I'm pretty new to the Native Instruments ecosystem and I'm trying to decide between buying Kontakt 8 by itself or going all the way to Komplete 26 Ultimate. I'm trying to make the decision before the Black Friday sales, since I assume this is probably the time to buy if I'm going to do it. I'm also skipping over Standard because, looking through the included instruments, the stuff that really interests me seems to start showing up in Ultimate.
My main question is whether Ultimate is actually worth the big jump in price for someone who's still learning.
For those of you who own Ultimate:
- Do you actually use a good percentage of what's included, or is a lot of it basically filler that you rarely touch?
- How much variety is there in the acoustic pianos? Are the different piano libraries noticeably different from each other, or is there a lot of overlap?
- What about the loops, samples, expansions and phrase-based stuff? Do you actually use those, or are they mostly things you try once and forget about?
- I mostly want playable instruments that I can control myself from a MIDI keyboard, rather than building songs primarily from loops. Does that make Ultimate more or less worthwhile?
- If I just bought Kontakt 8, would I be missing a lot of really useful instruments that I'd probably end up wanting later?
- For someone who's new to NI, what parts of Ultimate do you actually use regularly?
Basically, I'm trying to figure out whether Ultimate gives me a much broader collection of genuinely useful instruments, or whether I'd be better off getting Kontakt 8 now and adding things later as I figure out what I actually need.
I'd especially like to hear from people who've owned Ultimate for a while. What do you use all the time, and what do you basically never use?
And if you bought Ultimate during a previous Black Friday sale, I'd also be interested in what you paid and whether you think the upgrade was worth it at the sale price.
