You knew there would be an 808 — photo (CC) Charlie Evatt. But there are some other, rarer goodies in there, too.

If you haven’t been following the Kore Soundpacks, NI has steadily been releasing soundware packages for Kore. The sounds themselves are built on the sound engines in Kore — that is, the guts of the instruments you get in Komplete, like Massive, Battery, Kontakt, and Reaktor. (And that’s another reason to dig deeper into those instruments — more on that in a moment, Kontakt users.) On the Kore side of the soundpacks, the packs add variations on those sound, built in the Kore environment using internal effects and modulators from Kore itself.

The latest addition, the US$59 Kontakt Retro Machines, gets extra credit for including lots of juicy retro gear. NI tells us that included in the samples are the:

• Crumar Orchestrator and Roady
• Korg Minikorg
• Linndrum
• Moog Minimoog and Memorymoog
• Oberheim DMX
• an RMI 368 Electra
• CR78, TR-808 and 909
• Sequentials Drumtraks
• String Melody II
• Yamaha CP-11 and Roland EP-10/20 vintage electronic pianos

So, there’s actually some different stuff in there, in addition to the expected staples. The Yamaha and Roland pieces are pretty rare-sampled electronic pianos.

What about Komplete users?

Kontakt and Komplete users may be wondering which soundpack to get — especially if you got Kore 2 and haven’t yet spent your “free soundpack” offer.

The trick is, a number of the soundpacks so far do overlap with existing sound content you already own. So, for instance, the samples above are all in Kontakt 3 — which is a reminder to me that I personally need to start digging through the new Kontakt a bit more! You do get some additional variations and presets in Kore, but then, you could also build some of these yourself, which for me is half the fun.

There are two soundpacks that are different in content from what you get with Komplete: one is Massive Expansion, the other is Pop Drums, both of which are editable if you have those instruments. Each of these introduces substantial new content, so either could be a good candidate for your coupon. And because you have the actual instruments and not just Kore’s internal sound engines, you can edit the sounds you get — more on how this works in a future post, with some examples from these two. I expect we’ll see more new content in future soundpacks, as well, so stay tuned. Edit: Several readers point out that Synthetic Drums is also different from what you get with Komplete – thanks! Since I didn’t get this quite right, I’m going to go over what’s in each of the soundpacks and what’s editable / what engines are used in a separate post.

Of course, if you don’t have Komplete, you’re a big part of the target audience for these soundpacks, and they are just $60. I’m going to be digging through my Kontakt sample library and doing some Kore presets of my own with these retro samples, so stay tuned for that, but in the meantime, here are some song examples from NI:

What Retro Machines sounds like

1_MachineMusic.mp3

2_Nostalgia.mp3

3_BoomBox.mp3

4_Halogen.mp3

5_BeachDay.mp3

6_HotelLounge.mp3

I’m curious to hear if any of you have picked up the soundpacks, so let us know in comments. (And, heck, let us know if you own a Linndrum or something, so I can be jealous…)