I began writing this post to discuss Kore 2’s performance preset system. If you’re not familiar with this, the quick lowdown is: you can store banks of settings and change between them, or automate changing between them, in a master performance. I touched on this in my last post about Reaktor.

A funny thing happened on the way to the blog. I discovered that, when using a given synth and trying to store different patches in performance presets, not all the parameters were stored and changed with the preset. On the other hand, storing patches as Koresounds does save all the parameter settings. I’m thinking this difference is because the performance presets save on the basis of host automation of the controls, so non-automatable controls won’t have their state saved. (will have to doublecheck with the NI programmers on this to be 100% sure!)

Of course I started looking for workarounds. I loaded up Massive (my go-to synth for mad fun these days) and started trying to save different Massive sounds in the sound variation grid.

In retrospect this was a dumb move, because the sound variation grid is meant to hold variations in a sound, not multiple sounds. So like the performance preset, not all parameters save. Wrong level of abstraction. What I ended up with is a single sound with unusual, in some cases meaningless, parameter settings for that sound in eight variations. You might think this would be undesirable, but my goodness, I’ve never heard anything quite like this:

Unwholesome Sound Design from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

A sound such as this can only be called Quacking Robomultiverse, and I have named it accordingly. Notice the tuning settings of the oscillators on the left - they’re morphing in between settings that made sense in their original sound, but in this mutant superposition of sounds, things have become singularly Lovecraftian; abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Incidentally, I’m using the Kore knobs to morph between sound variations here, but a mouse is fine too.

Download kore performance and massive sound

TRIO SOWARI
Uploaded by Ornitoto

Phil Durrant is familiar to most Reaktor users as Sowari on the NI messageboards, a helpful and knowledgeable presence there. He’s also a renowned experimental musician, having performed with, among others, Ticklish, Trio Sowari and MIMEO, the music in movement orchestra - a collective that includes Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Keith Rowe. Phil is currently working on his PhD dissertation, which involves building virtual instruments for improvised laptop performance. I interviewed Phil by email shortly after Trio Sowari performed a series of shows in France. Phil not only answered my questions but shared a screen shots of the Reaktor instruments he uses in live performance, with detailed explanations. Here’s what he had to say.

In French cooking, there’s a sauce base called a roux (pronounced “roo”) that is the foundation of bechamel and other sauces. This is a sequencer macro that is the equivalent for programming sequenced instruments in Reaktor - you can take it in any direction from here. In its most basic form it can send velocity information to trigger percussion, or modulate instrument parameters like cutoff and resonance. With a few simple changes it becomes a pitch sequencer, suitable for use in something like the Frankenloop device.

Now that we’re off and rolling for a few weeks, I wanted to step back and ask you: how do you use Kore in your work? How might you want to use Kore? (That is, what would you want to know from us to make it work, , even if you don’t currently own it?)

Is it a way of finding sounds? A way of cataloging and designing your own sounds? Something you want to use for live performance? Or do you still have questions about how you might use it?

While hanging out with Richard Devine over the weekend, I asked how he handled similar questions back at the original Kore launch parties (which I wasn’t able to attend). He told attendees at one of those events that one major appeal was to take his somewhat ridiculous selection of plug-ins and use it in a different way. By assigning the Kore knobs to parameters in the plug-ins, he could try affecting multiple parameters at once, producing sounds he might not have otherwise discovered. I’m having a similar experience, though strangely with my Reaktor ensembles.

Kore has been tricky for people to wrap their heads around, so we’d love to hear from you. (And yes, while abusive comments aren’t allowed, this is an open forum.)

Part of the appeal of using Kore is as a meta-host for multiple plug-ins. But that means, particularly in live performance, that you’ll want to conserve CPU resources. I personally don’t like to make things too unwieldy with Kore, keeping things to 8-12 channels and consolidating wherever possible. But even with a couple of instances of Reaktor, CPU conservation is a good idea.

Enter the power of the Channel On/Off switch. It’s actually in two places – see the X in the top left of the image here, as well as the one on the Audio tab at bottom. What’s nice about it is that, by “pulling the plug” on a channel, you prevent plug-ins on that channel from consuming CPU resources. (Many third-party plug-ins will keep using CPU resources even if no signal is routed to them. The “X” in this case switches them off entirely.)

So we know that switching off channels entirely – rather than just avoiding routing audio to them or switching off MIDI input – is the best way to conserve CPU when switching between instruments and effects. But how do you automate this in performance?

You can’t directly assign controls to the on/off switch, so your best solution is likely to enable and disable channels with performance presets. Performance presets will store the enabled/disabled state of all channels when they’re saved. To access them, click the Performance Presets button on the toolbar:

I always loved fiddling with the insides of piano, back to when I was a kid. I’ve had the opportunity to play the occasional John Cage piece, and have done other prepared piano music. Prepared techniques include adding obstructions to strings and other modifications. There’s nothing like a real instrument, so I won’t even try to propose digital work as a substitute. But, on the other hand, mimicking real-world sounds with digital techniques gives you an entirely new perspective on sound.

In the last installment of “sound design for imaginary instruments,” we saw some experiments with guitar sounds. This time, I’ll talk about how nice it is to be able to throw together sampled sounds and effects quickly in Kore.