This week at BluewaterVST, Brent Kallmer takes us on a tour of Reaktor FX in Maschine. I really love Maschine for its freeform session view style workflow. I think it’s the only sequencer / host that gets this right aside from Ableton.
Enjoy Brent’s tutorial and check out the rest of his site here.
In this video, Brent Kallmer of BluewaterVST takes us through the wonderful NOD-E ensemble by Antonio Blanca, an algorithmic music machine that generates MIDI note data based on the positions of nodes moving on the instrument panel.
Says Brent:
You might think of NOD-E as the sequencer that you get when the nodes in Spiral reach escape velocity and break out of orbit. In NOD-E, 8 nodes travel around an XY-field and trigger notes when they cross certain boundaries (defined by you). Movement along the X-axis triggers notes; movement along the Y-axis determines the triggered note’s velocity (in other words, a note that is triggered at a high Y-value will play more loudly than one that is triggered at a low value. The nodes are propelled throughout the XY field by two polyphonic LFOs (one for each axis).
The cool thing about NOD-E is it can sound like anything – you can route the MIDI data to other plugins, even to hardware synths – or record and edit the sequence in a sequencer. Big ups to Brent for this great video introduction to the ensemble.
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.
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.
Danny J. Lewis of Music Production Tutorials tried out my free Frame 3 ensemble and liked it so much he made a brief video demonstrating what happens when you explore parameter changes in one of the default snapshots.
What’s interesting here is how deep he goes into the sound… Frame was designed for just this sort of exploration, for deep dives into detailed samples to bring out hidden goodies and details.
In this video, Danny from Music Production Tutorials introduces the free Solina-V String Ensemble (available here in the Reaktor user library) and demonstrates its use in Maschine.
The Solina was a classic 70s synth used by many of the soul/funk/jazz artists of the time. It’s got a lovely spacey, trippy sound when you make use of some of the controls.
Hugo Portillo’s reconstruction of the Solina in Reaktor is jaw droppingly good, and rivals other top-drawer emulations like the DCAM Synth Squad Amber, in my opinion. If you want to trip out 70s style, get downloading and start playing!