Tag Archives: routing

Let There Be Loops

If it’s Thursday then there must be another excellent Reaktor video tutorial from Brent Kallmer at BluewaterVST. This time around, Brent looks at rendering loops from Reaktor grooveboxes, which sounds simple at first blush but Brent takes you deeper into some of the tools and options available to you when hosting Reaktor in Ableton Live.

Says Brent:

In this tutorial, let’s take a look at how to bounce individual parts of a groove from Aerobic and SineBeats—two stunning REAKTOR grooveboxes. Both are drum synths (they synthesize drum hits rather than playing samples) and their penetrating, glossy sounds are ideal for techno and glitch (or anything else that needs a synthetic touch).

Great stuff! I think the grooveboxes in Reaktor 5 are some of the most under-appreciated and under-used tools out there, mainly because people just don’t know what to do with them, and as Brent says, sometimes there are just too many options. Rendering loops this way is a great strategy to narrow things down and get something going.

Ableton Live + Reaktor MIDI OSC workaround

In this video, John Burgess demonstrates how to route MIDI over OSC between different instances of Reaktor in Ableton Live, in order to send on multiple channels to Kontakt.


I’m not the biggest Ableton Live fiend on the planet, so if there’s a different workaround, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it here. Nevertheless, John has created a very cool introduction to Reaktor’s ability to send MIDI over OSC, something I haven’t experimented with much. Besides its applicability in Live, this technique could also come in very handy to route MIDI over the network in Windows, or between Windows and a Mac – or between two Macs if for some reason you don’t want to use the built in network MIDI facilities.

John also created another video on Reaktor in Live, demonstrating how to keep Live from putting Reaktor to sleep when you’re using it to transmit MIDI. Handy to know in conjunction with the other video!

Routing Reaktor MIDI in Ableton Live with a dummy track

I’ve always been annoyed with the way Live disappears the MIDI out menu of a track the instant you drop in an audio effect or instrument. It makes it difficult to route Reaktor’s awesome Spiral instrument, for example, to another instrument track. Or to send LFO controllers from Reaktor to an instrument. You can do it by selecting the Reaktor track as the MIDI in on the destination, but then you lose the ability to also control the instrument from a keyboard or control surface.

Farting around this evening I noticed that you can kludge around this limitation by creating a dummy MIDI track as a MIDI bus:

 

Notice that the MIDI Bus track has its inputs set to the Reaktor5 track, but also to the Reaktor5 instrument in that track. The MIDI Bus track has its output set to the next track, which has an instrument rack. That doesn’t tie up the MIDI from dropdown in the instrument rack’s track, so the track still accepts note and control information from a control surface or keyboard, or what have you.

The other important point is to set monitor to “In” for your two target tracks.

Maybe this is a well known workaround now but a year or two ago when I googled for solutions I found only complaints and no fixes. I hope this helps somebody else because it sure opens up possibilities for me!