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.

Reaktor and Kore 2 complement each other nicely, and one of the ways that is most apparent when using Reaktor effects in Kore. The high resolution control knobs and buttons are a snap to map to Reaktor’s faders, knobs and switches. Creating Kore sounds out of your Reaktor patches is also a good way to keep track of your creations and search for sounds by keywords.

Building and Using a Reaktor Grain Delay in Kore 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

In this video tutorial I’ll walk you through building a granular delay effect - in essence, it’s more like a granular live-sampler, which you can use with canned loops or audio from live musicians. I’ll also show you how to map its controls to the Kore 2 controller. This is just the beginning! In upcoming tutorials we’ll look at adding modulation, automation and other refinements.

The following download contains a Kore performance and the Reaktor ensembles you’ll need to follow along with the tutorial. Have fun!

Grain Delay in Kore

Note: Because Kore uses absolute paths for presets, you’ll need to manually point it at the included preset using whatever directory you’ve chosen for installation.

Laptop musician and DJ Tim Exile is basically one of my heroes. He’s done some mind-boggling work in Reaktor – you’ll see quite a lot in the DSP and Core stuff. His work manages to stretch sonic possibilities while remaining focused on live performance, and, yes, you can dance to it.

UK-based sound engineer Matthew Hodson got to watch an extended master class / demonstration with some of Tim’s best stuff in it. Matthew writes:

I have just uploaded a fantastic video on my website www.matthewhodson.com which I made of Tim Exile’s performance at The London College of Music & Media (TVU) last year! (Just got round to editing it)

This one, like the one he did for Native Instruments shows him at length talk about that fantastically creative live setup he has, how it works and what its capable of. I for one use the same software (Reaktor) sometimes when I am making electronic music under the name bit|bin as I really rate not only its flexibility and ability to build/create anything from a synth to an effects unit but it also sounds great too.

See Tim put the software to its test with some custom built patches which everyone found truly inspirational. Check out his custom ‘cock controller’! You can download the video from my site too.

Tim is a really nice guy though and was happy to go through the ins and outs of his patch and answer many questions to the students.

The first video is at top just to give you a taste; the rest are embedded at Matthew’s site:

Tim Exile Video [matthew hodson]

For more Tim Exile goodness, Native Instruments has an extensive interview with video and downloadable ensemble:

Tech Talk with Exile

It’s terrible advertising, of course, because seeing how good Tim is with Reaktor makes you just want to quit and go take up banjo lessons or sit on the beach and have beers, since you won’t top what he’s doing! (For me, at least!)

I hope we’ll patch into Tim soon to talk more about this stuff, so stay tuned.

I promise this won’t become the 24/7 Reaktor network, but since we’re on a roll this week… back to the rest of the NI stable soon.

Derek Bell’s Uzzums is a hacked electric guitar that integrates onboard MIDI controls for manipulating Guitar Rig 3 directly. Result: no food pedals needed; Derek can control Guitar Rig right from his actual guitar, turning it into a kind of hybrid digital instrument.

This video dates to when he first finished the build; he’s been practicing ever since and will be playing on our audiovisual party at the legendary HOPE hacker conference here in New York next month. I expect to get another look at it then, and will definitely share.

Guitar Rig users, how do you control your racks? Do you use the controller from NI, or have you found another solution?

More inspiration from Derek (he created the infamous driver’s license Ableton Live controller):

db3ll @ YouTube

Peter Dines’ tutorial on scripting and modulation in Kontakt 3 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

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?

Kontakt preset files download