The Sound Board

Komplete upgrades are 50% off, indeed most software and updates seems to be 50% off too. Partners Strezov and Evolution too, who both have good stuff at up to 50% off.

The complete Symphony Series is in a real blowout sale at 90% off - £89. It's far from perfect, but some may get use out of some of it.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/s ... ound-2025/

An FYI - Audiodeluxe has the Komplete upgrades and currently have 10% off. For me as a Brit, the NI website has my upgrade of Collector's Edition for £225 - via AudioDeluxe it is the same in dollars = £166.

I counted, there's 11 products I'm interested in having in the update. Seems fair to me.

EDIT - finishes tomorrow, May 26.

A few first impressions from the Collector's Edition shinies:

KITHURA
I really like this - cinematic world acoustic guitars, if you will (one of the snapshots is named Joel, a shameless Last Of Us nod). The engine is similar to many of their other products and works well - it's a cinch to swap out elements and manipulate things. I'd have liked another 25% of sample content - attack ornaments like note bends are few and far between, and they'd really help. Still, what we have is good quality stuff, the modwheel mapping gives instant intensity playability and overall it occupies good and useful space in the arsenal.

VALVES PRO
Tonally this this is gorgeous. So warm it's positively toasty, the solo instruments are largely highly playable (the Tuba's legato was an uncharacteristic weak point). Their auto-divisi engine is fab, and playing chords sounds instantly evocative. There's a host of articulations and switching out is pretty simple. There are some arpeggiated patches that sorta confused me.

FABLES
I did already have this and it's excellent, the lighter cousin to Lores.

SESSION GUITARIST - ACOUSTIC SUNBIRD DELUXE
I think this range is ace, they've just nailed instant playable good results. This is another winner, a lovely steel string tone. There's an option where keyswitches go between playable lines and strummed patterns which is very handy.

SESSION UKULELE
Has it taken this long for NI to do the ubiquitous ukulele? Three models here with different timbres to choose from. Again high quality stuff, likely to be my goto.

SESSION GUITARIST - UPRIGHT BASS
This however seemed to work much less well to my ears and fingers.

SCENE - SAFFRON
This is a small little thing but it sounds a billion dollars and is fun to work with - two sources of just 16 samples, a big XY pad and a dice proudly in the middle where you can randomise selected parameters. Great for (yes) cinematic organic sounding textures in a hurry.

SCHEMA LIGHT & DARK
I don't find their sequencer-based products nearly as good as their playable cinematic ones. But these are at least better than Sequis which seemed horrible to me, and it would be a good source of organic-sounding pulses and arps of many shades.

ELECTRIC KEYS - DIAMOND AND PHOENIX
I so don't need these. But Phoenix in particular is a very good Rhodes.

ALICIA'S ELECTRIC KEYS
This does sound notably different from Keyscape's CP70, but it is fundamentally a CP70 and as regulars will know I am unreasonably prejudiced against the damn thing. I only installed it because I was promised lots of different variations with other elements but it is at heart a CP70.

VOCAL COLORS
This sounds bloody awful. Really quite ghastly. Their Colors range are consistently disappointing to me, but this is a new low.

GUITAR RIG 7 PRO
A nice update. It seems snapper to launch and browse then 6, there's some new ICM models and components. It's still king of ambient and sound designy stuff, and some of the new models are strong for rawk. The new bass amp is really ace.

There's a couple more to come. It's the usual mixed bag right across the range of usefulness, but for £160 it was a fair update for me.

Thanks for sharing your impressions, Guy.

There's SO MUCH content, especially in the Collector's Edition, that it can be quite time consuming to come to grips with it all. I'll probably wait to download much of it, but it's helpful to know what you think.

I bumped our threads on Fables and Valves Pro, because I think they deserved extra attention, in light of the current sale.

Best,

Geoff

Geoff Grace wrote: ↑May 25, 2025 6:42 pm I bumped our threads on Fables and Valves Pro, because I think they deserved extra attention, in light of the current sale.

Thanks, definitely two highlights.

ACTION WOODWINDS
This is very much designed as a counterpart to Action Strings 2. It's pretty much identical except, well, they are woodwinds. It's a pleasing, classic soundstage tone with 4 mic positions and a mix. Again, it's well laid out - 4 phrase variations on the main patch are on the first 4 keyswitches, then you have staccatissimo, staccato, Marcato, Sustain, Trills HT and WT, which maps almost identically to the strings (they have trems and trills on the last two switches). That means you can play both libraries on the same midi channel and come up with complimentary lines as you play.

The selection of phrases are great. There's lots which are just short one-shot figures, there's lots of single-note rhythms which are thus fully playable as well as melodic phrases. As with AS2, it's very well conceived and executed.

IRELAND
I've found NI's World series to be one of their best ranges, and there's 11 Irish instruments here. Surprised to see a Bouzouki included - with this and the other guitars as well as the usual keyswtiches for articulations, there's additional ones for patterns you play with your left hand and a top line freely played with the right. There's also open strings. The Uilleann Pipes and Button Accordian have playable drones with the left hand. For most of the others it's a subset of these, but there's plenty of good ornaments and the tone is uniformly lovely.

I forgot one more which I already owned - Session Percussionist. Here's what Piet wrote on release:

SESSION PERCUSSIONIST
This is very, very good. Excellent audio quality, good choice of instruments (in several variations), endless editing possibilities, brilliantly programmed and producing results that sound totally convincing. Those who already have something like Shimmer Shake Strike 2 or similar software, might think they don't need this, and maybe that is true, but Session Percussionist takes this type of thing to a whole other level. Me, I never liked Shimmer Shake Strike (which, despite the developer's best efforts, still sounds rather flat and dead to my ears), Session Percussionist on the other hand, won me over within three minutes of starting to work with it. Do watch the video:



I concur (and similarly I never got on with Shimmer and Shake).

I have found one very annoying glitch though - I couldn't get playback to start on the first beat of the bar when playing from the timeline, whereas it would if playing live on the keyboard. It drove me nuts, and eventually I found it was related to having a time sig change in the Cubase project. So there's a bug which is still there, easily reproduced - in a 4/4 project, add a bar of 1/4 and then revert to 4/4, and on every first beat of the bar after this Session Percussionist will not start on the first beat of the bar. Posting this has finally prompted me to actually log with NI (don't know if it applies in other DAWs, would be interested to hear if this is the case).

That aside, the product is excellent!

I caved, some new stuff that interested me. and a gig that needed ukelele, so win win for me, no so much for my wallet.
Thanks Guy for the reviews!

I have the percussion from the Symphony series and have had good use for it... the price for completing the series is 59,90 for me, hard to resist

As I' mentioned in another thread, $199 to upgrade Komplete 12 to Komplete 15 which would include a major update to my Ozone 7, so I’m definitely doing it after I complete some projects. I need to update Monterey to use it, and I’m trying to figure out how far up the Mac OS chain to go on my aging 2019 i9 iMac.

RobS wrote: ↑May 29, 2025 12:31 pm I have the percussion from the Symphony series and have had good use for it... the price for completing the series is 59,90 for me, hard to resist

I caved in, too good to pass... must say, the strings are rather good, a nice warm tone and legato/portamento aren't bad. Was expecting much worse... they also have auto-divisi, and sections can be divided in Vln I A/B, Vln II A/B, Vla A/B, Vc A/B. Three mic positions, close-mid-far. To me they sound warmer than Lass3. Of course there are things that could have been better. Samples are taken every two semitones, the same sample of the immediately recognizable open G string in the violins is also used for the G#, same for violas and cellos (open C). But strings alone are well worth 60€... and the kontakt patches are open, so something can be done under the hood.
Haven't downloaded the ensemble woodwinds, just the solos, and they are barely passable. The range sampled is too short, like bassoon only up to the hi F, flute to the high G then stretched up to C. Oboe is maybe the best of the bunch. In general the tone isn't bad but these can only work as second or third parts.
Solo brass have this strange thing of having separate dynamic layers, p-mf-f and no patch to combine them in a playable way, it's either one or the other.
The ensembles are better though, with better dynamics, though not really from pp to sfz.
I don't know if I'll bother downloading the woodwind ensembles, I don't have many occasions to use them. Again, for the money I'm pretty satisfied but can't imagine spending the full price, sincerely...

Oh god, Valves Pro, why did I never got this, so much fun to play in ensemble mode, lost an hour that should be used elsewhere.
This and session percussion are worth the upgrade price alone

Pablo Crespo wrote: ↑Jun 04, 2025 10:55 am Oh god, Valves Pro, why did I never got this, so much fun to play in ensemble mode, lost an hour that should be used elsewhere.
This and session percussion are worth the upgrade price alone

It's pretty gorgeous, isn't it? And as you say just lovely to play.

And that's how I see Komplete. If you time it right, you only need a couple of great products to make it worthwhile. I don't install the stuff I know I'll never use, and often find uses for other products which I wouldn't have bought on their own.

Yes, the session guitarrist series has saved me a lot of times, world libaries, cremona, lores. All good in my book.

I am liking Safron but it doesn’t remember when I change the cc values of the x/y pad after switching to another preset, like starlight does.

Today I will start exploring Session Percussionist. I have SSS 2 so will let you know if I share your opinions
!

Stupid question here-so I have Komplete 12 Ultimate and would like to update to 15 Ultimate. I need to put the libraries on new drives as the locations for 12 are long filled.

Will my present projects all have to be redirected?

Lawrence wrote: ↑Jun 11, 2025 9:56 am Stupid question here-so I have Komplete 12 Ultimate and would like to update to 15 Ultimate. I need to put the libraries on new drives as the locations for 12 are long filled.

Will my present projects all have to be redirected?

Just name the new drives the same thing as the old drives.

Still have the old drives hooked up, I think that would cause chaos.

You can safely split the different libraries to different drives. No problem.

Right. My question is about pathways and what the upgrade actually does. For example, does it leave K5 and K6 in place? Will it mess up my VEP templates and my Cubase projects?

You only install what you want, and you can set content install paths for wherever you like. It doesn't touch anything existing by default, though you will likely get offered a lot of optional updates. Be wary if the specs there.

I find Native Access 2 solid.

So it leaves existing plugins alone? I’m trying to really really clarify, pardon my stupidity.

Lawrence wrote: ↑Jun 11, 2025 5:09 pm So it leaves existing plugins alone? I’m trying to really really clarify, pardon my stupidity.

Yes.

As said, it will likely offer optional updates to some of your existing products. The main risk there is that will offer some library updates that rely on a newer version of Kontakt to work.

The only other thing I can think of is for some third party products I had to point Native Access to my existing install using the "locate" button" rather than download a new version in a new location.

Thanks for clarifying! Gonna go for it. Best Service seems to have the best price.