Ableton Forum

Hello

Does any of you know if the Novation SL mk3 keyboard lets you browse presets of VST's out of the box?
From what I understand it integrates with Ableton synths without you have to map everything from the beginning.

Hey mate,

The board plays very nicely with Ableton native instruments and devices (and even hardware!).

If you're using a third party device/instrument, I *think* you'll need to map the parameters you want to tweak to an Ableton rack, but then you'll be good to go.

I don't think you can browse presets like you can with Arturias Keylab/Analog Lab series.

Maybe NI komplete kontrol is a better choice if I want coupled hardware control

Yeah, I think there are pros and cons to both, mate.

The NI stuff is great for browsing though those NI presets, but I'm not sure if it works with non-NI instruments - maybe someone here can help.

The Novation board is great for midi/device control, but not the preset thing. I will tell you, I nearly went with an NI board, but it just didn't have enough knobs and sliders which the Novation excels. Plus, the hardware integration is amazing out of the box. Want to treat your Prophet 6 like an Ableton device...boom. Parameters mapped, record and go.

The other thing about the Novation...the built-in sequencer is really nice. Again, probably not relevant....but if you wanted to sequence your hardware without Ableton then you can. You can even treat Ableton tracks as individual "midi hardware" - you can sequence using the Novation, but use VSTs via Live as hardware devices. So, you can use your hardware synths, but still use Ableton's drum racks/sampler etc.

Komplete Kontrol works great with both all the NI content and a huge range of VST instruments. I have developed NKS support for over 5 years now to support the instruments that do not have NKS officially with hundreds of instruments and expansion libraries available. The support from users makes more supported plugins possible.

https://freelancesoundlabs.com/nks

It wasn't my intention to still be making NKS libraries these days, it was initially to just add browsing for Omnisphere, Sylenth and Korg but given the support I have had and the fact it actually opens these up for visually impaired users to use the voice guidance of the keyboard it has kept me pressing on.

I wouldn't be without it these days. if you like to dig through presets and get going fast, nothing beats it. Every library I create has sound previews that play a small sample of every preset before you load it and the tagging helps to quickly find sounds fast. It was always one of those "first world problems" to have too many options in which VST to use and not being bothered to wait for each one to load to browse some sounds.

I used Push and developed push preset browsing libraries before I had a KK keyboard but this kind of slowed me down even more due to the Push browser being very limited and not great to browse. KK isn't a perfect solution to everything but is a useful addition to live.... Just don't bother if you are a Mac user who likes Logic as Apple kind of screwed up Logic API and things just haven't worked for a while... Live is always good because they have a decent API which is rock solid from experience.

I’ll second how powerful jestermgee’s NKS presets are. Thank you so much!