This site is back – and back to stay. We have a new server, and some new tools we’ll be able to share soon to help the CDM community share tools and techniques more easily.

And sometimes, wonderful things just happen when the time is right. Case in point: a whole new set of beginning Reaktor tutorials, covering all the basic tasks you might like to accomplish. For newcomers to Reaktor, these will be ideal, as they get you rolling on a specific tasks — like, build me a sampler or do something cool and granular and delicious — without assuming a lot of prior knowledge. But if you do have prior knowledge, these will fill in some gaps even for intermediate users.

Reaktor Tutorial

Topics so far:

• Programming and patching: intro and a simple synth
• Effects: envelope generator, ring mod, tape decay
• Grain Delay
• Sampler
• Granulation modules (similar to our own series on the topic)

Creator Mats Claesson of Norway is interesting himself, with a background in classical guitar, a resume that includes work with John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, and ballet composition. If you can read Norwegian, there’s a lot more.

I have some additional Reaktor tutorials that, at long last, I’ll be publishing within the next two weeks – in a new format that will allow others to build upon the same work.

We won’t be disappearing for two months again, but with these tutorials and Reaktor in hand, you may.

Last time we looked at Kontakt I showed you how to import and slice up a sample, and create new music out of an old melody. Now let’s pick up where we left off by exploring the scripts and performance views in some Kontakt and Kontakt-based Kore library instruments.

The Urban Beats collection that ships with Kontakt includes 49 instruments, each with a different set of percussion loops and samples. I’ll show you how to use the sequencing and effects scripts to create endless variation in each instrument. As well, we’ll have a look at creating and managing zone envelopes to repitch and pan loops.

Ed.: When you think of sample design, you may think of hours spent painstakingly multisampling hundreds of audio files. Of course, that’s not the way most of us work (or have time to work). More often, you have a short recording you like that you want to manipulate. Kontakt’s functional depth need not intimidate you: you can use all that horsepower to get your sounds doing interesting stuff right away.

Here, Peter Dines walks us through in a few quick steps taking a simple sample and turning it into a complex instrument. He’s got a free download to round it out. Even if you’ve seen very little of Kontakt beyond its presets, you should be able to pick up some quick skills. And yes, you’ll even do some scripting – though thanks to the presets, you won’t have to know about scripting yourself to take advantage of this feature. (We will make all of you scripters soon, though.)

In this video, a basic set of Kontakt skills that could apply to lots of ideas:

• Creating a sample from a file
• Slicing up bigger samples into mapped slices with the Wave Editor
• Correcting slice points
• Using Script Editor performance presets to get advanced features
• (without having to write your own scripts)
• Simple script modification – even if you’re afraid of code

But the whole thing started (appropriately enough in the holiday season) as a gift. Peter recalls:

My brother in law came back from Vienna with a great gift for me – a music box mechanism. I recorded its output and imported the file into Kontakt. In this video, I demonstrate some of the ways you can manipulate and script your way to creative results.

Music-boxing in NI Kontakt from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Here’s the Kontakt instrument I created in this video:

Last time we looked at Massive on Noisepages I covered how you can use Kore 2’s hardware controllers to get your hands on Massive’s parameters and morph song arrangements from sequenced patches.

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.

Feedback, Routing and Modulation in Massive from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Download the patches used in this screencast

Previously:
Mutating Sequences Live with Massive in Kore
Video: Wobbly Bass Tutorial in Massive

GearWire’s Bill Holland gets lost in the sounds of some Reaktor instruments in a couple of videos. Worth watching, in case you haven’t explored some of the Reaktor library yet – or for showing to non-believers, if you prefer. Thought I’d put them here to bring in a perspective beyond our own videos:

Click through to high-quality versions on YouTube, or check out the original GearWire posts:

Native Instruments Reaktor Equinox: Bill Holland In A Padded Room

Native Instruments Reaktor Gaugear: Bill Holland Checks His Gaug-Reflex

Gaugear in particular is a real favorite of mine – another creation of the insanely-talented Lazyfish (who is evidently neither fish, nor lazy).

Also interesting: as I was looking for these videos, I see an interview with Cliff Taylor of The Plan (Submerge label). Cliff uses both SynthEdit and Reaktor for his creations. That should answer confused users who ask, what should I use? The answer, invariably: whatever you want, or even all of the above. Different tools do yield different ways of working.

Got an evening to get deeper into sound? Want to get a project started? We’ve been covering all aspects of using Kore in music, bit by bit. Here’s the overview of what we’ve done, which we’re expanding on an ongoing basis.

Using Kore

And, most importantly, I’ve just finished off:
Reference: How to Navigate Kore 2 with Hardware – No Mouse!

Last time we looked at the Roux Sequencer we examined the Snap Array module, how it retains values and how it feeds them to the Event Table module when you change snapshots. In this post we finish up by focusing on how the Mouse Area module allows you to add and change the sequencer’s values.

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.

Let’s continue learning about the Roux sequencer macro. Last time we looked at the Event Table module in Reaktor and how a clock signal can read values from it. Since the Event Table has no memory associated with snapshots, builders typically use a Snap Value Array to store and recall sequences with snapshots.

Sequencers are, by definition, all about controlling sets of events. Having unlocked the mysteries of time — the clock and timing data you need to keep your sequencer in sync — Peter Dines now tackles how a table can organize a sequence of events or steps. Take it away, Chef! -PK

Here’s the next puzzle piece in our series dissecting the guts of the Roux step sequencer macro – the event table. As you might guess from the name, the event table receives and sends event rather than audio data.

By default, the event table holds values between zero and one, and I know I bang on about this lot, but that’s a super convenient range because it’s so easy to scale. Ed.: It’s what’s called a “normalized” range for this reason – and easy to scale, indeed. Want 0 to 127, for instance? Just multiply by 127.) -PK We dealt with scaling the output in the last post on the Roux sequencer.