Pip: KK-ACCESS — where the question is never "what dropped this month" but always "can a blind or visually impaired composer actually use it."
Mara: chrisankin has been busy: the territory this episode covers runs from orchestral strings and woodwinds through dark synth design, platform and workflow updates, and cinematic guitar libraries. Let's start with the strings and woodwinds.
Strings And Woodwinds Get An Upgrade
Mara: This segment is about two orchestral libraries landing updates and new releases — the question being whether what's new is genuinely worth your attention or just version-number housekeeping.
Pip: The Lineage Strings post sets the bar plainly. The update is available now via Native Access, and Project Sam are briefly returning to their launch price — a 15% discount on the usual retail price.
Mara: So the upshot is: existing owners get meaningful improvements for free, and anyone who missed the original release gets a timed window to pay less for it.
Pip: Then there's the full review of Alternative Woodwind Soloists by Fracture Sounds — alto flute, bass flute, tenor recorder, and bass clarinet, instruments you don't often see spotlit. The conclusion puts it plainly: "for composers seeking a special emphasis on that much sought after realistic instrument sound that is required for emotive scoring, or perhaps those quieter subtle orchestral passages, this library addresses a gap in the market."
Mara: Accessibility is confirmed solid — every feature fully usable, with keyswitches available for articulation switching alongside the NKS mappings. It's on introductory pricing at £97 until the 5th of November.
Pip: Right — and the Fracture Sounds smart legato returns, which for anyone who used Emotive Woodwind Soloists is probably the first thing they'd check.
Mara: From woodwinds that fill a gap, let's move to synths that deliberately carve one out.
Dark Synths And Sound Design
Pip: This segment is about three very different routes into synthesis — one aggressively characterful, one quietly generous, one cinematically focused — and what each actually offers to a Komplete Kontrol user.
Mara: Circle Drone of Doom, the collaboration between Impact Soundworks and Look Mum No Computer, leads. The review's verdict is direct: "if you want a synth with real darkness and grit, then Circle Drone of Doom is terrific fun and immensely enjoyable to get your hands dirty and be creative with."
Pip: What that means in practice is a six-oscillator synth that can stack up to 48 oscillator voices in total, with distortion, an LFO that syncs to your DAW, and 133 snapshot presets — all in a 347MB download.
Mara: The NKS implementation is described as covering approximately 99% of functionality, which is a high bar. One omission noted: an oscillator randomise button that isn't mapped and can't be MIDI-learned by a screen reader user who can't see the interface.
Pip: The side-quest detail here is that Look Mum No Computer is Sam Battle, who represented the UK at Eurovision 2026. The synth is a virtual realisation of hardware he actually built — which makes the "no computer" branding somewhat ironic in context.
Mara: Applied Acoustic Systems have released a free updated AAS Player, giving access to 650 presets across their instrument range — Chromaphone 3, Ultra Analog VA-3, String Studio VS-3, and others — with NKS support included. And Plughugger's Focus sound set for u-he Diva brings cinematic film and TV textures with full NKS tagging, described as spanning "warm 80s-inspired brassy pads to dark, tension-filled textures inspired by the psychological unease of David Lynch."
Pip: A free player with 650 presets and a sound set under ten euros — the barrier to entry for this segment is remarkably low.
Mara: Platform updates follow, and the barrier there is simply knowing what changed.
Platform And Workflow Updates
Pip: This segment covers the infrastructure layer — NKS support libraries and a significant Maschine software update — the kind of news that quietly determines what you can actually reach from your hardware.
Mara: The Freelance Soundlabs September newsletter brings NKS support for Air Music Fabric Vintage Synths Vol 2 and reFX Rippler, with the Rippler library described as offering "full browsing of all factory presets with sound previews and an in-depth controller template covering all synth controls for both Layer A and B."
Pip: So the upshot is: presets that previously sat outside the NKS browser are now fully tagged, mapped, and auditionable without touching a mouse.
Mara: The October newsletter expands that considerably — Cherry Audio Memorymode V2, KeySolutions Traveler, D16 Punchbox 2, Rhodes Clav Pro, and an Air Music Keys Collection bundle all receive NKS libraries. That's a broad sweep of hardware and keys instruments now reachable from Komplete Kontrol or Maschine.
Pip: Meanwhile, Native Instruments released Maschine 3.7, adding per-note probability, Euclidean and random note generation modes, and a new Variation page for groove. Three new expansions also dropped to mark 30 years of Native Instruments.
Mara: From platform updates to the libraries that actually sit on top of them — specifically, guitars.
Cinematic Guitar And Textural Ambience
Pip: This segment is about two very different approaches to guitar as a cinematic tool — one a full reviewed library, one a free discovery — and what each brings to atmospheric and filmic work.
Mara: Panorama Whitekirk is the third in Sonora Cinematic's Panorama guitar series, and its defining feature is its recording location: St Mary's Church in Whitekirk, a 12th-century building in a small Scottish village. The review describes the experience of using the modwheel: "as you gradually bring the modwheel downward, it then introduces the much larger ambience and reverberant bloom associated with the central nave of the stone walls and high ceilings of the church area."
Pip: What you're getting, then, is a real acoustic space as an instrument — not a convolution reverb approximation, but the actual room baked into the recordings.
Mara: The library includes electric and semi-hollow guitars, a plate reverb, and two atmospheric layers named Blue and Pink. Blue is described as a huge, long-tailed space suited to sparse notes and chords; Pink is more granular, capable of thickening the guitar toward a pad-like timbre. NKS controls are noted as sparse — a single page — though no controls available to sighted users appear to be missing.
Pip: One practical gap flagged: pitchbend isn't pre-assigned to the wheel, which is standard for a guitar library and would need a workaround via a third-party plug-in. For a library priced at £39 introductory, that's a reasonable thing to flag and a reasonable thing to hope lands in an update.
Mara: Also worth noting: Dado Lilac Alloy by Tonal Forms is a free download from the Native Instruments partner sale — an organic-metallic textural instrument with NKS mapping and aftertouch pre-assigned, created by Francesco Sabatini, who is behind libraries including Kithara, Action Strings 2, and Fables.
Pip: Free, NKS-ready, and from a credible pedigree. That one's hard to argue with.
Mara: From a 12th-century church to a free download — the range this month is genuinely broad.
Pip: Strings, woodwinds, dark synths, workflow plumbing, and a Scottish church — it's a wide sweep.
Mara: The consistent thread is accessibility: every review asks whether blind and visually impaired users can reach the full instrument, not just most of it. More of that next time.
