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NI Feel It!


Larry Shelby

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9 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

I suppose this is some sort of deal to make us think their subscription plan is attractive, as this is not part of even the Collector's Edition of Komplete 14, which should in theory have everything NI makes.

It's new (and came out after KCE 14); it'll (most probably) be in 15.

I think NI have figured out they have two types of customers: the more studio-experienced ones, and the newcomers to music. I think their subscriptions are targeting the latter. Unlike other subscriptions that include every product in their catalogue for a recurring fee, the NI one is different. It includes instruments more towards the 'instant gratification' end of the scale. It doesn't include Kontakt, and I think someone who Komplete Now is targeted at wouldn't fully appreciate it.

To be clear, I'm not saying any one group is 'better' than the other; just that there are different types of users and that NI are trying to cover all the bases.

 

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1 hour ago, antler said:

It's new (and came out after KCE 14); it'll (most probably) be in 15.

I think NI have figured out they have two types of customers: the more studio-experienced ones, and the newcomers to music. I think their subscriptions are targeting the latter. Unlike other subscriptions that include every product in their catalogue for a recurring fee, the NI one is different. It includes instruments more towards the 'instant gratification' end of the scale. It doesn't include Kontakt, and I think someone who Komplete Now is targeted at wouldn't fully appreciate it.

To be clear, I'm not saying any one group is 'better' than the other; just that there are different types of users and that NI are trying to cover all the bases.

 

There's two types of music producers: The ones that design the sounds they put into their music and the ones that just need the correct preset. NI targets both with their product line with Komplete. From one side, you have Kontakt and Reaktor, which allow you to create your own instruments and plugins like Tim Exile, which ended with two NI products (The Mouth and The Finger) which were based on his Reaktor stuff he used for live performances. From the other side, you have the Play Series stuff, which are ready made presets you can do minor tweaks on to suit whatever music you're making. The latter used to be less prevalent or non-existent in earlier versions of Kontakt and Komplete, but NI saw the market for the "preset producer" and dug into that.

Edited by Bruno de Souza Lino
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On 5/20/2023 at 9:34 PM, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

There's two types of music producers: The ones that design the sounds they put into their music and the ones that just need the correct preset. NI targets both with their product line with Komplete. From one side, you have Kontakt and Reaktor, which allow you to create your own instruments and plugins like Tim Exile, which ended with two NI products (The Mouth and The Finger) which were based on his Reaktor stuff he used for live performances. From the other side, you have the Play Series stuff, which are ready made presets you can do minor tweaks on to suit whatever music you're making. The latter used to be less prevalent or non-existent in earlier versions of Kontakt and Komplete, but NI saw the market for the "preset producer" and dug into that.

 NI / Komplete have always had EXTENSIVE preset databases in all their instruments. There are literally 1000s of presets inside Reaktor across all their Ensembles. Always have been. 1000s of presets for Absynth, Massive, FM8, Battery and on and on. You can hear these presets on 1000s of albums (in dozens of genres), and in 100s of tv / film / game scores, by some of the best song writers, producers and composers in the industry. Kontakt's ginormous factory library has also always been jam packed with presets.

Presets have always been integral to modern music, going on 50 years now.  Notorious talentless slackers (hehe) like Phil Collins, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Gary Numan. Queen have all used them. Some of these presets are iconic to disco, pop, rock, jazz, latin music. Some presets designers, especially for classic synths and drum machines are legends in the industry. If you've ever used Omnisphere, then you're listening many patches designed by Eric Persing, who's presets are a staple of music from the 80s (jazz / jazz fusion, pop, world music, hip-hop, etc.). Guys like Howard Scarr are critical to Hans Zimmer's scores, and other patch designers are critical to some of your favorite artists.  

Also - just as a rant - if you go to a store and buy an instrument....you're using a preset. You didn't build the acoustic guitar. Or the drum kit. Or the piano. Or the violin. You're enjoying all the wonderful engineering & craftsmanaship of someone else, and paying for the privlidge of using their sounds in your music. Nobody faults a music producer for not building the instruments in his studio. And nobody faults Stevie Wonder for using the Horner Clavinet Model C on Superstition, which sounds exactly the same in the song as it did when it came home from the store.  It's no different than pulling up a preset in Omnisphere. 

Presets don't allow you to make or produce great music. For the same reason that buying a $50,000 guitar ain't going to make good music for you, even though it sounds incredible right out of the box...with no effort on your part.

Relax about presets. Relax about loops as well. The greatest artists in modern music use them for a reason. Speaking of which - see how many iconic songs you can hear in this preset demo of the CR-78:

 

 

Edited by Carl Ewing
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12 minutes ago, Carl Ewing said:

NI / Komplete have always had EXTENSIVE preset databases in all their instruments. There are literally 1000s of presets inside Reaktor across all their Ensembles. Always have been. 1000s of presets for Absynth, Massive, FM8, Battery and on and on. You can hear these presets on 1000s of albums (in dozens of genres), and in 100s of tv / film / game scores, by some of the best song writers, producers and composers in the industry. Kontakt's ginormous factory library has also always been jam packed with presets.

Presets have always been integral to modern music, going on 50 years now.  Notorious talentless slackers (hehe) like Phil Collins, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Gary Numan. Queen have all used them. Some of these presets are iconic to disco, pop, rock, jazz, latin music. Some presets designers, especially for classic synths and drum machines are legends in the industry. If you've ever used Omnisphere, then you're listening many patches designed by Eric Persing, who's presets are a staple of music from the 80s (jazz / jazz fusion, pop, world music, hip-hop, etc.). Guys like Howard Scarr are critical to Hans Zimmer's scores, and other patch designers are critical to some of your favorite artists.  

Also - just as a rant - if you go to a store and buy an instrument....you're using a preset. You didn't build the acoustic guitar. Or the drum kit. Or the piano. Or the violin. You're enjoying all the wonderful engineering & craftsmanaship of someone else, and paying for the privlidge of using their sounds in your music. Nobody faults a music producer for not building the instruments in his studio. And nobody faults Stevie Wonder for using the Horner Clavinet Model C on Superstition, which sounds exactly the same in the song as it did when it came home from the store.  It's no different than pulling up a preset in Omnisphere. 

None of that makes anything I said less factual, though.

13 minutes ago, Carl Ewing said:

Presets don't allow you to make or produce great music. For the same reason that buying a $50,000 guitar ain't going to make good music for you, even though it sounds incredible right out of the box...with no effort on your part.

You're missing the point and once again, that doesn't make what I said less factual. For as much as you have people that make use of said presets as a means of a specific sound that caters to their vision of what the music should sound like, you also have several people that want a sound they don't have to make fit into whatever music they are composing or add design elements around. Neither approach is right or wrong. What NI is doing with their Play series stuff caters to the latter more than the former and that's my point.

16 minutes ago, Carl Ewing said:

Relax about presets. Relax about loops as well. The greatest artists in modern music use them for a reason.

At no point I was ranting about presets and didn't even mention loops. Much like you felt like explaining me the value of presets, I felt like explaining why NI produced these products in the first place, because they're are more than "just presets."

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4 hours ago, Carl Ewing said:

Relax about loops as well

Is there any danger about getting flagged for copyright infringement (e.g. on YouTube) when using loops and your song sounds identical to someone else's?

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18 minutes ago, antler said:

Is there any danger about getting flagged for copyright infringement (e.g. on YouTube) when using loops and your song sounds identical to someone else's?

I highly doubt that the algorithms were written to determine if any loop comes from a royalty free library.  Even if they were, google would have to invest in a lot of libraries to figure out that.  I would also guess that the algorithms are focused more on melodic content because otherwise they would have a ridiculous amount of claims generated.

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2 hours ago, Magic Russ said:

I highly doubt that the algorithms were written to determine if any loop comes from a royalty free library.  Even if they were, google would have to invest in a lot of libraries to figure out that.  I would also guess that the algorithms are focused more on melodic content because otherwise they would have a ridiculous amount of claims generated.

I didn't mean the loop library itself so much. More like Artist A publishes a song that uses a (melodic) guitar riff loop. Then Artist B uses the same loop in a different song and tries to publish it. And then some (possibly AI powered) algorithm matches Artist B's song to sound the same as Artist A's.

Edit: but yes - I guess there's some threshold, otherwise there'd be a huge number of claims.

Edited by antler
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