Native Instruments - Behind The Brand

Sam Inglis Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound People & Music Industry podcast with me Sam Inglis. In this episode I'm delighted to be joined by Simon Cross from Native Instruments. Welcome, Simon. Simon Cross Hey Sam. SI Great to meet you. SC Great to meet you too. SI Thanks so much for coming on this episode of the Sound On Sound podcast, I'm sure we're going to have some amazing insights. Astonishingly it's nearly 30 years since Native Instruments first burst onto the scene as a sort of disruptive startup and today it's one of the biggest names in digital music making. How did that happen and how do you yourself fit into that story? SC It is an incredible history, it is an incredible legacy. There's so many great products that kind of NI, or more broadly the NI companies kind of were part of creating and that's one of our greatest strengths as a company is that brand and that history. I mean, I fit in right at the end, you know, I've been at the company nearly two years, you know, just a very small amount of that time and I just get the opportunity to work with some incredible people. How did that happen? A couple of things. One is just a relentless focus on innovation and the second is riding the wave of the improvement in technology, Moore's law if you like, just over the last 30 years. Like if you think back to what was possible on a computer 30 years ago, you know, it was limited and you needed a very powerful one. Today, you know, you pick up a secondhand MacBook Pro and it can do incredible things and I think like NI's just been able to build more and more stuff that sits on top of that ever-improving technology. SI So from a business point of view, we've seen a lot of consolidation and private equity investment in the musical instrument industry recently and NI is no exception. Native Instruments is now kind of the banner brand for a group that includes iZotope, Brainworks, Plugin Alliance. Are they now just sub-brands of a single company, or do they all still have their individual identities and what has that investment allowed you to achieve at NI? SC Those brands still very much have their own identities and that is a strength, not a weakness. They stand for different things, they resonate in different ways to different customers and that's great but yes, you know, I oversee the whole product group and we work together as a group of engineers and designers and product managers across that whole suite of brands. In terms of what it's allowed us to do, one of the big advantages is technology sharing, right? So the, we just recently launched stems in Traktor Pro 4 and stems in Maschine V3 and that technology came from iZotope RX. We've got the Ozone Maximizer in Guitar Rig and in Traktor Pro 4 and it's, you know, it's the Ozone Maximizer, right? It's this incredible thing that's on many, many hit records and to be able to take those great pieces of technology and embed them around the various products of the group is something that would have been really hard to do before. SI Yes and on a related point, NI is a little unusual in that you offer a wide range of products directly to consumers, but you also support other manufacturers, especially through the Kontakt engine. How do you kind of balance the needs of those two markets? SC I think of NI first, actually, as a platform company. Like, that is where we start most of our thinking in the NI brand. So I mean, Kontakt is just a humbling thing to have in our world there, you know, we have hundreds of thousands of people using it every day. There are entire companies which exist just because of Kontakt and it really lowers the barrier to entry for many people to kind of create innovative sonic products and distribute them to ultimately millions of people and what we try and do is everything we build, we try and build into the platform. So a good example of that is the features we added in Kontakt 8, the tools and the Leaps, the Leap feature. We could have built those as features of Kontakt, meaning only NI could add to them. But we didn't, we actually implemented them both as features of the platform. So later this, either later this year or early next year, we're going to release a Tools SDK and a Leap SDK to allow third party developers to build tools and leaps for Kontakt and similarly with Conflux which is this kind of synth and sample based hybrid instrument we shipped with Kontakt 8. To build that, we added a bunch of new wavetables to the core sonic engine of Kontakt and they're now available for anyone to build products on top of and we're starting to see the first products come to market now that take advantage of that new technology. So like, I think of us first as a platform company. SI Interesting and of course by now there's a huge number of sound libraries available in Kontakt format, both from yourselves and from third parties. Regarding the ones that are marketed under the NI brand, are those all created in-house or do you work with third party development teams and how do you ensure consistency and quality control? SC Yeah both. I mean, we have a bunch of in house designers, sound designers and instrument builders, but we also work with third parties to actually develop and build those, many of those products as well and those relationships are really important and the people that we work with at those companies are just wonderful, they can do things and they bring ideas to the table that we don't necessarily come up with. Sometimes the opposite happens, where we come up with an idea and we need a third party to help us bring it to life. So both, some of the instruments are built entirely in house, some are built working with external partners. But when we ship them as NI branded products, you know, we have a team of people, sound designers and product designers, who have final sign off on whether or not that's something we're gonna ship under the NI brand. SI And when you make that decision, what sort of qualities are you looking for in your quality control? SC The user experience and the sonic experience, period. Like, is this thing fun to play with, does it open itself to you in a engaging way, is it easy to get good sound out of it but also easy to explore the edges of the sonic space? And does it sound good, does it sound distinctive? And you know, you know that same feeling, that you've played an instrument that doesn't inspire you and you're like, okay, I'll put this down and then there's other times you pick up an instrument and you're like, four hours later, where did the time go? And we've all had that experience and that's a lot of what we're looking for, is a very qualitative judgment of whether or not we think something's ready. SI Interesting. And historically, I guess, Native Instruments is strongly identified with Germany and with Berlin in particular, which is where your head office still is. But you now have offices in England, France, Japan, China and the USA. How does the market differ across those territories and how is that reflected in your product development? SC Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, like, they all differ, but maybe not by as much as you might think. Ultimately the job of a creative person is the same everywhere but the kind of culture in which they live and the music they're trying to create obviously is very local. So you know, the fact that we have people in all these places is another huge strength of ours. A lot of our sound designers and instrument builders are embedded in the music culture of where they live and that connects us to new genres as they emerge, artists, producers, all of the people that have their ear to the ground in kind of emerging cultural trends. That then directly informs our roadmap, right? We work with producers and sound designers who, you know, have a particular kind of sound and we either turn those into products that are NI branded or sometimes we'll work with, you know, we'll work with the artist to actually brand the product using the artist's brand. So yeah, that connection to culture and emerging genres and trends is just like, I mean, that's how we try and stay ahead of where music is going. SI And how do you handle that in territories where you don't actually have a direct presence yourself? SC We spend a lot of time listening to music online, you know. All of us are music nerds and one of the great things at NI is we have, you know, Slack channel after Slack channel of people talking about music. There’s Slack Channel’s dedicated to different genres and people are posting links to new artists. They're all over Spotify and SoundCloud and YouTube and you know, that's no substitute for having somebody there, but we have a pretty diverse employee base. In today's modern world you can work with people who might be on a different continent to you often just as you would if they're you know in the same country or just one time zone away. So I think the barriers to collaborating across countries, continents, genres and time zones have kind of really fallen away. SI Yeah and back in the day, as the Native Instruments company grew, it was split into three divisions. There was the core synthesis department and there were also units focusing on the DJ market and the guitar market. Is the company still structured like that? SC That's not quite how we organise today. We have a group who focus on kind of effects. We've got audio production and so that's a lot of the iZotope stuff, a lot of the Brainworx stuff, mixing and mastering, creative effects, like that area. Then we have another team looking after kind of Kontrol Maschina and Traktor, our hardware / software products. And then we have another team working on what we call music production, which is the platforms like Kontakt as well as like the instruments and synths that we, that we make ourselves, so things like Massive, Massive X and Claire which is one of our kind of recent releases in the sampled instrument space. SI There's been a general trend across the industry for the last 10 years or so for manufacturers to try to sell subscription packages rather than perpetual licenses. I find NI's approach here quite interesting because you don't offer subscriptions for say Komplete 15, but you do have a subscription offering that includes products from your partner brands. Tell us a little bit about the thinking behind this structure. SC We launched NI 360 about eight months ago now I think and we're really pleased with how that's gone. The uptake has been really promising and in particular it's, you know, what a lot of new customers are choosing, you know and we think giving customers a choice is the right approach. We offer, you know, we just launched Komplete 15 you know, a few months ago and we offer NI 360, and so, you know, if you want subscriptions as a way to access our products we have a great offering there and if you want kind of the complete offering then we also have that. They actually contain mostly the same products, it’s not like one is NI's products and one is partner products. They're actually kind of both similar in terms of the kind of products that they offer. The reason we kind of have them separate is that we're adding new products to NI 360 all the time, whereas Komplete 15 is, you know, the products it is today and so we wanted to make it clearer that if you choose Komplete, you're going to get a great set of products and you're going to have a wonderful day. But that's going to be the set of products you have indefinitely, whereas with NI 360, you're getting access to this ever evolving, ever changing, ever growing library of sounds and content and that's what a lot of our new customers have decided to choose today. SI So as a company, it's not a question of you trying to guide your users into one choice or the other. They're both equally valid as far as you're concerned. SC Totally. Like, they offer different properties for different groups of people, you know, for many people the cost of, you know, buying Komplete upfront is a lot to overcome and so a lot of our newer customers or people who value flexibility, you know, they either have to stick with a small selection of products in the perpetual world, or they can choose NI 360 and get access to this huge library of content. And if they want to take a break from their hobby, they can just, you know, pause their subscription and come back to it later and for a lot of people they value that flexibility and the fact they can access this huge catalogue of products and content for a modest monthly fee. SI Makes sense. And it seems like everyone's talking about AI and machine learning at the moment. How do you see the AI revolution panning out in the music business and what sort of developments are we likely to see from NI yourselves? SC Like any new technology it offers a bunch of opportunities and it also creates a bunch of challenges for any industry and we've seen this play out, you know, over decades of any new technology. I'm an optimist so I'm like pretty excited about what it offers, but I also understand why there are some, why there are concerns about the threats it might pose. In terms of how we're applying the technology at NI, the first principle is we never want to take away creative control. We're not about building black boxes where you type, you know, a few sentences and you get out a fully finished song. That's not what our customers want, that's not why we exist. But it also is an opportunity to bring new technology into the products which removes a bunch of the drudgery that, you know, the creative process has to go through and can help, you know, people reach, overcome creative barriers to entry and spark new ideas. So for example, one of the ways we're applying AI now and you'll see this roll out in our products next year, is can we use AI to help people navigate their existing library of sounds and content? One of the benefits of something like Komplete is you get, you know, tens of instruments, gigabytes and gigabytes of samples, loops and one shots and it comes to a point where that breadth becomes a problem. Like where do you start, right, how do I, you know, we've all spent seven hours trying to find the right hi-hat. So AI actually is a way that we can maybe help people navigate all of that complexity, we can jump from one preset to other presets that sound similar, we could let you upload an audio sample and we could generate you a preset that sounds like that and we could help you go from audio or text descriptions to like a set of results from your library that might, like, solve that, you know, creative idea you have in your head. So really it's about, like, how can we leverage technology to get that idea in your head coming out of the speakers as quickly as possible and never ever take away your ultimate creative control. SI Is there also potential for use of AI on the back end, as it were, for instance, in generating the vast amounts of metadata that you need in something like Komplete? SC Well, so, yeah. I mean, part of how you solve that search and discovery problem is using AI to categorise or classify different sounds and you know, the old way of doing that was very human, which had limits in scale and biases, right? What you might describe this sound as is different than how I describe it and that's why a lot of these sonic search features just aren't great. AI actually allows you to describe sounds in an automated way at scale and then build really great product discovery experiences on top of it. SI You recently released Kontakt 8, which adds new features to what is probably the most widely used sampling platform in the world. With the rise of AI and a renewed interest in physical modeling as well, do you think sampling will remain the core technology for recreating instruments in software? SC It always been an important tool in the toolbox. I think ultimately what matters is the, how you get the sound you're looking for and sampling is one approach to that. Synthesis is, you know, another different approach to that, physical modelling again. Nothing, you know, can quite compare to having, you know, all of the sonic detail of a real sample in your toolbox. That is, you know, those products are great for a reason, but I think, you know, just as you might choose a synthesizer sometimes instead of a sample piano, like having that breadth of choice is the thing. So I don't think it's about one technology over another, it’s about how all these things fit together. One of the big investments we made in Kontakt 8 was really up leveling the synth engine inside it. So, I mean you said sampler, Kontakt was a sampler. I don't think of Kontakt as a sampler. Kontakt is the instrument platform. It has sampling capabilities, it has a sampler in it, but it also has synthesis in it, it has synthesizers in it. And the thing I'm most excited about is that we're seeing instrument builders now build pure synths in Kontakt and really use synthesis and sampling together to create hybrid instruments and that's something that just wasn't possible until Kontakt 8. SI Interesting. So when you add new features to Kontakt, are those primarily inspired by what end users are asking for or are they inspired by what your industry partners need to deliver their content more effectively? SC We use a bunch of different sources to kind of understand what to build. Most people use Kontakt as a, to load an instrument and play an instrument. Like, not really, yeah, not everyone who's using Kontakt is kind of opening the car bonnet and, you know, really getting into the guts of an instrument. So one of the things our customers are telling us is the kinds of instruments they want to see, right? What kind of genres or sonic capabilities they want. So that's one big input. And then yeah, our instrument builders, both the ones we work with directly and the ones we enable, who build on Kontakt, we have pretty good channels of communication with them and they have a long list of things they'd like us to add and so what we're often looking for is, you know, do three or four partners are asking for the same thing? And does that enable the sonic outcomes that our customers are asking for? If yes, that's the kind of thing that rises to the top of the road map pretty quickly. One of the things we've been working on a lot recently is the UI framework, actually, for Kontakt. We want instrument builders to be able to build really expressive UIs that are responsive and scale as you have a bigger or smaller screen and are high resolution and modernizing the technology in which the actual user interface of Kontakt instruments are built has been a big project. And again, we released that in beta with Kontakt 8 and you're now starting to see the first instruments come to market that take advantage of those new features. SI So offering Contact as a platform on which other manufacturers can build their products is one thing, but you're also actively engaged in other kinds of industry partnerships, for instance with Avid. What sort of benefits can those bring, both for NI and to end users? SC I said, you know, I said earlier, I think of NI as a platform company. I also think of NI as a partnerships company, like all of the, you know, people we work with with Kontakt, they’re partners, right? They're people that have chosen to build for our platforms or chosen to let us distribute their products. I mean another example is NKS. We've got more than 1,800 NKS enabled products now from over 200 brands. That's mental, that's insane. It's like extremely humbling to be in that position. What I think partnerships offer is, like the one with Avid, is a way to improve the end to end user experience. Like being creative, there's a lot of stuff to, that you want to spend your time on. What you don't want to spend your time on is trying to make this and that and this other thing work together and by working closely with folks like Avid, and you'll see more from us in 2025 on partnerships, is about streamlining the user experience and reducing the amount of work and thinking and clicks that a user has to go through to get to get to an outcome. And we're really like, really pleased with the partnership with Avid, I think they've helped us improve Kontakt. And if you're a Pro Tools user who's, you know, trying to not just record bands, but compose and produce, then Kontakt is just like so much easier to integrate now than it was before and there's more to come there, too. SI And I guess that allows Avid to concentrate on their own core strengths and not have to worry about developing their own Sampler plug-ins like they used to 10-15 years ago. SC Yeah, I mean look we're, we don't have a, we're not a DAW company right and they're in many ways not a content platform company. Now the Sonic Drop is a great line of content that they make, but again, Avid get to focus because they're using Kontakt as the platform for their instruments and sounds, they get to focus on that rather than the guts of, you know, how to build an instrument platform. And again, they've chosen Kontakt because it offers an amazing sampling, you know, infrastructure, but also now a hybrid and synthesis platform inside it too. SI So it's about people not having to reinvent the wheel, essentially. SC Yeah, like, look, none of us want to do the same thing twice, right? We're all here to empower the creator and every minute we're duplicating technology is a minute we're not spending improving the life of the creator. And like, that partnership with Avid, I think, is great for Avid. It's great for the customer, most importantly and as a result, it's good for us too. SI So you mentioned NKS, which stands for Native Kontrol Standard with a K, tell us a little bit about that, what that is and why it's significant, because I think that's gone under the radar a little bit. SC NKS is incredibly, incredibly powerful. NKS is a few things. The first thing it is, is a set of, a protocol that communicates between hardware and software. So that's what you're using when you're using a native instruments A series keyboard or an S series keyboard or an M series keyboard. That device is talking to your computer over NKS and that allows us to put parameter values on the screen, put artwork on the screen, like a whole bunch of stuff that goes well above and beyond what raw MIDI One can do. The other thing NKS is, is this massive database of products and parameter mappings. I think, you know, most hardware manufacturers have got some level of DAW integration, because there's only eight, nine, ten of them. But when it comes to instruments and effects, there are thousands of products from hundreds of companies. And what NKS does is take all of that complexity and allows you to navigate the massive library of NKS instruments and effects through one single technology hardware, through one set of hardware products. So it really is a wonderful workflow, right? Like, if you've got an S series keyboard, you can access all NKS instruments and effects, not just from NI, but from all of our partners and developers too and just navigate through all of those presets, chain those effects after the instruments all from the device and that's like a really it's just such a powerful workflow. SI And does that have benefits in terms of accessibility as well? SC Something we're working on yeah, I mean because NKS essentially standardises plug-in metadata and parameter mappings, then we can expose that in a consistent way. So if you're using, you know, a Kontrol series keyboard, particularly a mark two keyboard, we have an accessibility helper that when you're scrolling through all of the NKS presets, will read them out and because NKS maps parameters to pages of 8 knobs and defines what those parameters are, then when you touch, you know, the control on the device, it will read out the control that you're trying to change. So NKS enables accessibility for all of NI's products and any NKS integrated product and again, it's a huge reason why many people with accessibility needs choose NI. SI Relatedly, we've seen a lot of efforts recently to extend the MIDI spec with technologies like MPE and MIDI 2.0. Does NKS relate to those at all and how far have you explored those with, at NI? SC We have people who sit on the MIDI 2 committee at NI. We're actively involved in helping to develop and shape those, that specification and let me, MIDI one has just been, you know, unbelievable, right? It's like 30, 40 years later and we're still using it so, that we want MIDI 2 to do well. The Kontrol NKS, the Kontrol S series implements MIDI 2, you know, all the standardised parts of MIDI 2 already and we think NKS relates to it in that it's a layer on top of what the core protocol can do, that enables a user experience that's consistent and simple and really powerful on top of the core spec. SI So by embracing MIDI 2, you're obviously going to have a lot of fun, kind of appreciative of the benefits of an open standard. But is NKS still a proprietary standard then, or can anyone use it? SC Well, we control the development of NKS and the definition of the standard, but we work with, you know, as I said, we've got 200 brands who have integrated with NKS, over 800 products and we're looking to see how we can expand the adoption and use of NKS at the moment. SI But does that extend to, for example, allowing other manufacturers to make NKS compatible keyboards? SC Let's see what happens. Let's see what happens next year. SI One thing we've seen over the last few years is quite a few other manufacturers who started out in software not only move into hardware, as NI have done, but they've started manufacturing analogue synths and other equipment as well. Is that something we're going to see from NI in the future? SC Not, nothing I can share right now, nothing I can share right now. But what I will say is that the integration of hardware and software is really important. Like, music is a, you know, music production is an inherently tactile activity and I think that's behind, you know, a lot of our products in the last kind of 5-10 years, right? And NKS is about enabling this connection between hardware and NI software and third and none, so that's where a lot of our focus is right now, but yeah, nothing I can share right now. SI Fair enough. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Simon. It's been amazing having you on the podcast. Before I let you go, I wonder if I could conclude by asking you one final question, which I ask of most people actually, which is, could I ask you to just gaze into your crystal ball a little and give us some ideas about where you think not only NI, but the industry might be going in the next 5, 10 years? SC What a question. The first thing is, I think, there's a great quote, here, I think it's Bill Gates quote, which is like, we overestimate what's possible in two years, but underestimate what's possible in ten and so like, I think this is a scary thing to do, but I'll take a swing, why not? So first is, I think, multi-platform is more of a thing, right? Like, 10 years ago, we didn't, the web platform was much more immature. The iPad was much more immature and look now, we have, you know, we've great music creation products on the web, we have Logic Pro for iPad and the AUV3 standard. So, I think multi-platform is going to become more of a thing and I think customers and users are going to expect their experience to follow them between devices and for what they do over here to have a graduation path to over here. And I think like, that's an area where there's a lot more work to be done. I don't think the desktop is going anywhere, that’s like, you know, where a lot of music gets created and finished. But I think multi-platform in general as a theme is a big one. The second I'd wrap up in like, assistance or assistive, rather than like AI, which is a technology, I think I prefer to frame it as like the benefit, like the benefit it gives to the user. So how do we help or how do we, how do people overcome creative barriers to entry and achieve their creative outcomes faster. Good example from what's now five years ago was the assistant in Ozone, right? Doesn't do, doesn't complete, doesn't here's a WAV file, spin, spin, spin, oh look, here's the WAV file we mastered for you. It's an assistant, it creates a mastering chain for you and it picks the frequency points of the multiband compressors, it picks the attack and release points, but you can change all of that, right? And so that's assistive, right? It helps you on the way to achieving an outcome, but it doesn't take away any creative control. I think there's a lot more to do in that domain, so that's like another three theme I'm excited about and then I think the third theme is like just the speed at which genres can rise and fall. Like, technology in the sense of kind of YouTube and TikTok and, you know, Instagram, whatever, have just decreased the, like, the increase, the speed at which new ideas can propagate across countries and cultures and that is just going to mean a massive increase in the diversity and speed at which new genres and ideas and artists can come, can reach a new audience. I think for a company like us that builds tools for creators, that means we're going to need to be on our toes, to stay much more abreast of those kind of creative trends. SI Amazing. That's really going to give people a lot to think about. Thank-you so much, Simon. SC It certainly gives me and our teams a lot to think about. But I always want to end by saying this is kind of quite a surreal experience. I think we should have started with this, but like, I've been a Sound On Sound reader for like, 20, 30 years, maybe and my dad bought me a subscription to Sound On Sound, like, 12 or something and you know, sadly my subscription's come and gone over the time but like, I don't know, to be with you, here, today, talking about this stuff, I just keep having to pinch myself. This is just the coolest industry to work in, the coolest set of products to be thinking about. This is, I just pinch myself every day in this world. SI Well, like you, I've been working in this industry for 20, 30 years and I can count the number of times, bad or even boring people I've met on the fingers of one hand. It really is a an industry full of amazing people and my guest today, Simon Cross, is among them. Thank-you so much for appearing on this podcast. SC I mean, it's been great to talk. Yeah, thanks, man. SI Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.