- Imagine you are a Traktor DJ, who after many nights of playing shows has become one with the program. You have refined your control maps and mastered Traktor Pro's effects to the point that you can navigate them with your eyes shut. Let's also assume that you happen to dabble in music production. You are in the studio, working on a new track when you realize it would be really helpful to be able to use one of Traktor's effects to spice up a drum pattern that's going nowhere fast.
Before now, the only option you had was a workaround requiring the routing of both audio and MIDI sync between Traktor and your DAW of choice. This was awkward and really more trouble than it was worth in most cases. According to Native Instruments, this request was more common than one would think. Therefore, last month as part of their big Komplete 7 release, they finally rendered the workarounds unnecessary by releasing Traktor's 12 - a selection of Traktor Pro's effects that can be used in the studio environment. Not as plug-ins in the VST/AU plugin sense, but rather as components that run in another one of Native Instruments' existing plug-ins. So, how would the DJ effects fare in a true studio environment?
The first bit of technical detail to get out of the way is that Native Instruments have chosen to deploy Traktor's 12 as components within their own tried-and-true Guitar Rig environment. When you buy Traktor's 12 ($79 standalone, or part of the Komplete 7 bundle), you automatically get the Guitar Rig Player in both plug-in and standalone versions. It's a strange arrangement on paper that sees the producer and DJ worlds married by a piece of software which some might associate with the rock guitarists swilling PBRs at the local garage bar. However, many music production pundits have been preaching the Guitar Rig gospel of late, because the past two versions have introduced many components and modifiers that extend functionality way beyond your normal guitar tools like distortion and wah pedals. NI seems to be reinforcing this sea change a bit further with Komplete 7, which features Guitar Rig add-ons like Traktor's 12 and the Reflektor Convolution Reverb, proving that the Guitar Rig environment has really emerged as a Swiss Army knife for effects.
When you load an instance of Guitar Rig into your DAW or launch it in standalone mode, you'll notice that the design philosophy of the Traktor effects fits in very well with the rest of the Guitar Rig components, where rather than having a knob for every possible parameter one might want to adjust on an effect, the Traktor effects are all controlled by a maximum of four knobs and/or four buttons. In order to achieve this, some of the knobs perform more than one responsibility. For example, the Traktor Delay effect has a filter knob which transitions from low-pass to hi-pass mode when you cross the center position (at which point the signal is unaffected). This consolidated simplicity makes these effects a great choice for those who are just getting into the production game and want to be able to exert a large amount of change on sounds without having to study the inner-workings of a plug-in for weeks.
If you want to get more advanced, peruse the 120 included preset racks that come with Traktor's 12; they show off some real sound-design genius achieved by combining the Traktor effects with the modifiers and components that come free with Guitar Rig Player. These presets show how Traktor effects really come alive when they are automated by the Guitar Rig modifiers like Step Sequencer, Analog Sequencer, and LFO. Any lingering concerns about Traktor's 12 being handcuffed to Guitar Rig should be absolutely wiped out after you go through a handful of those racks. They are really that impressive.
The "12" in Traktor's 12 refers to the 12 effects that Native Instruments chose to include in the package, from the 28 available in Traktor Pro. If you have used Traktor Pro, then you are likely already familiar with these effects, which can be broken down into four types. You have your bog standards (delay and reverb), two filters (Formant and Peak), three destruction effects (LoFi, Ring Modulator and Mulholland Drive), and finally five buffer-style effects (BeatMasher, Gater, Reverse Grain, Transpose Stretch and Beat Slicer). The only notable omissions from the full 28 effects offered in Traktor Pro are Flanger, Phaser, Iceverb, and the Xone 92 style filters. When you consider the components that are included already in Guitar Rig Player, and the studio-class plug-ins that are included in most DAWs, one would think it would be tough to make a strong case for repeated use of some of these plug-ins.
The most curious selections in Traktor's 12 are probably Mulholland Drive and the standard Delay and Reverb, as even the Guitar Rig components would rival the distortion, delay and reverb quality that you'll find in their Traktor counterparts. Each effect does have its own unique signature, however, and they can all be used to good measure. I found the Delay simple but powerful, it sounded surprisingly good even when its parameters were being automated heavily. The Reverb effect is as huge and dramatic as you'd expect from a reverb meant for use in a DJ setting, so using it for subtle applications won't really work. The highlights of Traktor's 12 can be found in the buffer-style effects like Beat Masher, Reverse Grain and Transpose Stretch, which can be used to freshen up an otherwise-stale beat, or abused to achieve other-worldly IDM-style grain effects.
In the interest of comparing Traktor's 12 to alternatives, there are other plug-ins out there that will get you subsets to the level of functionality that you can achieve with the 12 effects found here. For instance, Sugar Bytes Effectrix and Artillery plug-ins both offer multiple categories of effects triggered by a sequencer, but the price of admission is in the range of two to three times more than Traktor's 12. When you look at what you're getting for the money, I would say Traktor's 12 is as close as a no-brainer gets for anyone who is producing electronic music of any kind. If you have previous experience with Traktor as a DJ, this will give you a suite of effects that you already know and trust, and if not, you'll quickly find yourself comfortable with the straight-forward interfaces found on the Traktor effects.
Ratings:
COST: 5/5
VERSATILITY: 5/5
EASE OF USE: 5/5
SOUND: 4/5