Limited results when. choosing tags?!

So, Komplete Kontrol has a nice tag system where you can choose your sound type and drill down into the many many thousands of patches across multiple instruments.

But, I'll choose, say, 'chord' as a sound type and it gives me results from four instruments only?! I mean really?

Choose 'distortion' and it gives me results from two instruments?!
'Pluck' again from two instruments only?

And so on…. barely any results from all the sound types?

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Kymeia

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/48900/limited-results-when-choosing-tags

I'm afraid this is a consequence of people making up their own sound 'types' or turning a character into a sound type and applying them to banks with the result that given no one else uses those sound types they only apply to the few patches made by whoever decided to go against the standard NI categories.

'Chord' is a Character - searching for chord as a character results in 5927 hits for me and that is only on the factory side. So is 'Distorted' - they are characters because you can have Piano chords, Bowed String chords, distorted Leads, distorted bass, Pad chords etc - any tonal sound type can be played as a chord, just as any sound type can have distortion applied

If you want pluck (which is a sound type) look under the sound type 'Plucked Strings' (I usually put synth plucks under Plucked Strings - other)

JesterMgee

If you want pluck (which is a sound type) look under the sound type 'Plucked Strings' (I usually put synth plucks under Plucked Strings - other)

That's where it's just unintuitive as it stands. A "Synth Pluck" is not a Plucked String or even close in most cases and makes even less sense sitting in there especially when you want to find a plucked string and have 60,000 results that are not plucked strings of any kind. If I didn't have an added "Synth Pluck" under the Piano/Keys section I would add them likely to Piano/Keys > Other Pianos then just tagged with the Pluck character but that then prevents additional filtering of characters for plucked synth sounds. Most instrument libraries for Synths have a specific "plucked" category so there really should have been a Synth Pluck and Synth Key category to begin with.

But yeah things like Chord, Distortion, Pluck etc and all Characters and shouldn't be a sound type. If the libraries are user ones, easy to reassign tagging but also a good example of how tagging is important for efficient use. If the libraries are User ones, it's always a given tagging will likely be a bit of a mess. But if they are official ones, that should not be the case or someone at NI QA isn't doing their job.

Only character I would argue that should still be a type is the Arp character since with it as just a character, since the browser is still woefully poor in filtering capability, makes it impossible to find arp sounds that are "dirty" or "aggressive" etc. Everyone has their own opinions on how it should be tho.

Don't even get me started on the fact NI choose to have "Reed Instrument" instead of the rest of the universe who chooses the more recognisable "Woodwind" description which makes far more sense. Could have then done away with needing that separate "Flute" category for 3 instrument types and "Whistle" could have been under "Voice" where it should have been all along… 😄

Good thing is tags are super simple for anyone to reassign themselves if they are user libraries or remove if they do not like them. However anyone that has tagged thousands of files by hand will appreciate any tagging that can be manipulated is better than having no tags to play with.

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