By
NearTao
Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:12 pm
Kontakt is a sampler Product by Native Instruments that can load into any DAW that supports VST or Audio Units. Though calling it a sampling is a huge disservice, it’s a whole platform to itself, and allows advanced routing, scripting, and a whole host of other things.
You might ask, why use Beats at all if you’ve got Kontakt... and that’s where I’d probably say that at the end of the day it is a great instrument, but it is not a digital audio workstation. So while you can construct amazing sounds in it, you’re not really going to want to produce a whole song in it from start to finish. That said, you absolutely *can* create a whole song in it... and I’ve seen people do other crazy stuff in it... but it is a kind of high friction type of work compared to working in a DAW.
All that said, nothing wrong with using Beats and Kontakt together, heck they used to have a demo version of Kontakt... and if they still do you could at least give it a try. It is quite popular too, and is going to have way more free instruments people have created for it compared to the new Beats software.
Personally I found Kontakt to be a bit of a resource hog, and while it is super powerful, I found it kind of obtuse to work with. This was years ago (10+), and more recent versions are likely far more streamlined.
At the end of the day though, I’d be sure you are adding something that adds more to what you have to give you new effects, features, etc... otherwise you’ll get lots of duplicate types of instruments, effects, DAWs, etc... and just bury your creativity in too much choice. This is a big reason why I moved away from software, sure it’s powerful and cost effective, but as you dig deeper there is a tendency to just scroll through presets instead of taking a step back from what you are doing and think about various ways to approach the problem.
And Tutor is right... programming guitar in the current Beats/Studio/X/Live/One environment is a bummer... you either work too hard to get a fair (EDIT: guitar) sound, or you fake it and get something that resembles a guitar but doesn’t really sound like a guitar. Nothing wrong with any of this, but it’s an area where the current firmware cannot fill that gap (EDIT: for some types of sounds).
My suggestion... stick with the Beats software and see what you can do there. You’ll quickly find out if you care that it sounds real, or you just want to get into the ‘that sound’ space. There is absolutely nothing wrong with faking it, and there are tons of tricks you can pull off with just Beats, and honestly, how many people are going to know what DAW you used unless you tell them?
