I’m a big fan of the FL Studio DAW software, and also a big fan of NI plugins. In the past this has been a problem because of an incompatibility that caused CPU spikes in some NI plugins running in FL. Specifically, in Reaktor this manifested as a constant fluctuation of the CPU meter, even without an ensemble loaded. I’ve also noticed this behavior in Absynth. It’s been possible to compensate by setting the plugins to run with fixed-size buffers, but that has two undesirable consequences; one, it increases the latency for those plugins, putting them slightly out of sync with other elements in the mix and two, it takes away the ability to use multiple outputs to separate mixer tracks in FL.

Well, the new 8.5 beta of FL solves all that! I was initially excited to read that the new beta lets plugins running with fixed size buffers use multiple outputs – but then I discovered a new audio setting called “align tick lengths” that makes those large fixed buffers unnecessary. The mouse-over hint for the align tick lengths checkbox tells us “may increase CPU performance” and they aren’t kidding.

This is fantastic, because now I can load up Kore in FL and Reaktor in Kore and get one of my favorite DAWs, my favorite control surface and my favorite plugins working together smoothly with no hitches, glitches or handicaps.

Licensed FL producer edition users can download the beta through their account page.

Building instruments and effects in Reaktor is a lot like building your own hardware. But ever wished those fabulous UIs you’ve seen could be used via something other than … ugh … your mouse? View Reaktor with a touchscreen or touch-controlled projection, and it’s an entirely different game. We already knew Tim Exile was a fan of touchscreens, but here’s what it can do in the hands of another Reaktor master.

Above are videos of Metrognome a.k.a Karl White getting down with a custom ensemble on a touchscreen. Karl reveals on the NI forums:

That was a huge undertaking and is one very complex Reaktor mod. I’ll be making more stuff public on the user library once I get the documentation lined up.

In other words, new goodies on the horizon! Here’s a better look at the Intelectualist ensemble (click for the full-sized version):

Live performance granular drum machine. My inspiration was the intelekt in the NI user library and various works by Clist, Program Child, etc.

I like the use of recordable touch-faders in the upper left – looks like an implementation similar to my own Freshmaker macro. If this isn’t exciting enough, here’s a video of Karl working with his ensemble on a wiimote whiteboard – I’ll be keeping an eye out for his work in the user library.

Spiral, the far-out sequenced Reaktor synth we saw earlier this week, is now available free to Reaktor 5 users. Just fire up Service Center, and download! We’ll have more on how it works soon.

Native Instruments has also announced the larger context for Spiral. It’s part of a new Soundpack called Animated Circuits, which adapts some of the best sequenced, mutating Reaktor ensembles for use with Kore. Since it’s a Soundpack, you don’t need either Reaktor or Kore to use it; it’ll run easily in Kore Player. That said, you’ll miss out on Spiral’s groovy interface – you’ll just get the sounds.

Reaktor users will want to pass on this one; you get Spiral free, and the other ensembles are already in Reaktor – SpaceDrone, Metaphysical Function, Skrewell, and Newscool.

But if your appetite for strange, alien Reaktor ensembles hasn’t been entirely sated, never fear: we’ve got more coverage of this coming.

Reaktor Animated Circuits Soundpack [Product Page]

Native Instruments has posted a teaser video of something new called Spiral. It’s a sequencing instrument, and as you can see modulation is represented by swirling squares. It looks fantastic, it sounds wonderful and fluid – it’s, naturally, the creation of Reaktor maestro Lazyfish, who brought us ensembles like the cellular automata-powered Newschool and the brilliantly inscrutable Gaugear in Reaktor 5.1. Lazyfish is the kind of person who can make you believe the future of software instruments is unlimited.

I’m humbled again in my Reaktor building chops. This is really wonderful.

Now, as it happens, I know that there’s more to this story than Spiral, and as you know, generally I’m always eager to talk more about design and instruments. Stay tuned.

(Incidentally, potentially an obvious tip, but if you use Reaktor in Ableton Live, Ableton will automatically show the active plug-in user interface based on which channel is selected. That means you can easily switch between lots of funky-looking Reaktor UIs in Live without having to open and close windows. And of course, that’s really important when you have fantastic, strange UIs you actually want to use live, like this one. I’ll do a short screencast this week or next. Thanks to Owen Vallis, our friend and talented Reaktor user, for the idea. I’m finding having Live with Reaktor and Kore all running at once is a wonderful surge of sonic power.)

Updated: Reaktor 5 users will get this as a free download; see Thomas’ announcement on the NI forum.

Wondering how to use this thing? Don’t miss our how-to screencast video.

We’re deep in production on some new tutorials and reference material for Kore, Reaktor, and more. But one of the wonderful things about the Web communities flourishing now is that there are lots of people sharing the way they work and making their own tutorial videos and the like. I find it especially refreshing in music software, because different people take such a different approach to the tools. Here’s a video by The Synthesist walking through a “wobbly” Dubstep bass sound. It’s also an excellent way to dip your toes into modulation in Massive, so this certainly could apply to very different sounds.

The Synthesist website includes patch downloads and other info.

Found via the Native Instruments page on Facebook (I now have a new Facebook artist page, myself)

That page also links to more Massive “Dubstep-style” tutorials from our friends at Computer Music

Got favorite video finds of your own? Share them in comments.

More details, via YouTube:

www.myspace.com/thesynthesist

This is the first tutorial from The Synthesist, covering the process behind making a Dubstep wobble bass sound.

This video shows the use of Native Instruments’ MASSIVE synthesizer, which shifted the paradigm for software synthesis development in late 2006. MASSIVE’s fat, analog sound is unique to the soft-synth world, offering a wide scope of sound design possibilities.

But underneath all that, is an extremely simple-to-use, great sounding engine, that can provide some of the baddest bass tones you’ve ever heard.

Notes on the patches:

Wobble 1- This is a basic demonstration of the ideas seen in the video. One oscillator, one filter, one LFO. very basic.

Wobble 2- This is the patch that was created in the video. You have a the dual-oscillator setup, using the same wavetable and settings, one is simply pitched an octave down. Try putting an LFO on the pitch of one of the oscillators, but only modulate the pitch by .10 or .15 of a half step. This will give a thicker and different feel to the sound.

Wobble 3- This is an example that has been used in one of The Synthesist’s tracks previously. Its an example of experimentation with the LFO, applied to the Ring Modulator in addition to the Filter’s Frequency Cutoff. Try applying an LFO to the Phase knob in the Modulation Oscillator. Also, the Performer function is displayed, rather than a simple LFO, so that you can write in your own modulating patterns.

The biggest rule of creating a fat bass sound from scratch is START SIMPLE. Bass tones get muddied very easily, so very minor changes can have a dramatic effect on your sound.

If you’re looking for folksy, retro, and acoustic sounds without all that pesky wood and wire, you should check out Pendle’s Grand Thrift Auto(harp).

It’s a Kontakt 2- and 3-based instrument that multisamples an autoharp and a plucked grand piano. What does it sound like? Something like a cross between a zither, a harp, and a hammered dulcimer. Listen to the embedded sound player on Pendle’s page for examples.

After playing with the Grand Theft Autoharp for a few days I can honestly say that it’s the last autoharp sample set you’ll ever need. There are four different multi-sampled layers, including a muted layer with a nice pizzicato thump, and you can mix the four layers freely. This eats up a fair bit of polyphony – by default, it’s set to use 60 voices, which in turn eats a bit of CPU, but the sound is worth it. You can always decrease polyphony and let voice stealing kick in sooner.

Want more retro Kontakt goodness? What about the Dulcitone1884 on the same page:

Originally designed and manufactured in Scotland in the 1800’s, and with allegedly only 2000 in existence the DULCITONE is a portable keyboard that was made for missionaries to hump around remote african village churches to help perk up hymn services. It has a very basic piano action with spring loaded felt covered hammers striking small magnet shaped tuning forks. Its a bit like a Fender Rhodes electric piano without the electric bits, and has a very lovely woody, clonky glockenspiel/celesta kind of sound.

Some of the higher-velocity Dulcitone samples have an interesting rattle, and this varies from one note to the next, giving the instrument an appealing organic quirkiness.

Both instruments are available in Kontakt 2 and 3 format for £15. There are some other intriguing instruments on Pendle’s site, including a free sf2 (soundfont) sample set of fireworks sounds. This imported nicely into Kontakt 3 for me and provides some creative percussion possibilities. Makes me want to try my hand at something like Astrobotnia’s Lightworks.

Native Instruments announced today some new pricing for Kore and related products. The existing Kore product (hardware with software) is now cheaper, you can get just the software without the hardware for a lot less, and you can now buy a whole bunch of Koresound packs bundled together at once. I’ll break it down for you:

• You don’t own Kore, and you want the hardware and software. Kore 2 is now US$449 / EUR399 with the controller, down from $499 / EUR449.
• You don’t own Kore, and you want just the software. The “Kore 2 Software Edition” does everything the software does, but leaves out the controller if you don’t want it. Result: it costs about half as much, at US$229 / EUR199.
• You own Kore 1, and you want to upgrade to Kore 2 sans controller. That’s now US$119/EUR99 to migrate from Kore 1 to Kore 2 Software Edition — keeping in mind, Kore 2 Software Edition will still support your existing Kore controller / audio interface if you prefer that.
• You want more Koresounds. Now you don’t have to piece together the sound bundles you want a la carte. The new Kore Electronic Experience bundles together seven of the Kore soundpacks into one bundle, priced at US$229 / EUR199. And of course this is on top of what ships with Kore 2 in the other editions. Note that if you just want the sounds and not the custom sound editing and hosting capabilities of the full Kore software, this pack is all you need — it ships with the free Kore Player.

What would you most want to know about Kore? What would you most want to see on Kore if you had just a few minutes? (Beer and drinks would be available.) What would you want to show other people?

I’m putting together a short workshop for the Warper Party in New York, a (roughly) monthly get-together of laptop musicians of all types in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Now, NI has done an official workshop tour, but well-done as it was, that was a sales event. I’m talking to fellow musicians, and even some non-musicians.

I’ve got some ideas for what to put together, but I’m equally interested in what you think. And in addition to doing this event live in Brooklyn (I’ll post info for those of you in the area), I think a short, all-encompassing workshop would be ideal to add to this site.

We’ve already got some stuff in our “101″ thread:
101 tag @kore.noisepages
…and of course, on Kore in general:
Kore tag @kore.noisepages

But there’s plenty more to talk about. So let’s have it: what would you most want to know?

My focus will be on using Kore as the hub of a live performance rig, in conjunction with Reaktor, and using it for really playing electronics live.

Photo at top: me playing Boston’s Beat Research, all in Kore, as part of the Mind Meld get-together earlier this summer. Photo by Todd Thille.

On NI forums: Since some of you like to chat there, I’ve also opened a thread on the NI forum. What I may do, as well, is get the outline and some content for this workshop up and allow people to comment on it, so in the end we’ll have collected some community wisdom (and questions!) for the results.

From the how not to use Reaktor, some lovely finds:

I love the creative abuse of tools, and the warping of software for expressive ends. sonictwist on the Reaktor forum has posted a wild gallery of images made entirely with Reaktor. Reaktor, of course, isn’t remotely intended for this kind of generative visuals, but the results are gorgeous. The gallery of Reaktor interfaces we got going was simply to be focused on UIs – in this case, apparently partially inspired by that effort, the results are purely aesthetic. sonictwist explains:

After some years playing with multi/poly displays, I decided that it might be interesting to make a gallery with visual stuff made ONLY with R5. Ofcourse its very far from Jitter or vvvv, but we all understand that r5 wasnt designed for such purposes at all, and its even kinda fun when you realise it and try to make some decent pictures.

So, just tell what you think about this idea, post your own stuff etc… Please note that the idea is not a duplicate of Peter Kirn’s gallery, so try to post only artworks made with md/pd and maybe xy modules…

I attached some generative artworks made with multidisplay based on a pseudorandom sets of rules to showcase what I’m talking about.

Reaktor based Visual Art [NI User Forums > REAKTOR]

While these are simply for visual effect, I could imagine them being used in a strange musical interface, too. I’ll be sure to post when sonictwist uploads an ensemble.

Peter Dines adds, No one should be surprised that he’s come up with that given his skill at creating polished GUI interfaces like this:

I also enjoy the glitched-out image at right. It’s actually not intentional – it’s occurs when you import 16-color BMP files into Reaktor – but since I’m always looking for sources for digitally-distorted images, I may even use this trick. (Hmmm… cheap way of making an interface for your glitch effects Ensemble, perhaps?)

Back to using Reaktor as a sound tool, as intended, Suryummy assembled this fantastic, sci-fi cooking motion graphic with a brilliant soundtrack. Suryummy did both visuals and sound. No, that’s not Reaktor generating the visuals; that would be Maya and Particular, lest you thought he got his hands on a very different Reaktor 6. But the wonderful soundscape comes courtesy of Reaktor and Absynth, generating the distinctive timbres you hear in the track. It’s really inspiring to me to see people working across sonic and visual media in this way – and may suggest that your next Reaktor/Absynth track really needs accompanying visuals for the full effect. As seen on our sister site, Create Digital Motion.

Interstellar Sugar – Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

Fans of the tracker/music production tool Renoise wanted to make use of Gustavo Bravetti’s free FM drum kit on their tool of choice, too. Renoise is a unique environment for music making, a modern take on an alternative generation of sequencing applications called “trackers,” as can be seen from the interface above. It should be a lovely match for some FM8 synthesized drum sounds. Torben, a reader of this site and member of the Renoise forum, went ahead and did the work of porting Gustavo’s instruments to Renoise:

Free Fm8 Drumkit For Renoise, Gustavo Bravetti Exclusive Drumkit for FM8 [Renoise forum]

Being such a friendly guy, I copied the arrangement from Live into Renoise – setting up the 9 instances of FM8 with the drum-patches and the example drumloop.
For info on the drumkit check this link: http://kore.noisepages.com/2008/07/24/free…stavo-bravetti/
For downloading my Renoise-file, get it here: http://vibrants.scene.org/gustavo_bravetti…_1_renoise.xrns
And here’s how the drumkit sounds (in Ableton Live). http://media.createdigitalmedia.net/kore/s…ries/fm8kit.mp3
FM is lovely indeed
Cheers,
- Torben.

Thanks, Torben! Hope this is of use to some people. (And maybe it’ll give you an excuse to try out Renoise.)

Part of the appeal of Kore, of course, is to be able to move a sound setup from one host to another, so you could easily switch between Ableton Live and Renoise.I’ll be getting the Koresound version and straight FM8 preset out this week — I promise. And I’m especially curious to try pairing up Kore with Renoise as a host. That said, there are also times when some my prefer to drop an instrument directly into their host, minus Kore. Gustavo’s choice of Live was entirely personal; he likes dropping the different FM8’s directly into Live tracks for assembling beats. So, when I release that Koresound, perhaps we’ll compare how these different workflows function.

Got another host to request? Say so in comments. (Obviously, FM8 presets will work in any host, but I’m curious to know how you like to work.)