Tag Archives: Simpler

Frame 0.3 beta – download

I’m crossposting this from Lambent Studio because people are asking about it in the thread below, and Reaktor Tips gets more traffic; I guess I’ll post Reaktor related stuff here in the future, where people expect it to be. šŸ™‚

Here it is.

Tada! The initial release of the Frame looper, made to emulate the realtime-manipulable start and loop points of Ableton’s Simpler instrument. It’s a powerful and convenient way to play with samples, which makes the dearth of samplers that can do it so shocking.

Frame Beta 0.3 from Peter Dines on Vimeo.

In this clip I’m alternately adjusting start and loop points by clicking and dragging on the waveform, and using the knobs. The knobs can be mapped to MIDI controllers or (better) the high-res knobs on the Kore 2 controller. Initially I had tried to do this with the sample loop module, but that caused clicks because of the lack of crossfade / ramping. Eventually I hit on the idea of using a grain cloud module with grain overlap set to one – so the single grain, in effect, is acting as a loop. And the great thing about the grain cloud module, unlike the grain resynth, is that the grain can be arbitrarily long.

When I interviewed Phil Durrant, one of the things that came up was the lack of a split library in Reaktor 5 – there were only “premium” bells and whistles ensembles, and no simple, easy to modify examples. Frame is an instrument that tries to do just one thing, and do it well, with a clean easy to modify structure.

Read the notes in the instrument properties and tooltips. If you have suggestions for improvement, let me know, unless your suggestion involves sticking a reverb macro in it. šŸ˜‰

previously

Frame: A Reaktor Freeform Looper

Frame: A Reaktor Freeform Looper from Peter Dines on Vimeo.

This is a stripped down version of a looper built to work the way the Simpler instrument from Ableton Live loops. That is, you can set an arbitrary loop length and scrub across it in realtime without glitches or clicking.

In this video I’m using the Frame beta in Kore, which allows me to control the loop start and end points much more accurately than your standard 7 bit MIDI controllers. There’s also some saturation and echo on the Frame channel; however, it’s capable of sounding as clean as whatever sample you throw into it.

I have far more complex versions of this but I cut this one down to essentials for two reasons – one, so it would be obvious what I’m talking about when I say freeform looping, and two, so that it will have a clear structure to hot-rod when I release it.