Native Instruments

Native Instruments plugins work with MainStage. I have the S61 MK2 and it works well. Here is some advice.

1. You are correct the keyboard is limited in regular MIDI mode. If you want to use the fully-featured USB mode of the keyboard in MainStage, you probably want to load up a single instance of Komplete Kontrol as a concert level channel strip. Instead of using MainStage to change sounds, select sounds from your sound browser on the keyboard. This gets much easier when you start saving user presets in K.Kontrol, because there are so many factory presets to choose from.

2. Be careful using Kontakt with MainStage with regards to CPU/RAM resource usage. Do some reading on "paste as alias", as you'll definitely want to do that with your Kontakt instances. There are a few articles on the internet about how to best use Kontakt with MainStage, and they are worth a read because of the specific issues you'll run into there.

Hope that helps!

Glad to help. You only need to run Komplete Kontrol standalone version once. It does not need to rebuild the database between reboots. You are correct that you'll need to run the standalone version again if you add new instruments so it can add them to the database.

Be sure you're not confusing "Kontakt" with "Komplete Kontrol" plugins:

1. Kontakt is a sampler instrument. It runs either standalone, or as a plugin, and has a "free player" version as well. It does not unlock advanced features on your S88 MKII when running though.

2. Komplete Kontrol is the software that unlocks the advanced features of your S88 MKII keyboard. It is not an instrument, but you can load instruments into it (see next.)

3. If you want to play a Kontakt instrument (such as the piano: Grandeur,) you will load it within Komplete Kontrol. You can think of K.Kontrol as a shell or "host" for loading instruments. Sure, you could load Kontakt directly into MainStage, but without K.Kontrol, you won't have access to those advanced features on your S88 MKII.

Hope that clears things up.

You can build a custom layer in Kontakt, but you will have more flexibility using MainStage as a host, and optionally running Kontakt as a standalone in tandem with MainStage. You'll need to explore the options to decide what is best your your situation. When you open Kontakt standalone, the Kontakt Virtual Input will show up in the MIDI output box of your external instrument channel strip.

Maybe you could run Kontakt in standalone and access it from MainStage by creating an external instrument channel strip and connect it via Kontakt Virtual Input.

To use the special features of your MKII, you will first need to load an instance of the Komplete Kontrol plugin. I usually avoid putting channels on the concert level whenever possible, but for K.Kontrol I allow this. As other users have suggested, there are multiple ways to go about this, but here is the method I use:

1. Start by creating a new "instrument" channel strip at the concert level.

2. There is a slot on the newly created instrument strip where you load plugins. You should see all your Native Instruments plugins appear in this list, along with the MainStage plugins as well. Load Komplete Kontrol into this slot. Check out this picture for reference if you are having trouble locating the plugin slot.

3. You're done! Check out the display on your S88 MKII, and you should notice that the "non MIDI" mode has been enabled. You now have full access to the device's features such as arpeggiator and scale modes.

4. Important note: You must run Komplete Kontrol once as a standalone instrument before you attempt to use it in MainStage. When K.Kontrol starts for the first time, it builds a database of all Native Instruments instruments/sounds. If you try to use K.Kontrol in MainStage without first building the database, you may not see all your sounds show up in the browser. You may notice as you install additional Native Instruments plugins that you will have to perform this step again. (Launch K.Kontrol, and let it discover the new sounds before loading MainStage again.)

Hope this helps!