Is Komplete 7 the Reason replacement I have been looking for?

Morne · 07-11-2011, 01:02 PM

I warn you in advance for a long text, but scroll down to the bottom for a TL;DR summary

Also I am not sure If this is the right forum category, but I could not find any more suiting.

So, my composing and mixing carrier started with Reason 3 and only Reason 3, and I held on to that for quite a lot of years. It worked fine as long as I was contempt with only making instrumental tracks. But suddenly I found myself in a "band" (meaning three guys sitting in my bedroom making music on the computer with more alcohol then skills) and we wanted to record some vocals to our tracks. I spent a few months in the dark age of cubase before finally finding heaven in reaper.

In those early days I knew no other way of making music then reason, so I still made all tracks in reason, connected it to reaper with rewire and then recording vocals. But as I studied the arcane craft mixing more I realized that I wanted to route reason tracks in to different channels, so I could do all my mixing and automation in reaper. And then I discovered the world of VST sampled instruments. And finally I got tiered of all the hassle rewire creates for me. Setup time, loading time, not being able to have several projects open at the same time and unstable 64 bit rewire support are the things that really hampers my creativity the most.

So lately I have been trying to emit reason from my recording chain, but the thing I miss the most from reason is its varied sample library and expressive soft synths. So when I found out about komplete I thought it to good to be true. So I have a few questions to you guys using that bundle or any of the included products (mainly Reaktor 5, Kontakt 4 and battery 3 ):

How good are the synths and synth posibilities of reaktor? Is it a good general purpose synth for most applications? is it more or less capable then the combined synths in reason?

How good is the sample library in kontakt 4? Is it good enough to use in pseudoacustic pseudocinematic music? and is it good enough to ad orchestral pompousness to electronic tracks?

Also how is your general experience after working with them and reaper, stable? unstable?

The music I compose mainly sounds like this:
http://www.myspace.com/trocaderostrikeforce
and this:
http://www.myspace.com/pwoland

TL;DR:
Komplete 7, is it worth it is as a instrumental foundation for digital music composition in reaper?

Tod · 07-11-2011, 01:53 PM

Hi Morne, I can only speak for Kontakt. I have both K2 and K4 and couldn't live without them.

As far as the library that comes with K4, it's very usable. I have several Orchestra libraries and use them all includeing Kontakts.

Eyes · 07-11-2011, 06:48 PM

It really depends on what you want. For full on electronic music, Komplete could replicate most functions of Reason.

If you were looking at more acoustic or organic sounds, Kontakt is lacking in variety in the soundbanks - they are focused on highly sampled instruments instead of lots of instruments like Reason.

If your looking at Komplete, think about getting VI One as an addon. You can get it for 99 from musicians friend and it adds alot of additional sounds to Kontakt. Alchemy is pretty amazing if your just looking for a synth you can do anything with as well.

mtthw · 07-11-2011, 09:15 PM

Komplete has a lot of ready to use sounds.

You might want to just demo everything and dl all of their free players.

Komplete doesn't provide sequencers and midi editors which are very versitile at all, only very basic, not useful for much I have found. Hopefully this will develop more with Reaktor.

Kontakt is the most important, Reaktor as an effects processor, then Absynth, then FM 8. Battery and Massive are less important, IMO.

But yeah, Its just absolutely gorgeous to listen to for the most part, lots of fun.

Morne · 07-12-2011, 01:34 AM

Tod: Good to hear

Eyes: I gave a quick glance and tried to compare the instrument banks of vi.one and kontakt 4, but to me it did not look like they where that different? Is there any where one can find the complete lists of instruments for komplete 4 and vi.one? or could you give me some of the (in your opinion) most important instruments that are lacking from kontakt 4?

I have also glanced a lot at alchemy. It seams like a really awesome piece of software and I had almost decided to buy it when I found the komplete bundle (at that time I was looking for a drum machine, found battery and that lead me to komplete). And sadly I cant by both

mtthw: yea at 90 gb I really hope so, it it truly seams like that from their demo tracks.

I am not sure that I understand why you would want sequencers and midi editors in the VSTi, don't you use reaper to program your midi tracks? or am I missing something?

For my part I would rate komplete, reaktor and battery as my top 3 wants since battery will be my replacement for ReDrum.

But there is a lot of other goodies there as well that I am interested in. I experiment quite a lot with distorted synths, and I would love to see what ramfire could do when you throw synths on it. You also awakened my curiosity for FM8, maybe it can help me learn to program my old yamaha TG-77 behemoth.

mtthw · 07-12-2011, 10:20 AM

I just like sequencers. The Midi editor in Reaper is adequate, but I like having lots of different sequencers and midi editors/score editors.

Yeah, it takes months just to really get through all of Komplete once because theres so much stuff to get through. The saturation/distortion on absynth is really something. You can do waveshaping distortion with any waveform, and there's just lots of innovative controls.

Eyes · 07-13-2011, 04:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Morne

Eyes: I gave a quick glance and tried to compare the instrument banks of vi.one and kontakt 4, but to me it did not look like they where that different? Is there any where one can find the complete lists of instruments for komplete 4 and vi.one? or could you give me some of the (in your opinion) most important instruments that are lacking from kontakt 4?

It's hard to say, ED would be a better source if he is lurking somewhere...

Kontakt 4 is missing a few simple things - like the steel string aucostic only has chord strumming patches and no single notes. The electric guitars are realivly coloured allready. No banjo/harmonica etc. Just simple things missing. VI One isn't a complete solution to everything, but fills Kontakts gaps nicely.

Kontakt 4 library: http://sanches.com/dropbox/Kontakt4.pdf

(Taken from here. Not sure about VI one though, check google for reviews etc.

Quote:

I have also glanced a lot at alchemy. It seams like a really awesome piece of software and I had almost decided to buy it when I found the komplete bundle (at that time I was looking for a drum machine, found battery and that lead me to komplete). And sadly I cant by both

Ah the pain.

I wasn't intending to buy alchemy but I decided I couldn't live without her. All of NI's synths and Alchemy have decent demos to play around with anyway.

Morne · 07-13-2011, 04:52 AM

Thanks everyone for more good and informative replies

I also have a question about the system resource efficiency for different ways of "implementing" kontakt. I am not sure how to explain this clearly so feel free to tell me if you dont understand my question completely.

Lets say I am building a instrumental piece with 16 tracks, each one of them is using one kontakt instrument. Now as I see it, there is two basic ways of implementing this:

The first is to create a kontakt master track where I load one instance of kontakt that I fill with all the 16 instruments, then I create 16 instrument tracks, rout the midi from each track to one of the instruments and the audio from that instrument back to the same track that sent the midi. Thus I will have one instance of kontakt running all the 16 instruments.

The second is just to load one instance of kontakt with the appropriate instrument on each instrument track. Meaning that I will have 16 instances of kontakt running one instrument each.

I suspect that the former one consumes less resources the the second one. But do any of you guys have any estimation of how much? is it just slightly more, twice more or maybe even 16 times more?

The reason why I am asking this is because I much rather use the second implementation since tedious routing is one of the reasons I want to escape Rewiring Reason. I have also experience some quite weird (and very annoying) phenomenas while routing Reason audio and midi trough buses implementing sweeping EQs.

Eyes · 07-13-2011, 07:18 AM

Make a sacrifice to the Evil Dragon and you will get the answers you seek.

(I do the second and don't normally have any issues)

Blackrg · 07-13-2011, 07:26 AM

The NI products sound good, and there are lots of sounds.

The Spectrasonics products look great for the type of music you are making, but they may be too expensive, as they were for me

But having just bought Kore only to have it discontinued, just be sure you don't pay full price for NI products otherwise you may experience future pain.

NI has a strong track record of discontinuing stuff: B52, Vokator, Kompakt, Spectral Delay and now Kore, and is currently heading in a DJ/loop direction with Traktor and Maschine.

Best bet is to get Komplete second hand/used. NI always offer cheap upgrades to existing users. I bought Reaktor used off KVR and then got Komplete as part of a Xmas deal.

just my 2#