Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Komplete Kontrol S49 Mk2 – first impressions”.
Hello, I’m Robin Jenson and welcome to this very quick first impression of the Native Instruments: Komplete Kontrol, s4 t9 MUC. Yes native intruments, have sent me this thing here to give a bit of a review of and have a look and that kind of thing. So I thought I’d do is get inside plug it in and just give you my first impressions. So let’s open the box, I always like a good carry handle and there she blows so initial out of the box. Impressions are that it’s a weighty thing.
It has some real substance and mass to it, which I’m liking a great deal. I’M loving the clean lines. The angles are all very good. So far, it’s a very pleasing experience. The new twin screen section here is looking very nice and it doesn’t even have any annoying plastic over it.
So yeah. I guess I should plug it in and see what happens so here. It is the s 49, all plugged in all lit up all raring to go after an enormous scan of every single plug-in and bit of library.
In my entire system, I’ve plugged it here into my surface pro. I’Ve got a scattering of complete loaded on there. Just enough to give us a bit of a flavor and other than the sort of fresher cleaner look of the hardware, the focus is going to be on these little screens down here. What are they gon na? Tell us? Are they gon na make it useful? Are they gon na enhance the workflow, or are you gon na be swapping between one on the other and getting yourself confused as to where things are? We don’t know, we don’t know yeah, we haven’t tried it, we don’t know.
Well, let me bring you in and have a quick look so ignoring the the software on the surface. That’S focused directly on the screens on the keyboard where we appear to have is on the left is all of the library that the complete control software understands, and that includes third-party, since it’s not all just about Native Instruments, Komplete or complete instruments or contact instruments. I’Ve got things here from our cheerier and other bits and pieces that I have installed on the system and on the right hand, side. It seems to be all about the presets within whatever selected over here. So if I twist and Abba round it changes over here to give me the presets that I can select now, one of the key new features is this pre here this preview. This idea that it’ll give you a little burst of a preset as you go through like so now. This is only relevant to Native Instruments, instruments at the moment, this arturia ARP 2600, for instance, there’s no previews. For that I mean that’s something that that may happen, but the previews are actually samples, they’re not magically being sucked out of the instrument. They are samples that are added to the library to give you this preview of each individual preset, so we’re going down to FM 8, for instance, there’s a Fabrice thing.
That is a little bit like you know, browsing radio stations, I suppose, but you don’t have to have it like that. You can turn it off and then it’s no longer there and turn it on when you want it and when you found the preset you want hit load and then for each no belong here on the screen. It shows you what its controlling and there’s multiple pages of controls on you hit a button here, and it gives me more staff go back to my browser oops, I’m always hitting that first knob and that first knob is really annoying because it changes the category and That can sometimes reset what you’re looking through.
So it’s the second knob is what I find more useful that the picture here is just a it’s just a thumbnail. It’S not actually showing you any changes. The changes are happening on the computer screen like so you can see the changes on the controls. As I move the knobs back to the browser they’re always hitting that knob.
Let’S bring up something like a third-party one, like the the Jupiter here load that one in go to the operator put that on hold go back to the plugin [ Applause, ], [ Applause, ], I’ve. I’Ve done that once I don’t have a thousand times it says, have a quick look at the hardware. I must say that the mod wheel and pitch wheels are the biggest hunkiest controller wheels. I have ever seen in my life.
I’Ve never seen anything quite like it. Its enormous the fatness of these things, I don’t know whether that was deliberate, because everyone was moaning about the fact that the previous version didn’t have them, and only had these controller type strips. I don’t know, but they went to town and they have produced these massive wheels here.
So you definitely know you’ve got a pair of those. Do you have these lights on the keys? I haven’t worked out how you use them or what they’re for yet. I know they’re supposed to change to reflect various things. I know when you put the up edge wager on. They do show the notes that are being played, which is quite good fun and when you bring the lights down low, you still appreciate some buttons.
A lot more because otherwise the buttons have a habit of kind of being black labels on a black background lighting up black, to show you that you’ve done something. But here the the knobs themselves don’t seem to light up, which I’m a little bit surprised by. I have to say, I kind of expected there to be a band around them, but the buttons, the feel is really very nice, swap between browser control, plug-in control, there’s all the sorts of things like mixer and bits and pieces and MIDI which are all to do With door control as you’ve got over here, you’ve got transport controls as well, which I have not got into whatsoever as yet got stop start tempo preset pages forwards and backwards a whole bunch of buttons. They all have no idea what they do and you’ve got these selector buttons at the top, which refer to things that come up on the screen.
So there you have it. There’S my Whistlestop tour of the new control s 49. There’S a lot of stuff to get into here, there’s a lot more detail than I imagined.
Actually there now I’ve got a lot to say about these different screens and how they work and how they relate to that and there’s things that I need to learn. I don’t know what half these buttons do yet or how they relate to each other, which plugins get to be shown, which ones don’t I don’t know? How do you access other third-party plugins that aren’t in the rest? How do you get to those? I don’t know what about the screen size, I don’t know, and does my workflow get pulled into here or pulled up to here. I don’t know so.
What I need to do is spend some time with this, maybe a week or so. Give me a couple of weeks to really dig in and get underneath what this keyboard is all about, but the physicality of it is is excellent. I have absolutely no complaints on what it feels like as a controller at this stage and the the layout and the lines and the buttons and the lights, and all of that is simply lovely. The integration with the software is interesting and it’s not necessarily immediately intuitive, and I think it takes a little bit of grasping before you are flowing naturally from one thing into another. But I get the feeling that once I get there, hang of where the knobs and bits and pieces are and what they refer to, then I’m going to be skipping about in no time at all I mean what I already love is the fact that I have A way of accessing all of the Native Instruments sounds without having to load individual synths in some kind of stand-alone mode, because normally, if I want to play with massive, I would load up massive ever want to play with contact. I would load up contact or then go through all that rigmarole, whereas the software, the complete control software and the keyboard with the controls on brings all of that together.
So it just becomes one big, huge super synth that you can browse through and those previews. I think they’re excellent, because otherwise you’re just faced with a great big list of text as you nearly always do, and you have to load up individual, sounds and then try them out and then try another one. This little preview thing, which is a simple sample based sort of fudge, really is actually extraordinarily useful and I’m already liking that a great deal. So that was my very quick first impression of the control s 49.
I spend a couple of weeks playing with it and I’ll get back to you with a full, in-depth Martin music technology review. They all not find another review, like the sort of review that I will do. It’Ll, be the good, the bad, the ugly, the horrible and the fantastic will all be laid bare for you to see and to witness and to experience. So should you buy one of these for yourselves for your own, controlling and navigational experiences too soon to say you better stay tuned and look out for my full review coming soon and, in the meantime, go make some tunes.
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