Review: Native Instruments Kore 2 Music Workstation
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Playing Kore 2: The Browser

Running the software as a sample player is Kore 2's most basic mode of operation: find a sound via the Kore Browser and load it, tweak (some of) the sound's key parameters, and jam away.



The Kore Browser exposes an extensive set of metadata that Kore 2 stores for every sound in its library. This metadata includes sound attributes like type, genre, and timbre, as well as the sound's name and author. You can freely configure the columns in the Kore Browser to display whatever criteria you find useful when searching for a sound. (This also works for effects and MIDI plugins.)

As soon as you make selections from the Browser's criterion columns, the list of sounds is instantly filtered to show only those that match your selection. Additionally, there's a search box where you can type in your own terms to filter the list further. (See Figure 1.)

Fig. 1: The Kore Browser
Fig. 1: The Kore Browser: The yellow highlights indicate criteria the user has selected, whereas the check marks indicate which attributes have been assigned by the author to the sound currently selected in the list on the right.

While this kind of sound browser has become common in audio software, the Kore Browser has a useful feature that I have not seen in competing applications: once you select a sound, all of that sound's attributes are shown in the Browser. You get an instant idea of the overall character of a sound without having to load and test-play it first. Excellent!

However, I wish there were a way to explicitly enter a "not" selection. For example, while looking for a bright synth lead sound, I noticed that some of the sounds Kore 2 found were arpeggiated, which was not what I wanted. What if holding the Option or Alt key while clicking a criterion highlighted the criterion in red instead of yellow, and excluded matching sounds from the final list? Just an idea, dear NI developers.

By the way, if you aren't happy with the characterization of a sound, that's not a problem, because most of the metadata is freely editable.

Kore Audio

As mentioned, Kore 2 ships with some 500 sounds, which are all of impeccable quality, as you would expect from Native Instruments. I also had a chance to try a number of optional Soundpacks, with names like FM8 Transient Attacks, Deep Transformations, Synthetic Drums Reloaded, and many more. The synth-oriented Soundpacks contain 200 sounds each, and being priced from $59–$119, offer extremely high instant gratification — especially because you can buy them as online downloads.

Here I'm playing three of Kore 2's Deep Synth Pad sounds in a row to demonstrate the quality of the sound library and the built-in effects. (Just listen to the richness of the phaser and the creamy reverb at the end of the last example.) The sounds are Mirphak from the Kore 2 factory library, Come Upstairs from the Massive Expansion Vol. 1 Soundpack, and Return to Dust (also from the factory library):

Once you've loaded a sound, you can adjust key parameters with eight onscreen knobs and buttons, which can be controlled with the Kore 2 hardware controller (Figure 2). You also can use the hardware knobs as generic MIDI controllers, but they become much more valuable when used with the Kore 2 software, because their resolution is much higher than the 128 steps supported by the MIDI protocol, making for much finer sound editing compared to standard MIDI controllers. [Ed. Note: Well-designed MIDI software interpolates between incoming controller values to smooth out the jumps, so in practice you shouldn't hear "stairstepping" when using standard controllers, but higher resolution in an integrated system like Kore does have advantages.]

Kore 2 Control Surface
Fig. 2: Kore 2's high-resolution hardware controller has a very nice feel. It lets you control the entire Kore 2 software more efficiently and expressively than with a mouse.

Obviously, this won't compare to having full access to all the parameters of each synth engine, but for the vast majority of sounds in Kore 2 (including the Soundpacks), the selection of parameters makes a lot of musical sense and allows for some drastic sound modifications. For many sounds, more than eight parameters are assigned to the control knobs, so you have to flip through a number of pages of parameters. Fortunately, you can flip through the pages from the hardware controller.

As a cool extra, you can store up to eight variations of a sound in a 4x2 matrix and either jump to one of them or smoothly morph between them. Here's an example of sound morphing, using the arpeggiated Abendstern (evening star) sound from the Massive Expansion Vol. 1 Soundpack. I created the performance by holding a Maj7/9 chord and morphing between the eight sound variations with the eight controller knobs. This is more of a technical demonstration than a marketable piece of music, but should give you an idea.

This next example is the Arp Tweaker sound from the factory library triggered with a simplistic bass arpeggio while I change parameters.

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