Monthly Archives: July 2013

Single Mault SE Distortion and Tone Shaper

This isn’t directly Reaktor related but if you use Reaktor you’ll certainly find uses for it in your effects chain, to add everything from subtle warmth to screeching insanity.

“Single Mault SE is a powerful distortion and tone-shaping plugin by FXpansion. A streamlined version of the Maul 3-band distortion plugin, Single Mault SE features 7 modelled distortion algorithms with additional tone filtering, saturation, soft-limiting and transient-shaping circuits. Single Mault SE also includes a wet/dry mix control and full MIDI Learn functionality. It is provided in VST, AU and RTAS formats. “

Get it here free until July 31st! You have to create an FXPansion account to get a serial and authorize – well worth the effort, I think. Pretty much everything FXpansion releases is worthy of your consideration. I’m a huge fan of their Tremor and Synth Squad plugins.

Care and Feeding of Granular Samplers

If you have my Loupe, Mirage and Frame granular samplers you are probably, like me, a relentless hunter of sample material to transform. Here are a few resources I discovered while browsing the WATMM (We Are The Music Makers) forums.

First off, the OLPC free sound samples page is several months’ worth of downloading, sifting and listening. And all of it, as far as I can tell, is licensed Creative Commons – attribution, allowing commercial use.

Next, the Prelinger archive at archive.org offers an embarrassment of riches for creative sampling – want some voices saying strange out of context things, and oddball scratchy soundtracks? Here’s your source. All public domain. Download the mp2 or mp4 files and open them in, say, Reaper to import and use the audio segments of the files. Reaper is also a fantastic way to cut up and export chunks of large files.

Speaking of cutting up large files – from that same WATMM thread, this great post from Zoe B. links to a Python script to split large files with various size and threshold parameters.

Another trick I like to use is to browse Freesound by license. There’s a lot of stuff licensed public domain or CC-attribution. For example, here is a search for field recordings with Creative Commons 0 licensing (no rights reserved).

Happy exploring, and if you have your own favorite free or CC sample sources, please link us up in the comments!

Ghost Shift: Multitap Filtered Delay Effect for Reaktor

Heeeeere’s Ghost Shift!


Ghost Shift is a delay effect based on an earlier version of mine called Pumpkin. I’ve reskinned it, added functionality and fine tuned the filter and feedback parameters for easier sound tweaking.

The major thing you have to know about Ghost Shift is that each delay line works as a separate voice in Reaktor. Adding more voices in the instrument parameters…

…is gonna give you more delay taps, and magically, the number of controls in the delay time, pan etc. graphs will auto-adjust to the number of voices / delay taps.

Each voice can have its own delay time as a multiple of 16th notes, separate pan, feedback and filter settings. I’ve included just a handful of presets because the settings are going to be highly dependent on the material you’re running through the instrument. Really sparse input with lots of space can have more delay lines and more filter feedback. A more full audio track, like a drum kit, will benefit from no more than three delay taps, widely panned, and not much feedback. Let experience and experiment be your guide.

Everything’s tool tipped and self explanatory. A saturator can boost the signal as well as keep it from clipping unpleasantly at the output. The one control you will want to have mapped to a controller or mod wheel is the Mixer, so you can crossfade between dry and wet signal. You’ll hear that happening in this Soundcloud demo:

So how does one obtain this marvelous and endlessly entertaining Ghost Shift device? Click here:

Add to Cart

It’s free! Enjoy!