Monthly Archives: August 2011

Mixin’ it up with Konkreet Performer

I was talking to another Reaktor builder about mixing Konkreet Performer signals, so one KP parameter could control 25% of the range of a Reaktor instrument parameter, another could control 10%, and so on. It was an intriguing idea so I worked out the math and knocked this quick test ensemble together.

All it does is mix the X-value signals from the first three nodes in Konkreet Performer, then normalize the range so it’s always 0 to 1. That way you don’t have to fish around making sure everything adds up to 100%. Here’s what the structure looks like:
The output goes to a numeric display so you can see the values. 
You could easily adapt this to control whatever parameter you desire, or send the result to MIDI, or even adapt it to mix incoming MIDI CCs instead of Konkreet OSC parameters. 
Here’s the ensemble. Happy building!

Loupe 1.5.4 fix for Reaktor 5.6

From now on, buying Loupe on this page also gets you a copy of Loupe 2!

It came to my attention – frustratingly, as I was attempting to write some music – that the Reaktor 5.6 update had done something that messed up the slice points in Loupe. After changing a snap, slices would play on too long, drop out or play the wrong part of the wave when they were first triggered. Subsequent key presses on the same note worked fine.

I spent hours trying to fix it the proper way, by looking for initialization problems. Finally I decided to brute force the issue with an iteration macro:

All this does is silently bang out 128 notes in a split second when the instrument loads or changes snaps. As you see in the instrument properties manager, MIDI output is directed back at itself, making Loupe properly initialize every slice. This is perhaps inelegant, the equivalent of kicking 128 televisions, but it works well, doesn’t cause other problems, and I’ll take a working kludge over broken ideological purity any day.

If you have an instance of Loupe already loaded with your snapshots and samples, and you don’t want to bother with the update, you can simply install this macro in the main instrument structure, and make sure to go to the connect tab in the instrument properties and redicrect its MIDI output to itself. Incidentally, tracing the events in this macro makes for a pretty good exploration of intermediate to advanced Reaktor event wrangling and I welcome any questions – post ’em below.

Download the update here. Don’t have a Loupe license? Learn more and purchase here.

Shout out to Felix Petrescu (Makunouchi Bento) and Phil Durrant (Trio Sowari) for beta testing!