In this video I load up Massive in Kore again for hands-on control and take a look at some creative signal routing and modulation possibilities in Massive. Feedback is something people primarily associate with rock, heaviness and sludge, but there’s something here for the meditator as well as the rockist. How about some harp feedback? Eat your heart out, Joanna Newsom.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I’m always on the lookout for a really sick sampler - something that can scratch my itch, and keep scratching when the itch migrates. I think I’ve found that sick sampler in Kontakt. I usually hit the wall with a sampler half an hour into exploring it. There will be some inflexible feature that shows me the developer had one way of making music in mind, and didn’t foresee how someone might want to creatively abuse the product.
Kontakt, on the other hand, invites creative abuse. It’s easy to do simple things and possible to do complex things. Here’s a video of a simple but offbeat thing I like to do with a sampler. I’ve also provided a Kontakt instrument for you to download. It has a different sample than the one in the video, for copyright reasons, but everything else is the same.
Let me know what you think, and maybe we can explore ways to take this further. One thing I’d like to do is get it integrated in Kore, and another is to fancy up the panning script a bit. Any other ideas out there?
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