Anyhow, that's my contrarian view. Love Komplete, but if you can't keep your computer running for whatever reason, Komplete can't save the day.