Native Instruments Kontakt 8

Kontakt 8 features a User Interface refresh with several new content categories available within the main Browser.

NI’s long‑established software sampler gains a raft of new features and other improvements.

Over the last 20 or more years Kontakt has become an essential tool for countless musicians and producers. A new version is, therefore, something that both the user and developer communities will look forward to with anticipation and, perhaps, just a little trepidation. So, with the release of Kontakt 8, what have Native Instruments done to refine and improve upon one of the world’s most widely used pieces of music software?

First Kontakt

As before, Kontakt 8 is available in both full (paid‑for) and streamlined Player (free to use but with some limitations) versions. Both can run standalone or in a plug‑in (VST3, AU and AAX) format. As well as an individual product, both Kontakt versions are also available as part of NI’s various Komplete bundles. These bundles have also been updated and a separate SOS review of Komplete 15 will follow shortly.

For existing Kontakt users, the reworking of the UI will be the most immediately obvious change in v8. This exploits some significant graphical enhancements under the hood but, if you prefer the previous look, just opt for Classic View from the View menu and you can switch back to the earlier design.

There are a number of notable changes in the redesign. For example, on the Library page, there are now six main tabs — Instrument, Combined, Tools, Leap, Loops and One‑shots — and I’ll touch on all of these below. Once you have selected and loaded a specific preset from a library, as before, the main instrument UI dominates the Kontakt window, but you now get the Side Pane (it can be toggled on/off as preferred) on the left. This contains sections for Tools (more on these in a minute) and Instruments but, very usefully, it provides a compact version of the browser, giving you instant access to your entire Kontakt content including the presets for any loaded instrument.

Conflux Instrument

The full version of Kontakt includes a significant new instrument called Conflux. NI describe this as a something of a first in that it blends synthesis with Kontakt’s usual sample‑based sound creation in a hybrid design. This is provided by a complete reworking of Kontakt’s existing wavetable synthesis engine, adding FM, phase modulation and ring modulation wavetable oscillators to the existing PPG wavetables.

Conflux’s control set is laid out across three pages; Play, Edit and Settings. The first of these provides easy access to the presets and a set of macro‑style controls but the Edit page is where the full potential of the synth engine can be accessed. Here, the Source panel provides access to the Wavetable and Sample oscillator choices, and the ability to blend and adjust the balance of these two elements. The Audio Mod panel adds an additional sound source, offering three modes; Audio Mod, Shaper and Oscillator. The first two provide additional manipulation of the wavetable source but the third provides an independent virtual‑analogue oscillator that can be blended into the overall sound.

Conflux’s Edit page provides plenty of sound design options for those wanting to go beyond the included presets.

The engine offers a filter, two LFOs, two envelopes, two flexible effects slots, delay, reverb and a step animator. Alongside the six macro controls (each of which can be used to modulate multiple parameters), this makes for plenty of modulation sources and lots of suitable modulation targets. Linking sources to targets is all done graphically and is easy to configure, although a MIDI Learn option for linking the six macro knobs to an external hardware controller would be a nice thing to see. That said, hardware control was easy enough to map using the features in my DAW host.

Sonically, Conflux is impressive and involving. It perhaps won’t be an obvious pick for your bread‑and‑butter pop or EDM sounds, but for media composers or the more experimentally minded looking for some quirky sonic elements or evolving otherworldly soundscapes, it’s a great choice.

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