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.