If you’re a Native Instruments hardware owner or you're just deep in the NI software ecosystem, you’ll want to pay attention to their latest sale. For the next two weeks or so, you can bag yourself a massive up to 50% off instruments and effects, as well as up to 80% off curated bundles. It’s the perfect place to pick up some fresh sounds for your next production project, whether you want to go all Hans Zimmer with atmospheric drone tones or you’re into your synth wave.
If you’ve never come across NKS before, it’s a Native Instruments technical standard that means plugins behave natively with any NI controller. If you load up one of these plugins in your DAW alongside something like the Native Instruments Kontrol S61 Mk3, the plugin will already be mapped to all the controls on the physical unit, so you can get straight to creating. Of course, if you don’t own any NI hardware you can still use the plugin exactly as you would any other.
With over 250 items on sale, it made sense for us to have a look through and pick out some of our favourites for you. First up, we wanted to shout out a great one for producers who don’t play guitar but want realistic sounds, E-instruments’ Desolate Guitars. It’s got a huge $50 discount in the NKS partner sale, and allows you to add moody, Americana-inspired guitar to any of your productions. In our Desolate Guitars review, we praised it for its simplicity, allowing music-makers to easily add the iconic sounds of two classic guitar amps for some ultra-atmospheric tones.
Next up we’ve got a beady eye on Soniccouture’s Sun Drums. Packed full of classic drum sounds from Ludwig, Gretsch, and others in Ray Davies’ Konk Studios, these are relatively dry samples that are perfect for breakbeats, funk, hip-hop and loads more. We love the MIDI mapping presets which means you can use them with a variety of different MIDI grooves, and you can even create your own mappings if you want. It’s super flexible and with a hefty $80.55 reduction in the sale, incredible value for money.
Containing emulations of both the Sequential Pro One and Prophet Five, the U-he Repro is our final choice for synth lovers. From modifying the individual parts of the sound engine to its selection of six excellent effects, this is a soft synth with a lot of depth that can make a huge variety of sounds. The sound is absolutely stunning, endlessly tweakable, and arguably one of the best Prophet emulations ever made. A $44.70 discount isn’t as large as some of the others in the sale, but if you need a Prophet in your soft synth collection then Repro should be your number one pick.
