Native Instruments is set to unveil their latest addition to the Traktor Kontrol series somewhere in spring. Besides the announcement they made at the NAMM show, no official words has been said as they seem to be very careful not to stir up the wrong kind of hype around the product.
There’s relatively little information besides the fact that it’s going to be called Traktor Kontrol F1, but the shots and video demos seem to say the main concept revolves around the 4×4 pads that act as sample launchers. Each pad has a multi coloured, true-RGB back-lighting that matches the color of the samples in Traktor, which acts as a handy visual cue about the sample currently in place. We have yet to know how the pad actually feels like, but from the build qualities of their other controllers we think it’s safe to assume that they are made to withstand fair amount of abuse from eager DJs
We are particularly curious about one large knob that sits besides a large seven-segment display. This is just a wild guess as the demo shows very little about its function, but it might hint at a kind of pattern selector, judging from the display that says “P” that might stands for “Pattern”. If it is, it’s obviously a very nice surprise that opens up to a whole new remix possibilities. Speculation aside, we do think that it’s a natural progression that NI should implement as soon as possible. Their main competition, The Bridge, already allows you to do such complex manipulation in your DJ set by allowing Serato users to play Ableton Live clips.
It seems that this controller is intended to be the first instance in a new product line, along with their S and X series of Traktor Kontrol, so we wouldn’t go selling around our older X1 for this one just yet. The demo video shows some exciting sample deck capabilities not available on current version of Traktor software, so it seems like the plan is to drop the controller together with a new version of Traktor somewhere in spring time. And, we expect this particular update to be massive.
So far nothing has been said about the price, but we think it’s safe to expect it to be somewhere between 150-250 USD. Also, we hope that it’s possible to use one instance of the controller on more than one sample deck; otherwise it will costs some crazy amount of money to get a complete setup for Traktor
There’s still very little information as of now but we expect more teasers and informations before it’s actually released. We’ll keep you up with the updates regarding this interesting controller, so stay tuned!
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