Review: Native Instruments Kore 2 Music Workstation
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

Performing Live with Kore 2

With all your sounds and plugins inventoried in Kore 2, wouldn't it be grand if you could take this library with you on stage and access all that sonic goodness via the now-familiar interface? Thanks to the stand-alone version of Kore 2, you can do that without having to use any other piece of software.

A key feature to support the use on stage — or in any other live environment, for that matter — are Kore 2's Performance Presets. A Performance is essentially a multisound plus a few additional settings like time and tempo for the built-in MIDI player (for syncing effects, etc.).

While the structure of a Performance is saved in a file with the Save Performance command, a Performance Preset stores the settings of the components in that structure. In other words, you can't exchange any components via Performance Presets, but you can change almost everything else, like the settings in the user or channel pages of the components, the mixer settings, and the audio routings. (See Figure 9.)

Fig. 9: The Performance Presets panel. There are 16 banks of 8 storage slots each for a total of 128 presets for the given Performance. To store a preset, select any slot and press Store. The Append button selects the next empty slot and stores the current setup as a new preset. Neat!

A preset is loaded as soon as its slot is clicked, so there is no explicit load button. If you're using presets while synchronizing with a sequencer, Kore 2 lets you decide when the change becomes effective: as soon as you select a preset, or on the next beat or bar.

For remotely switching presets, Kore 2 supports standard MIDI Program Change events. As you'd expect, you can also change presets on the Kore 2 controller by pressing a button.

To prepare Kore 2 for use in a live setting, here's what you do: compile all sounds that you will need for a set into one or two Performances. Adjust the sounds' settings and routings, store these as Performance Presets, and step through them while playing.

Here's the key feature that makes this approach possible even when the processor load would be way beyond your computer's capabilities: you can deactivate each channel, and even each component, of a Performance. This is not the same as muting a module, because deactivated modules do not require any CPU cycles.

In other words, you can throw as many modules at a Performance as you wish, as long as you make sure that your computer is capable of running those modules that are activated at any given time, or rather: in any given Performance Preset. In Figure 9, the orange x in the fourth module indicates that it is deactivated, so that only the four others are using CPU power.

In the lower right corner of the Performance Presets panel, Kore 2 displays the previous and next non-empty preset slots, so that you can see which preset will be recalled when you hit the forward or back program-change buttons. There's also room for comments, so you can add notes to inform yourself about what will come out of the speakers before pressing any key.

Don't forget that you can also use the eight sound variations. By modifying your sounds' settings via the controller knobs and storing these settings as sound variations, you effectively have eight times as many preset slots available. Those 1,024 "presets" should let you tackle even longer sets!

The current implementation works quite well, but I don't understand why NI followed the "presets in banks" metaphor and put in this rigid 16x8 matrix. I would have preferred a more flexible approach of folders holding arbitrary numbers of presets, which would hopefully do away with the limit of 128 total presets, as well.

Regardless of the way they are organized, the Performance Presets turn Kore 2 into a great live tool that makes for a seamless link between studio and live usage of your entire sound library. And when using the hardware controller, you can even stash your laptop away and use Kore 2 as a unified interface for summoning all the sounds you'll need for a given session, as well as for live-tweaking them to your heart's content.

Kore Conclusion

Kore 2 is an extremely capable music production tool, so you will probably need to play around with it for a while until you see just how versatile and powerful it is. That doesn't mean the software is complex — rather that it's almost infinitely flexible.

Which brings me to my main complaint: the "operation manual" could have been more helpful. It is written in a monotone style and follows a purely reference-oriented structure. Fortunately, NI has since addressed those of us who learn better by doing with a series of excellent video tutorials that you can download for free through the Service Center utility.

As for the actual Kore 2 product, I have never before seen a sound-search tool that is as useful, convenient, and fast as the Kore Browser. Better, by supporting standard third-party audio plugins, that browser can serve as a studio's central sound librarian. The Kore 2 hardware controller won't replace a full-blown hardware synth anytime soon, but in combination with the right soft synths and a reasonably powerful laptop, it makes a very capable alternative to that hardware synth, especially for live gigs, when reliability and transportability are more important than having direct access to esoteric sound parameters.