PLAYBOX comes at a standard price of €199.
NI’s head of UX & Market Research and co-creator of PLAYBOX, Nadine Raihani on the plugin: “Our goal as creators was to establish a sound library that didn’t just focus on one specific sound, but instead explored the full spectrum of sounds available to us, and embraced the happy accidents you come across when working with randomization,” Use the XY pad to morph between different effects and embrace the happy accidents by using the randomization dice button.
By using the built-in effects strip you can quickly tweak your sound through distortion (bit crush), shaper, strum, verb, strum octave, drive, and tape. Record your own chords, import MIDI files, or choose out of the 224 included chord sets. On the main Control panel, you’ll be able to merge individual samples, such as vocals or synths, into a chord and control up to 8 different chords through the use of 1 finger. Both the chords and samples combinations can be colored and shaped through multiple LFOs, envelopes, filters, and different FX types such as delay, reverb, and a limiter. A total of 905 alluring samples can be chosen specifically or by rolling the dice in the Samples section. By gathering the right notes you can build yourself unique chord combinations in the Chords section. PLAYBOX’s main interface can be divided into 4 sections: Chords, Samples, Effects, and the main Control panel. Get access to 200+ chord sets, 900+ samples, and 200+ effects presets, playable with just a click of a button. As a solution to the well-known writer’s block, NI mainly puts their focus on refreshing your workflow and sparking your creativity. Through a combination of chord generation, sample layering, FX, and randomization you will experience an unexplored world of creative possibilities.
Regardless of being a starting musician or a professional engineer, this plugin remains a challenge for everyone.
PLAYBOX is NI’s latest addition of software instruments focussing, this time, on randomization. | The Essential: Plugins & Gear used by 70+ artists – Click here to checkout On March 23, 2022, NI released their newest randomization instrument called PLAYBOX. Besides their newest instruments Prime Bass, Lunar Echoes, and Stradivari Cello, they announced the 4th addition to their range of instruments. If mangling samples is your gig, Kontakt 3 is well worth investigating.Native Instruments’ music production softwares, MASCHINE hardware, Traktor DJ equipment, and the KOMPLETE instruments & effects belong to the top tier within the music scene. It reads almost any sample format imaginable and once your sound is on board, many more tools await you. Suffice it to say, Konkakt 3 is far more than a simple sampler. Now, with the Zone Envelopes you can customise every hit by drawing an envelope directly onto the sample display – things like volume, pan, pitch, filter cutoff or any other parameter – even modulation sources. So, for example: grab a one-bar drum loop from your sample library and drag it into Kontakt, use the Beat Slicer function to chop up the loop and map each hit to an individual key. Within Kontakt’s wave editor there’s now a tab called Zone Envelopes, where you can ‘paint’ an envelope on any sample, for any parameter. These scripts are fully programmable once you get your head around NI’s scripting language.
A Kontakt script can take the form of anything from simple MIDI mangling, to arpeggiators, step sequencers and full-blown guitar emulation.
Kontakt also changes its skin like a chameleon thanks to its powerful Script Engine. So, for instance, the World instruments, when loaded, have a tuning table accessible from a tab on the front of the patch, while other samples like the 808 drums sounds, have an integrated step sequencer.
This customisable view turns every sample patch into its own instrument, allowing the most important elements of any patch to be arranged onto the plug-in’s skin. Divided into six sections (Band, Orchestral, Synth, Urban Beats, Vintage and World) the library encompasses a broad range of high quality sounds that are opened in the Performance View. Version 3’s 33GB sound library is impressive. Let’s quickly cover a few of the coolest new advancements. It’s truly an amazing beast and, thanks to the new version 3 release, it’s even better. If you want Kontakt to slice loops a la Recycle, it’ll do that too… and granular sampling. It ships with a comprehensive suite of built-in effects and is equipped with powerful modulation options. Its versatility, flexibility and ease of use make it a very attractive tool for beginners and serious underthehood geeks alike. It’s not simply a sample playback engine, it’s a thoroughbred sound designer. Native Instruments Kontakt has certainly been a trail-blazing success since its inception nine years ago, and has become the preferred format for a multitude of samplebased products.
Kontakt 3 is Native Instruments’ flagship sampler.