The Komplete Kontrol range of MIDI keyboards by Native Instruments provides a ‘light guide’, comprising a light above every key that can each be configured to any of a selection of 16 colours. The light guide is especially useful for virtual drum and percussion kit libraries, such as are provided by Superior Drummer and EZDrummer, to colour-code the keys for specific instruments or groups of instruments.
There are two ways to configure the colours. The virtual instrument plugin may implement the NKS interface. The light guide can then be configured by the virtual instrument plugin’s developers. However, Toontrack products do not support NKS. There is a request for its implementation on this forum: https://www.toontrack.com/forums/topic/nks-support/.
As an alternative, the user can configure, via the Komplete Kontrol application, templates that, among other things, allow the specification of the light guide colours. This is currently the only available method for Toontrack products
A limitation of this method is that the 128 MIDI notes of the keyboard can be divided into a maximum of 16 colour zones. However, C-2, which is the valid note 0 in MIDI, is not supported by Superior Drummer. So, unless keys that cannot be played are to be illuminated, one key zone must be an ‘Off’ zone, where the lights are off, for the one or more keys at the bottom of the MIDI range that are not used in the Superior Drummer libraries or presets to which a template applies. That leaves a maximum of 15 illuminated key zones in a Komplete Kontrol template for Superior Drummer. That may sound like a lot, but I have found that I always run out. Every colour map I’ve created has had to include several zones that each include multiple instruments. There is no such limitation when the key zones are specified via NKS.
I attach files from which six colour maps may be set up. For each colour map, there are two files, an Excel spreadsheet and a JSON file, combined as an attachment into a single zip file, as attachment of .json and .xlsx files is not allowed. The spreadsheet may be referenced when configuring a template in the Komplete Kontrol application.
Alternatively, instead of using the Komplete Kontrol application, the Komplete Kontrol settings file may be edited to incorporate the contents of the JSON file provided for the colour map. The settings file is a text file that conforms to JSON syntax. Replace the keyzones node of the template within the settings file with the keyzones node that comprises the entire content of the colour map JSON file. For tips on editing a Komplete Kontrol settings file, see https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/can-you-copy-komplete-kontrol-templates-in-the-editor.452045/.
The six colour maps support all the Toontrack libraries I own:
- “Many Drum Kits (122 keys)” matches Death and Darkness SDX and Custom Shop EZX. In Superior Drummer 3 Core, it appears to only match the Default preset. My guess is that this common layout is a standard to which many if not all SDX and EZK drumkit libraries conform.
- “SD Core (127 keys)” appears to match all Superior Drummer 3 Core presets except the Default preset. See the comments in the Excel spreadsheet for the two points at which it differs from “Many Drum Kits (122 keys)”.
- “Latin Cuban Percussion EZX” matches the EZX library of that name.
- “Latin Percussion EZX” matches the EZX library of that name. It is similar to “Latin Cuban Percussion EZX”.
- “Orchestral II” matches the library of that name in the Orchestral SDX. It is similar to “Latin Cuban Percussion EZX” and “Latin Cuban Percussion EZX”.
- “Orchestral I” matches the library of that name in the Orchestral SDX.
If you also would like to share Komplete Kontrol keyboard light guide key maps for Superior Drummer, you are of course welcome to do so here.
There’s a maximum of four attachments per post. So I shall attach the last two to the next post.
Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.2.4Operating system: Windows 10
