Komplet 15 Ultimate vs V Collection X

[Trancer]

Good morning,

What would be the best choice for electronic music composition (trance, melodic techno)?

Komplet Ultimate seems to be more suitable for orchestral, scoring and less for more modern music, now perhaps a preconceived idea.

On this subject, for orchestral, scoring, choirs, Komplet 15 Ultimate is a good choice or better to choose banks like Oblion One, Audio Imperia Nucleus or others?

Thank you in advance for your response.

[Ah_Dziz]

I'd say Komplete has far more range than V Collection. All those orchestral libraries and ethnic stuff is sample based and can easily be used and abused in all types of musical and sound design contexts. It also gives you the option to mock up some movie score style music as a learning experience if nothing else.

[BBFG#]

Far less BS with Arturia. More time to create with them than NI. With NI you'll spend time trying to get them downloaded and installed and emailing support than you will with Arturia.

[Trancer]

Thank you for your answers.

Concerning the Komplet, for orchestral, is it an introduction, nothing more?

Better to take something more specialized?

Oh, so bad with NI?

[IvyBirds]

I have both but didn't upgrade to the newest version of either as there wasn't all that much that was new

With Arturia V collection you get emulations of dozens of vintage instruments. You Digital Synths, Analog Synths, pianos, and organs. There are three (four if you count mellotron) samplers. That come with sample libraries but they are from back in the day and are not "realistic" by modern standards. You also get some modern sample based instruments in the Augmented line.

With Komplete Ultimate you also get a ton of instruments. The star of the show is Kontact and with that you get a bunch of libraries that sound very real and you can do a lot of them. The good news is that you also get a bunch of other instruments that cover a bunch of things, the bad news is many of them have been out for a very long time and are not really being updated

My recommendation especially with Black Friday Sales right around the corner is the do the following. Keep in mind Komplete Ultimate is over $1,299

Take advantage of the current UVI sale and get Falcon 3.1 for $150. With that you will also get a $50 to go towards any library you want and they have a ton. Falcon has a ton of different Synthesis types all in one plugin and has a nice library of factory sounds. It also has a ton of expansion libraries

Wait a month until black Friday and get V Collection X on sale. You should be able to get it for $299. Now you are at $450

Then use the crossgrade pricing from owning Falcon to get HALion7. My guess is it will go on sale for Black Friday for $199 as a crossgrade. HALion7 has a HUGE factory sample library and several more bonus libraries as well. The bonus libraries include a really good Orchestral library and a really good Acoustic Guitar library, plus you get a fantastic FM synth, Wavetable, Spectral, granular and whole bunch more

So for half the cost of Komplete Ultimate you would get V Collection X, Falcon 3.1, and HALion7. With all of those things you could spend a lifetime and still not come close to exhausting the possibilities and they would work for all genres of music

[Ah_Dziz]

Thank you for your answers.

Concerning the Komplet, for orchestral, is it an introduction, nothing more?

Better to take something more specialized?

Oh, so bad with NI?

If you're interested in orchestral style scoring as a job I can't see how you wouldn't need the full version of kontakt. I use 3rd party non player libraries all the time. I also make my own little instruments in kontakt. I have both the Arturia a collection and Komplete bit my work wouldn't skip a beat if all the Arturia emulations disappeared. I can't say the same for kontakt. The libraries included in Komplete are great but they are not exactly cohesive (they are developed by a range of other companies). There's lots of good stuff in there though. Probably to the point where you could just use Komplete if you wanted to. That's before you even start with the synths and stuff.

[noiseboyuk]

Thank you for your answers.

Concerning the Komplet, for orchestral, is it an introduction, nothing more?

Better to take something more specialized?

Oh, so bad with NI?

There's a lot of nonsense talked about NI on KVR.

1. V collection is synths. If that's what you want, it's way better than Komplete.

2. The orchestral libraries in Komplete Collectors Edition are not a strong suit. However:

3. Kontakt (full) is an industry standard, and pretty much every serious composer has it to load third party non-player libraries.

4. IMO Komplete's other main strengths are: World instruments; Cinematic instruments; the session series (guitars, percussion), other keys. People here tend to call anything they don't personally use "bloat", but for many these libraries are bread and butter. Some effects are very good.

There wont be Black Friday discounts for Komplete, maaaay just be brief deals at Christmas, but it's probably more likely to be half price next June.

[mi-os]

Komplet

I like how you insist it's spelled Komplet instead of Komplete.

To answer your question, Arturia is tons of synths and Komplete is samples of acoustic instruments and synths. Techno is mainly synths, but there is no reason you can't do techno with Komplete.

[swilow11]

Besides being collections of instruments, I don't think these 2 are that comparable. V Collection is just synths, no FX or anything. Komplete contains basically everything one could ever really need for music of many genres.

My answer therefore is get both I have V Collection and Komplete Standard and use the latter way more than the former. V Collection is nice and all but who has the time to learn over 30 synths. OTOH, I use Massive X, many of the FX anf various kontakt libraries all the time. Both are seriously bloated though.

[jules99]

electronic music composition (trance, melodic techno)?

No one has really bothered to compare both bundles with this in mind. Because I would argue that, unless you want to create Synthwave, 70s Disco, 80s Acid or Electronica, or other 70s to 90s electronic genres, V Collection doesn't offer a lot.

If it's electronic dance music that you're after, either take a look at Arturia Pigments (not part of V Collection, brilliant modern synth plugin with hundreds of excellent EDM sounds) or get Komplete.

Because outside of all the orchestra sounds and world music instruments, it comes with two things, suited for EDM: Massive X and Massive. While the former is not easy to use and the latter is pretty old, both come with hundreds of excellent EDM sounds and dozens of expansions with even more techno sounds.

[Scoops]

Yes NI covers the whole gambit, but Omnia is terribly unimpressive and the orchestras are uninspired. Combine that with their seriously flawed business model, and I've walked away.

I have BBCSO pro for the orchestral portions. A bit pricey, but way better in terms of usability and support. If you wait till black Friday, you can get a good deal

[EnGee]

Sound wise, I would pick NI Komplete over Arturia's synths (not only, but in general above all others!). only Reaktor is a world in itself without making my own ensembles covering all kinds of syntheses! Massive X IMO is the best sounding wavetable synth out there. The only main drawback for NI products (except Massive X) is the lack of Hidpi suppport, so if you have a 4k monitor with scaled Windows (150% or 200%), you will deal with kinda blurry GUI. Still usable, but not as good as Arturia's clean GUI.

Personally, I have installed few Arturia's synths from VC 7 and individuals adding on: CZ V, DX7 V, Jup-8 v4 and SQ-80. Also, Pigments. I use them sometimes, but I use and prefer NI synths: Razor, Form, Monark, Prism, Reaktor (factory), Massive X, Massive, Absynth and FM8. Those never get old for me! Oh well, I'm old, so maybe that's why! I believe that picking what I really like one by one ideally is better than a collection that I don't use most of it! However, picking a collection most of the times cheaper than picking few items.

Orchestral sounds I use rarely as my focus is on synths mostly, but I find the few instruments that comes with Kontakt 7 are really good! They are definitely more than enough for me. I like them more than the factory sounds in Halion or even my MODX synth/rompler.

[Examigan]

HALion7 has a HUGE factory sample library and several more bonus libraries as well. The bonus libraries include a really good Orchestral library and a really good Acoustic Guitar library, plus you get a fantastic FM synth, Wavetable, Spectral, granular and whole bunch more

I have HALion 7, but are the bonus libraries you mention located somewhere else to download, or right there in the same package? I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something somewhere. I guess you mean the bonuses such as Tales, Raven, and some others.

[sinemotor]

What would be the best choice for electronic music composition (trance, melodic techno)?

Komplete Ultimate seems to be more suitable for orchestral, scoring and less for more modern music, now perhaps a preconceived idea.

Hi

Native Instruments website shows a comparison list to get a great idea of what is included in each Komplete bundle.

I would not put V Collection and Komplete Ultimate in the same category because the former is a large collection of vintage synths and keyboards while the latter is designed to be « THE ultimate instruments & tools library » available on the market.

I find Arturia V Collection to be extremely redundant (and kinda niche) in the context of production. I mean, why would one need 15 different flavours of analog synth sounds. I’d rather have one great analog emulation than being overwhelmed with all of these.
Worth mentioning that Pigments isn’t included in the collection.

So realistically you should go with Komplete Ultimate, especially for (modern) electronic music production. You will find in there all the content you need for contemporary Trance or Techno. The orchestral content is like a quarter of what’s included.

Check the numerous electronic expansions packs and Massive X in priority. This synth can be intimidating at fist but it does sound AMAZING and is extremely versatile. And don’t forget the old Massive which is still excellent.

[mumpcake]

They are two completely different beasts.

Arturia's collection is great. It has lots of analog sounds from the usual suspects, a bunch of digital (CZ, DX, Emu, Synclavier, Fairlight, SQ-80, Prophet VS), a 303, Tron, Vocoder, acoustic and electric pianos, organs, "augmented" instruments, etc. One thing it's lacking though is drum sounds.

Komplete is also great. Kontakt is the leading sampler. While it is great for all kinds of real world instruments, there are plenty of included synth libraries for it and a lot of modestly priced 3rd party libraries as well. There are also a lot of great drum libraries for it, many of which contain midi beats.

Battery has electronic drums. Guitar Rig contains a great collection of effects for any purpose, not just guitar. FM-8 can go beyond basic DX sounds. I'm not that much a fan of the OG Massive, but a lot of people in the electronic camp got a lot of mileage out of that one. Massive X sounds great and works for a variety of styles.

Let's not forget the can of worms that Reaktor is. There's Reaktor Blocks, a modular environment which contains digital and analog components, Monark, a realistic Minimoog, Razor, an additive synth, Prism, for physical modeling, Rounds, which incorporates digital and analog synths together, and a lot more that I don't have time to mention.

So far most of the items I have listed are available in the standard version of Komplete.

Maybe instead of Komplete Ultimate go with Komplete Standard and the Arturia collection.