Looking back at 10+ (?) years of NI => thanks for being AWESOME!

Hi gang!

It's been a while I guess... I really needed a bit of an outlet this evening and that resulted in me firing up my home studio and just losing myself a bit in my audio. Thing is... while I am an Ableton Live "fanboy" first and foremost it's also fair to state that a lot of my setup comes from this place: NI powered.

Over the last 3 - 4 years I've been very busy with upgrading my home studio. My APC40 got replaced with the awesome Push (2), the MPD24 I used got replaced with the Maschine Mk3 and I had also decided to grab Komplete in addition to all this. Once I learned that the Maschine was actually an amazing "Komplete controller" as well this quickly "escalated" and before you knew I was looking at Komplete Ultimate. Then NI made me an offer I couldn't refuse (no horse heads fortunately! 😁) and I went UC. Even went from 12 to 13 and that's where I am today: having an awesome time diving more "into" Komplete.

It's not just about Komplete...

But wait there's more... see, this post doesn't necessarily come out of the blue...

That ^ is Diva, one of U-HE's many synths and this critter is also fully "NKS compliant". Ergo: it will fit both Maschine (= huge personal favorite of mine) or one of the Komplete Kontrol keyboards like a glove. But that's not why I'm mentioning this: I got this critter thanks to Native Instruments: one of their awesome Holiday Season sales featured a U-HE bundle; I grabbed mine 3 or so years ago and I'm still not fully over it. Seriously: this stuff is seriously extensive! Oh: lookie lookie (wasn't aware of that).

It was a recent Reddit post which reminded me that we got quite the deal back then 😎

See, this is what I love about my experiences: it wasn't all about NI themselves perse. They also introduced me to some 3rd party products, one already mentioned above, and I'm very happy with that. Here's another one:

And that ^ is one of my favorite NKS bundles to this very day: the SoundIron VocalSuite 2. If you want to add vocals to your score but don't want to use a synth like Vocaloid (which is also somewhat limited when it comes to non-Japanese languages)... then this is a good alternative IMO.

...and Komplete isn't only about 'easy sounds'

So.. yah, that is one of my ways to have some 'fun' with Komplete: combining the likes of Max for Live with Reaktor and then, well, messing about. Why this is such a big deal to me? Easy!

Notice how I had to use "unpack" there? That's needed to seperate the MIDI message values of pitch and velocity. Here's the thing: Reaktor only knows about On and Off velocity whereas I can dig way deeper with Max for Live.

Ergo: I can focus on technicalities within M4l and then focus on audio within Reaktor.

Did you know that Reaktor instruments like Monark are a little bit "open sourced"? You can learn a lot from them by going over their internals and studying what is happening in there:

And then there's iZotope...

Now, to be fully honest, I knew about Ozone long before Native Instruments joined forces within the SoundWide setup but... not only do I still believe that Native Instruments + iZotope can be a perfect fit (ergo: combine the best sound quality with the best sound treating quality (I truly still believe this))... it's also the way it's being enacted. NI is still NI, iZotope are also doing their own thing.

IMO it's fitting.

In conclusion

So yah... it all started for me with Komplete Elements (the original release, I got the box back around 2012 or so ;)) which I then expanded on (Absynth and some Kore instruments) and fast forward to here and now and we have Maschine, Komplete and... oh, right!

^ THAT awesome critter is powering my home studio, backed by some JBL studio monitors.

I hope you can pardon my offtopic ramble, like I said I kinda dove into my audio, ended up around here and suddenly felt both nostalgic and very appreciative. Because NI had a major impact on my setup and my "way of synth live" so to speak.

A close friend of mine is all about hardware. "DAW's are for ******" is one of his famous jests (he ended up impressed with Diva 😎) and we sporadically have "synth evenings" every so many times. He then usually brings some of his stuff over to my place where we connect the whole lot and have some fun jamming and experimenting.

Guess what makes that possible? ;)

Ever combined the percussion of a Casio CTK 4000 electronic keyboard with a Roland SH 201 with a bit of Straylight on top? 🤗

Aaaanyway, thanks for reading. Here's to you Native Instruments! 😊