Guitar Rig 5 with the new Van 51 Amplifier ready to rock ’n’ roll. Guess which famous guitarist it’s probably named after? Clapton? Stevie Ray Vaughan?
NEED TO KNOW Price Komplete 8: $699 Komplete 8 Ultimate: $1299 Komplete 8 update: $269 Komplete 8 Ultimate upgrade: $699 Contact CMI (03) 9315 2244 sales@cmi.com.au www.cmi.com.au Pros Studio Drummer alone worth the upgrade from previous versions. Great new Guitar Rig 5 sounds. Nice new effects plug-ins. Cons Full install requires heaps of hard drive space and lots of patience installing it… unless you get the Ultimate version. No easy way to import your own MIDI drum programming into the browser. Summary If you’re not already a Komplete owner and you’re tempted by Studio Drummer or the new Guitar Rig 5 content, go the whole hog and buy Komplete 8. If it’s an upgrade, it’s still good value.
AT 86
Retro Machines Mk 2. Old keyboards never die – they’re resurrected as ‘retro’ sounds. Which means disco isn’t dead either.
programming you want, then export it as a MIDI file to Studio Drummer’s library folder. Some DAWs will give you better workflows to achieve this, but you’ll still have to create a new MIDI file somehow. The kicker is you can’t refresh the Groove Library to access them. Only quitting Studio Drummer and restarting it will allow your own, new Grooves to appear. If you have the full Stadium kit of over 400MB loading each time… face it, it’s a workaround for something NI didn’t provide. Also, in Abbey Road Drums a dialogue box tells you which drum piece you’re playing and how. Like “Snare left of centre,” “Kick drum, wooden beater” and even “Snare, tea-towel” (really). It’s not included in SD. I realise you’re supposed to know these things by the actual sound – but hey, would it be so hard to have it in SD, if it’s good enough for Abbey Road? Anyway, enough complaining. ANOTHER STRING TO THE NECK
Guitar Rig gets a promotion to Guitar Rig 5 with additional modules that’ll satisfy any Big Hair Band fans. It’s time to dig the spandex pants out again folks. No prizes for guessing where the inspiration for the new Van 51 amplifier came from. The Hot Solo + Amp comes from the same vintage and both have a huge, authentic guitar sound rather than seemingly emulating a CPU trying to rip up a paper bag. There are also new effects and improvements to components that were introduced in GR4 for Guitar Rig’s significant makeover following GR3 (which worked fine, so the redesign copped some flak). The GR5 fixes look sensible and should appease the critics. Personally, I’ve been using GR playing live for some time and I can’t wait to stun the punters with a face full of Van 51, but my initial experiments are hinting that GR5 has perhaps left NI’s own hardware and drivers behind a little. In the studio and safely cocooned in a DAW, GR5 is exciting. On the road, and subject to the vagaries of different laptops and different controller hardware, stability issues can make you nervous. You might want to extensively test the performance first. The truth is, Guitar Rig has always been a little intolerant, although it works great once you iron out your specific computer’s requirements.
TRANSIENT MASTER & AFRICA DISCOVERY
The aforementioned Transient Master is a new plug-in that NI is promising will transform your mixes to sheer genius. It’s a simple compressor effect that can be applied to any DAW track or bus from inside Guitar Rig 5 or the free GR5 Player (the freebie plug-in host for the likes of Transient Master), and it’s also there as that effects option in the Studio Drummer mixer. As the name suggests it focuses all its energy on transients, so drums can work well. But things like plucked strings or percussive organ sounds can also benefit. The concept is to push back or bring to the fore those fleeting, transient parts of the audio – the clicks, pops and blats of percussive instruments – and the results are surprisingly effective, if subtle (although the best effects often are). Since it’s included in Komplete 8 you’ll probably try it out on everything. Being a trifle esoteric, I’m not sure it’ll be high on the shopping list as a stand-alone product. Likewise, the Discovery Series West Africa instrument is a collection of (take a wild guess here) African rhythms and single drums that may only appeal to a dedicated enthusiast or film post-production facilities, so you’d think it’s not going to fly off the music store shelves in droves. As a part of Komplete 8, it might come to mind more often when you’re searching for something different. There’s plenty of variety and the rhythms are cool. You will find a use for it. RETRO MACHINES MK2
Finally, Retro Machines MK2 is a suite of 16 vintage analogue keyboards. Most of the sounds emulate keyboards that you can buy for five bucks on eBay and if you ask me it’s a mystery why anyone would want any of them back. After all, we’ve just spent a trillion dollars on software development to get away from these cheesy sounds. Okay, there are some classic sounds, but you know what I mean… An extra 1300 presets have been added in K8 across the board to NI’s whole range of instruments like Absynth, Massive and FM8. It’s always fun to devote a few hours purely to checking these out and filing them into Favourites for future reference. Talking of which, the future will no doubt bring us a Komplete 9, Komplete 10 and so on, and it can be difficult to decide which update to buy and which one to skip until next time. For mine, the inclusion of Studio Drummer alone makes this a worthwhile investment. The rest is a happy bonus.