The level meters on the display are lovely – far superior to looking at Ableton Live’s tired old interface. So i guess we just button it through those pages. I can do this on the screen with a tap which works well but it’s a fuss to have to drop to a mouse to do it.
Couldn’t they represent the different pages of editing? So rather than having to tap through each page i could just select them. But why don’t I get that on the keyboard screen? Also the white buttons at the top don’t seem to do very much. Whereas on the computer screen you get a knob showing you exactly what’s going on. Now is it just me or shouldn’t the screen on the keyboard be showing me this? On the keyboard screen you get the same labels but then you get the setting in numbers – in data. If you hit this little knob button it reveals these same controls in the GUI. But this stepping through pages can get a bit boggling and sometimes it’s hard to figure out what you’re controlling. These are not always labelled helpfully – like this Filter page with knobs labelled as Knob 1, Knob 2 etc. Hidden within Razor are a ton of other controls. Now although that appears to be simple if we look over here we can see that there are actually 16 pages of mapped knobs. So, what I am getting at is that in order to navigate the Kontrol software successfully – or at least get beyond the A’s – you have to get the hang of the Category, Type and Mode system. Rob Papen got in touch because they support NKS and gave me his synths to try with the keyboard – awesome but it added like another 10,000 presets to the list. A pain because I have an unwieldy 34163 presets to browse through. Awesome because I can simply dial up the sound I want to use without having to know where it came from – and it will load the relevant instrument for me. This is both awesome and a pain in the arse. The idea is that you don’t have to load Massive in order to look at Massive’s presets, or Kontakt to look at an instrument in there – they are all compiled in this huge list. The presets are pulled from every installed NKS compatible instrument. Now I should point out that you may have lots and lots of presets. So you can very quickly drill down to the presets that best match what you’re after. Types are types of instrument – piano, drums, synths, strings etc, whereas Modes are how they are played – arpeggiated, chord, long release etc. But you have other knobs that can break it down into Types and Modes which are probably more useful. The first knob selects the category – there’s only three, drums, sampled instruments and synths – seems a little under-served. You get options under the 8 white buttons, data above the knobs and thumbnails on one side, text on the other. The keyboard lights up, buttons emerge out of the darkness and now the S49 suddenly feels like a workstation keyboard.
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