Category Archives: Learn

Algorithmic Music in Reaktor

It occurs to me that it’s been ages since I posted an actual, you know, Reaktor tutorial around these parts. Which is what this blog was originally created for! So here’s something nice and meaty: a tutorial on basic algorithmic music generation techniques in Reaktor.

What this tutorial and its associated instruments will do is give you a basic feel for how events in Reaktor can be wrangled and manipulated into musically meaningful forms. What it WON’T do is compose your next masterpiece or write a top ten hit:

However, what you might do is take some of these techniques and create instruments that go further towards realizing your musical ambitions. I’ve always thought of Reaktor as a tool that blurs the distinction between instrument and composition. If you think along the same lines then you will find this information useful. Happy building!

Download the tutorial here (PDF and instruments)

Modding Spacedrone for keyboard control

Any sound generator in Reaktor can be modified to give MIDI note control over the output level. Here’s how to do it in Spacedrone:

Easy peasy. An ADSR envelope multiplies the signal going to the output. You can also use a selective note gate module instead of a vanilla gate module so only one specific note will trigger output. Adjust the attack, decay, sustain and release to taste.

Download the modded ensemble here. (oops, link was broken, should work now)

If you’re looking for an interesting way to manipulate recorded samples of Spacedrone or other audio material, try my sampler pack.

UPDATE: added pitch control too. It doesn’t work the way a normal synth would because the pitches of individual voices have a random factor but you can control the range.

Improved Reaktor voice panning and a little digital archaeology

I was reading through the Reaktor application manual which is greatly improved in recent times, and came across this structure to pan voices in the stereo field:

Not bad, but you’ll notice the first voice isn’t panned to zero (hard left). Here’s how to make the spread go from zero to one:

And here is a download of a simple synth which uses the pan macro with four voices.

I happened to notice the Reaktor tutorial synth I’ve used in my example is thirteen years old! That goes back to the days when it was called Generator.

More on routing Reaktor in Live: multi out audio UPDATE: VST works too, not just AU

Reaktor has flexible audio out ports – you’re not limited to stereo, and you can take advantage of that in Live.

Fire up Live and load the Reaktor AU (UPDATE: VST version will work too). Load the Aerobic ensemble, and in the lower right corner, turn on the “out” switch. This will enable multi-out for Aerobic, so each drum unit can be routed to one of four stereo pairs.

Then go to an audio track, select audio from your Reaktor track, and select either the pre or post FX for the first stereo pair, or one of the three others.

This means you can apply effects to each stereo pair by routing them to different tracks.

But what if you don’t want to use Reaktor’s outputs in pairs? Let’s say you’ve built a crazy custom ensemble with a mono sampler, a sine, a square and a saw wave, and you want to route them individually to the first four outputs. What you can do then, is use Live’s mono track insert effect to choose either the right or left channel exclusively.

So there ya go – easy flexible routing. I’m not sure why it won’t work with the VST version of the plugin, and I’m too bushed to fire up Windows and find out if it works properly there. Are there any Windows users who’ve tried this?

UPDATE: turns out routing with the VST plugin version does work properly after all. I think I had the monitor setting wrong in the receive track. Sorry for the disinformation! Remember to turn off the track activator for the track holding Reaktor, and if you want the first stereo pair, choose pre or post FX in your target track, not post mixer (that would be the muted signal).

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!