June 2024 – a community update from our Chief Product Officer

Alright, that’s good to know. Thanks @Simon_NI

Your comment caught my attention. Do you realize potential of Razor or Prism , they are absolutely Amazing especially Razor with ability to raise number of particles so you get so rich and detailed sound like nothing I heard. Massive X is maybe confusing but in general it's simplicity that is main feature of this Ulta high quality sound. Maybe visual presentation is not what users expected but it's a Beast. Sub Bass tones are so easy to achieve and they're clear on the first octave so people asking me how. Leads Pads and Modulation is so easy and maybe it's best to stick with having simplicity in mind and everything is just possibility that are choice and good music doesn't mean that it's complicate to produce as we tend to we idealize and experience music as a supernatural phenomenon, thereby putting ourselves in a position where it is either impossible or expensive.

When I saw how one big Artists is producing I was in denail because he was using stock Bass and Stock Saturation plugin in a way for just passthrough. Psy Trance Bass was a mistery for couple of years from 2000 to 2004 and it countinued to be outworldy phenomenon until Massive and similar Synths didn't get presets by Genre so everything become more transparent. Prism is amazing with RAUM it's enough for Music Production from Techno House to Ambiental and instrumentals in New Age Category.

This is Preset that I used for making Music that end up in Editorial playlist.

It's free version but Settings altered on this Preset and later I resampled and had endless possibilities with Live sound with color of flute or something based on real material.

@Simon_NI , Thanks for the updates and proactive communication. I know you've been asked this question a bunch in the past, but just wondering if there have been any updates/decisions made regarding bringing back some level of Maschine integration to the Kontrol Mk3 line? Frankly, that's what has me on pause on the purchase of an S88 - it would be great to know one way or another, with some specificity, what your vision is for the future of Maschine integration in Kontrol. Thanks again!

Having the generated samples become a playable instrument within Kontakt and having it be modified with Kontakt's FX and DSP is good…. but…

There is a whole other level of hope for what AI-assisted instrument creation could be.

The generative process of the samples themself could present a spectrum of articulations.. an approach that is sort of a quasi-modeled instrument with near limitless possibilities.

I dream of something more fundamental than adding Kontak DSP and FX on top.

@Simon_NI

Will there ever be a Traktor Z2 mk2, something like the Reloop Elite which sadly isnt fully supported by Traktor?

Simon, I want to share with you a "macro" problem that I and others experienced when jumping into the NI ecosystem for the first time, and the problem with relying on the Community Forum as a solution. I joined NI for the first time with a combination of the S-61 MK3 keyboard and Komplete Standard about 9 months ago. The initiation was daunting and the experience was quite negative due to fundamental terminology and user interface problems with NI products and lack of good tutorials.

Native Instruments does a poor job with terminology to identify and separate their products. This unnecessarily makes it confusing and intimidating to get started with their software and hardware. Komplete Kontrol means one thing for software and another for hardware. Given the scope and complexity of Native Instruments products, it is natural and to be expected that new users will have lots of questions in the beginning. They will turn to the internet, including YouTube and eventually find themselves to this Community Forum. When people are talking about "Komplete" or "Kontrol" on the forum or in these YouTube videos, it's hard to know if they are referring to software or hardware. Two other needlessly confusing terminology problems are the use of terms "Snapshots" and "Ensembles". I do not understand why Native Instruments has to use the term "snapshot" instead of preset, and why they must then allocate the term "preset" for something else. In Reaktor, this gets even more confusing, as you use both terms, snapshots and ensembles, instead of calling these things for what everyone else intuitively thinks of them as- synths and presets.

By and large, NI user interfaces are not very well designed and there is no cohesive design language. The best examples of good user interfaces that Native Instruments created are Massive, Battery, and FM8. These are clean and relatively intuitive interfaces, can be opened in standalone, and a new user can figure out how to start making music with them right away. Everything else designed by Native Instruments, however, is daunting, confusing, or just suboptimal. Kontakt and Reaktor share the same confusing and redundant stuff at the top. You look at this stuff as a new user, and the only thought that comes to mind is "****** is this?". You also have a hard time seeing any of the controls, as the text is tiny and is inexplicably low contrast (gray text on black background?). No one can see any of this on 4K monitors, which are now ubiquitous. The user experience workflows within these programs are also confusing. Stacking instruments within Kontakt or navigating between synths (not ensembles!) and factory or user presets (not snapshots!) in Reaktor is just plain weird. Komplete is suboptimal, simply because it sacrifices too much functionality for a "clean" look.

There are a few Community members, like Kymeia above, who try to help new users. But, many of the responses to newbie-type questions here are simply rude, and many longtime members choose to blame the new user for their ignorance rather than just helping them. I suppose it is the nature of internet beast, but it makes it a bad solution to help new users. So, besides investing a cohesive design language that carries over to user interfaces and makes approaching their software and hardware more approachable, Native Instruments needs better official tutorials. And upfront links to these tutorials need to be available from within the plugin itself. Brian's tutorial on Komplete is pretty good. But, we need stuff like that for everything that Native Instruments makes. It took more than 6 months to have a decent grasp on this ecosystem and navigate through it all with some proficiency. That's too long, and the experience has not been positive. It makes me not want to reach for a NI product when making music in favor of products that I have had great experiences instead. I know that I am not alone.