Native Instruments Black Friday Deals

[john]

Grab your freebie from Native Instruments!

 

Complete Start 100% Free

 

[starise]

On 11/17/2023 at 9:52 PM, john said:

Grab your freebie from Native Instruments!

 

Complete Start 100% Free

 

I like free!

 

I have had Komplete for some time now. The way they market their packages, the upgrade path adds a few new instruments or efx each time. Similar to Sampletank 4 by IK multimedia, once you get on top with the full collection upgrades seem less interesting to me unless it's a knock out home run instrument. 

I don't say this to discourage anyone because this is really a great way to get started with this free download. The full version of this takes up so much disk space, that even my outboard disks are too full to accomidate any upgrades at this time. NI in buying Izotope has added some truly amazng plugins. 

 

I just purchased Guitar Rig 7 and it's pretty sweet. I especially like that it comes fully loaded, unlike the IK competition,  which makes you buy the amp you want after you buy the product.

 

Hypha looks like a take on Arturia's "Augmented Strings" which was at one time free for the base version. Maybe 49.00 now.

So let's be frank, they are trying to get you hooked into their ecosystem which isn't a bad thing. In fact it's a nice way to get some decent kit in software. There are other ecosystems as well but NI is one of the best and most supported. Kontakt is really the one to have because it can load many instruments. Komplete should have at least the beginner version of Kontakt. Not sure.

[MisterB]

On 11/20/2023 at 3:27 PM, starise said:

I like free!

 

I have had Komplete for some time now. The way they market their packages, the upgrade path adds a few new instruments or efx each time. Similar to Sampletank 4 by IK multimedia, once you get on top with the full collection upgrades seem less interesting to me unless it's a knock out home run instrument. 

 

I agree about upgrades not being very interesting. I suspect I'm done with upgrading it until they include Kontakt 8. I really dislike their current architecture for sample pack add-ons, and never use any of their own Kontakt content other than Noire. I never use Reaktor any more, and Massive and Massive X get less and less used by the project.

 

I think a lot of these "package deals" that just add something very minor for the upgrade price of $199 are in for a bit of a shock as people start to tighten the purse strings.  Arturia is kind of the same for me.

[starise]

Hey I recently roasted my own coffee too! Cool hobby but I think I'm going to need to cut back my consumption.

Anyways.......to this topic.

 

I almost hated to write what I did because it sounds like I'm knocking them and John is showing their beginning free product. I have been buying music stuff for entirely too long and I guess after awhile I realized that good music was mostly up to me if it was made, and had very little to do with the plugins, instruments etcs. 

Yes, it figures in to some extent and we need the tools that will help us to get the job done the best it can be done, however it seems to be much less important than I once thought it was. I once said, If I only had **** I could make that track rock. 

 

So maybe you're similar in that we just have what we need and probably way more than that. The large sample libraries had me hooked for a long time. The last one I bought is an old one I had always wanted, Omnisphere which can take up a decent sized hard drive all by itself. 

 

I imagine any of us who have been at this for awhile could say I never use **** any more. TBH for awhile there it was just fun to buy stuff, like an addiction. So for someone like "us" if I may take that liberty, those huge packages with small additions yearly for rather large prices , like you, don't trip my trigger as much any more. 

[MisterB]

Roasted my weekly 12oz of Indian Monsooned Malabar this morning. Its the only thing I make my espresso from these days and I feel that what I originally thought was an endless quest to find the perfect recipe (I change the temperature 7 times at key points in my 17 minute roast) seems to be coming to an end. Sadly, that's probably only the case for my own taste. When you start out with roasting a new bean, your recipe is pretty random because of the massive diversity of equipment that people roast on, age of beans, and the impact of things like ambient temperature and humidity, which changes the recipe for everyone. Not only that, but each bean needs a different grind setting and absolute quantity per shot to make it pull in the perfect time for that bean.

 

There's actually something of a parallel here with NI Komplete.  The journey to find the perfect sound seems endless, and who really has the time to audition all those snare drums that come with Battery?  Or the patches that come with Massive? They should change the name of Komplete to Khaos... or even Komplete Khaos.  They give you all these expansion packs, but finding the content on your system is mind-blowing because its so fragmented. It's like going to the coffee store and being given a box of random products with no labels and only a generalized marketing sticker. You have to figure out what needs grinding and what gets infused, and most importantly, what you like and what you don't.

 

I have Komplete, and I've spent hours looking for usable 808 hats or snares inside of Battery. It's a real exercise in frustration, and I've ended up going for a third party 808 Kontakt instrument to give me a better chance of creating what I'm looking for. 

 

They give you too much stuff, and its just too badly organized. 

 

Lots of names are on this quest to overload you with stuff that you'll never have time to properly audition.  Quantity over quality is rife.  And even when you do find something of quality (personally, I think the Electric Mint sounds spectacular), they've somehow managed to cripple it enough to make it worthless (their pattern system). 

 

I still spend way too much money on this hobby of mine (VI buying, not coffee... and no, I'm not giving that up any time soon!), but its certainly more focused than it used to be, and I favour those developers putting in the time to create an interface or system that is relatively easy to use, and gives the flexibility for me to use their products the way that makes sense for the music I make. Even when their products have a very limited sound palette in themselves. 

 

Of course, sometimes you have to go the route of quantity over quality because you haven't yet developed your tastes.

Edited January 9 by MisterB

[starise]

Just a tidbit about my coffee roasting. I had it down to a science using a bread maker and a heat gun. I had everything timed and monitored the temps all through the roast. I could tell exactly how long it would take after second crack. I was roasting Ehtiopian Yirgacheff which is my favorite, but I tried other beans. Espresso was too much of a hit for me so my espresso machine hasn't been used in awhile. I seen a nice chinese roaster on ebay and was poised to buy it to take my hobby to the next level. I bid on it fairly but the seller decided to take the ioption to sell to another local buyer. It would have been overkill for a home roaster so maybe it was a blessing in disguise. I made plans to gut a bread maker and put bearings in it so I could tilt it on a stand like the bigger roasters, but life happend and unfortunately I had to  stall those plans. Now I have to make do with bought coffee. At least for the time being. I'm begining to get lazy just buying coffee 🙂

 

The one thing I liked about Komplete was the ability to search meta data on their controller. Although I never bought the controller and decided on an Arturia controller instead, I could still make use of the NI program made for that purpose. As luck would have it I found I wasn't very often in the NI universe so a dedicated controller would have been lost on me. The Arturia controllers work really well with their package. For electronic music I like UNIFY as it lets me combine a bunch of things and it wasn't very expensive.

 

But yeah, I would be lost without meta data search engines both in my DAW and in the other stuff. My process is probably different. If I envision a certain synth I'll just pull up something fast that seems to work well intending to maybe replace it later. That almost never happens. When it comes to drums I'm not a drummer, but I'ver managed to navigate those programs pretty well and get my mixes using mostly the drum programs and not in the DAW. Then once recorded I can pump it up with the tools in the DAW. 

 

Reminds me of the funny pics I seen describing the different instruments. A violin was called a squeak board. It reminded me of the way I think when I'm looking for a sound. Like a lowish bellish sort of DX thingy, or a big assed bass drum. The last thing I did I used my own rock bass and that was fun to put a busy bass into a progish sort of thing and then add waves submarine to it. It was perfect for that. I could have gone to less trouble and grabbed MODO bass but there's no way keys could have produced that sound.

[MisterB]

I mistakenly got an NI M32 keyboard to use with my laptop, and I couldn't believe that it has these 8 hardware knobs that can't be used outside of Komplete Kontrol. Any other keyboard, you would be able to assign a CC to it, but not in the M32. Last time I buy NI hardware, no matter how nice the build quality (even the M32 is nice hardware).

 

I'm planning to get an Arturia KeyLab Mk2 to replace my aging (and dying) Novation SL2 at some point this year. Just got to stop spending money on VI's.  

 

I got into roasting coffee because you literally can't buy freshly roasted beans here, and I got spoiled with them when I could. They make such a difference in the quality of espresso.  I bought a Behmor roaster, which is pretty much as low end as it gets, but it does a great job, I must say. When I do it right, its as good as any roasted beans I've had commercially. 

[starise]

Sorry to hear of your experiences with NI controllers. Having  never used one myself your experiences are helpful.

 

I had to return my first arturia controller because it didn't work. The second one is ok. It's a 61 key only because my present situation doesn't allow more room for an 88. Soon as I get the space I'll be looking to go 88. In a way though it's like having a turbo charger. Never really a need for it but nice to have 'just in case' . I started on keys and sometimes miss the weighted action the 61 lacks. It has synth action which is still ok. With the 61 and some key mappings, I have to shift down an octave to get to the control keys. Over all happy with it though. Works great with Arturia synths. I also like that they use tech similar to pianoteq in that the synths are physically modeled instead of streamed as samples.Lighter on the drive.

 

I have the IK B-3 and I don't think it sits as well in my mixes as the arturia version. I am overall happier with Arturia on everything .vs IK. I almost don't even use my NI stuff any more at all. I can't really explain why. It just hasn't been in my workflow. I thought all of those guitar instruments would be helpful and never used even one of them because none of the loops remotely fit what I do. Same with Ableton instrument loops. More trouble to hook up a guitar and play it but just works better. All except for things I am unable to play like very fast metal. In that I have no choice.

 

I agree. Something about getting the fresh beans and roasting them is just all around better. The only thing close here is buying unground beans and grinding them which is really all I can do right now. Starbucks over roasts their coffee IMO.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Bridget Murphy]

On 1/10/2024 at 4:03 AM, starise said:

Just a tidbit about my coffee roasting. I had it down to a science using a bread maker and a heat gun. I had everything timed and monitored the temps all through the roast. I could tell exactly how long it would take after second crack. I was roasting Ehtiopian Yirgacheff which is my favorite, but I tried other beans. Espresso was too much of a hit for me so my espresso machine hasn't been used in awhile. I seen a nice chinese roaster on ebay and was poised to buy it to take my hobby to the next level. I bid on it fairly but the seller decided to take the ioption to sell to another local buyer. It would have been overkill for a home roaster so maybe it was a blessing in disguise. I made plans to gut a bread maker and put bearings in it so I could tilt it on a stand like the bigger roasters, but life happend and unfortunately I had to  stall those plans. Now I have to make do with bought coffee. At least for the time being. I'm begining to get lazy just buying coffee 🙂

 

The one thing I liked about Komplete was the ability to search meta data on their controller. Although I never bought the controller and decided on an Arturia controller instead, I could still make use of the NI program made for that purpose. As luck would have it I found I wasn't very often in the NI universe so a dedicated controller would have been lost on me. The Arturia controllers work really well with their package. For electronic music I like UNIFY as it lets me combine a bunch of things and it wasn't very expensive.

 

But yeah, I would be lost without meta data search engines both in my DAW and in the other stuff. My process is probably different. If I envision a certain synth I'll just pull up something fast that seems to work well intending to maybe replace it later. That almost never happens. When it comes to drums I'm not a drummer, but I'ver managed to navigate those programs pretty well and get my mixes using mostly the drum programs and not in the DAW. Then once recorded I can pump it up with the tools in the DAW. 

 

Reminds me of the funny pics I seen describing the different instruments. A violin was called a squeak board. It reminded me of the way I think when I'm looking for a sound. Like a lowish bellish sort of DX thingy, or a big assed bass drum. The last thing I did I used my own rock bass and that was fun to put a busy bass into a progish sort of thing and then add waves submarine to it. It was perfect for that. I could have gone to less trouble and grabbed MODO bass but there's no way keys could have produced that sound.

It's these musical experiments that bring out the essence of playing the violin and exploring unconventional sounds.

[starise]

On 1/11/2024 at 7:34 AM, Bridget Murphy said:

It's these musical experiments that bring out the essence of playing the violin and exploring unconventional sounds.

 

I think of my music as one long music experiment   The violin? I still have them around but haven't played in awhile. It almost seemed to me that something or someone was seeing to it I would never want to play one. I was told I played ok in the sessions, but ok in a session isn't really that good. Never realized I should have started out a 3 years old. I had this sequence that would repeat itself for 7-8 years. I went to the teacher made noises and came home. I am pretty convinced it is a woman's instrument mainly. I know you'll probably disagree with me on that.

[Bridget Murphy]

On 1/23/2024 at 1:57 AM, starise said:

 

I think of my music as one long music experiment   The violin? I still have them around but haven't played in awhile. It almost seemed to me that something or someone was seeing to it I would never want to play one. I was told I played ok in the sessions, but ok in a session isn't really that good. Never realized I should have started out a 3 years old. I had this sequence that would repeat itself for 7-8 years. I went to the teacher made noises and came home. I am pretty convinced it is a woman's instrument mainly. I know you'll probably disagree with me on that.

Every musician's journey is unique, and starting at 3 or later doesn't diminish the joy and fulfillment playing can bring. As for it being a "woman's instrument," I respectfully disagree. The violin is wonderfully versatile, transcending gender. 

[starise]

4 hours ago, Bridget Murphy said:

Every musician's journey is unique, and starting at 3 or later doesn't diminish the joy and fulfillment playing can bring. As for it being a "woman's instrument," I respectfully disagree. The violin is wonderfully versatile, transcending gender. 

Well everyone on the violin forum I once frequented would agree with you and disagree with me, so your response is predictable. As I see it there are some advantages to being a woman on that instrument. Generally smaller hands/fingers which makes it much easier for them to reach difficult fingering in the higher ranges. The good ones generally are less abstract and much more analytical in their approaches to music, at least the classical ones. The good ones would blow through an Irish jig at double tempo in a session and assert their dominance that way leaving the rest of us to try and catch up. They were always classically trained.

 

With men, yes I see exceptions to my rules but not many  I can do a very decent job of many tunes on the violin although I had a health issue that made two of the fingers on my left hand numb for months. Just now getting that back to almost 100%. Lately my fav instrument has been guitars. I can't duplicate the tactile feel of a decent acoustic or electric guitar with synths. I mean I still love synths. I have an old vid of me trying to be Rick Wakeman which I hesitate to post here

 

What do you play?