a deep dive with Ocean Swift Synthesis – Native Instruments Blog

You’ve implemented deep NKS 2 (Native Kontrol Standard) integration and detailed help tags for the visually impaired community. Why was it important for Ocean Swift to go beyond standard mapping and ensure that every knob and slider was fully accessible to all creators right out of the box?

It started when I was still working at Native Instruments in the Kontakt team and we were handed the responsibility of integrating the direct Kontrol S-Series MK3 connection with Kontakt. It is ironic in hindsight – at first I was a bit upset about being handed this project. Through this I learned a lot about NKS and was lucky enough to be part of implementing NKS2, and thus grew to appreciate and love its possibilities.

The second experience which made us fully committed to NKS came from discussions with Chris Ankin who runs the KK-Access blog. We finally began to truly grasp how transformative and empowering NKS is for the visually impaired community, and how every good implementation detail removes a barrier and enables creativity.

With NKS2, many of the barriers to creating truly committed mappings that the original NKS suffered from were removed, and the methods of implementation in Kontakt were improved; I guess we kind of took it upon ourselves to champion this cause a bit!

A standout feature is the User engine, which allows producers to drag-and-drop their own audio into your signal chain. What was the inspiration behind turning a flagship synth into a high-end processing shell for a user’s own sample collection?

I remember the interview with Ilan Eshkeri on the Native Instruments blog, where he discusses using Kontakt as a front-end for his own samples. In a way, when users can load their own samples, we are exposing highly configured Kontakt engine front-ends with our instruments, which we hope is lots of fun for use cases like he describes in the article.

Just as we love exploring and loading our unique sample collection into other engines like Absynth and treat them as our own sound design playground, we want to give our users the same experience with our own instruments. It is also a way to expose Kontakt Player users to a flow which enables them to use their own samples in Kontakt, which is generally reserved for Kontakt Full users in the wider context.