Sound from a Virtual Planet

Native Instruments’ free KORE Player is now out and available from their Website. To get going with this, you’ll follow a link for your platform, Mac or PC, and fill out a short form. You’ll get an e-mail message with a time-limited download link and a registration number. Be warned however, the download is over 600MB, so you’ll need lot’s of bandwidth to even think about it. Oh, and by the way, your best bet is to attempt this in the early evening, Eastern Daylight Savings Time, while the Germans are asleep.

Once on your desktop, the install is easy. The installer puts everything in it’s designated place, and KORE can be opened as a standalone application or instantiated as an AU, VST, or RTAS plug-in. Even though the KORE Player is free, you’ll still have to register with Native Instruments using their Service Center application and the registration number provided with your download link.

The free player application comes with an assortment of 50 Kore sounds to get you started. This is an excellent collection of both useful "bread and butter’ sounds, like sample-based drum kits, as well as the more exotic types of electronic sounds NI synths are known for. These sounds are not left-overs, and you could do quite a bit of music making with just this starting collection. However, it’s actually kind of a teaser, since the real power comes with the additional Soundpacks. These are premium collections with 200 patches in each, that cover a broad range of styles, starting at 59.00. Unfortunately, the weak dollar will continue to put customers in the US at a disadvantage with this and any other European product.

All-in-all, the KORE player is a great way to expand your pallet and get some fresh sounds into your electronic music.

Postscript…. On March 13, 2008, NI announced a server upgrades to accommodate the increased traffic.

There’s always been a disconnect between musical instruments and technology. On one hand, we view instruments as things that take years of dedication and practice to master, while the unabashed goal of technology is to make the things we do, from basic communication to art creation, easier, and shall we say, more "democratic." With synthesizers, there has always been a steep learning curve involved with the art of sound design, however manufacturers have repeatedly found that most using these instruments, hardware or software, never stray far from the factory presets. Now let’s take a company like Native Instruments, who have developed an extraordinary line of unique, powerful instruments. How do they reconcile the two, staying on the cutting edge while serving the needs of the marketplace?

In the last couple of years, NI has been promoting its Kore system as a way to simplify working with massive software synthesizer patch libraries. Kore uses a database and browser to organize patches, formatted as Kore sounds, by sound categories. For those who have NI Komplete, this makes for a very powerful way to access sounds while in the production process. Typically, when looking for a bass sound, one would have to open each synth, browse for suitable patches, write them down, open another synth, and repeat the process, over and over again. This gets tiring fast; –not what attracted any of us to electronic music in the first place. With Kore, the patch browser lists all patches designated as bass patches, regardless of which instrument they’re from. They can be opened, auditioned and used in a project, all within Kore.

While on the surface it may seem like we’re opening a new synth each time we call up a patch, we’re actually running off the Kore Sound Engine. What NI has done is built the sound engines for REAKTOR, MASSIVE, ABSYNTH, FM8, KONTAKT and GUITAR RIG into Kore, so when any Kore sound is loaded the engine is ready to go. Pretty cool…

So what’s the next step? Give the software away…free. At NAMM NI announced that a free Kore Player would be available in March, and the company will be selling soundpacks for 59.00 each. The player will have all the sound engine capabilities of the full Kore 2 version with a starting collection of 30 patches. While this is a remarkable development in the electronic instrument industry, giving away the synth but selling the patches, this is a model that we see more and more with technology tools. You need to look no farther than the printer you probably got free when you bought a computer to understand that the cost is in the toner, not the machine. And so it goes for software synthesizers.

It will be interesting to see how this flies in the marketplace. While there seems to be some support for the business model, soundware never appeared to be much of a moneymaker in the music tech industry. But, when you take a look at how musicians actually use synthesizers, as opposed to how they say they use them, our friends in Berlin may be on to something.