Tag Archives: Brent Kallmer

The Daybreak Guide to REAKTOR’s Lurker

Brent Kallmer is back with one of his great explorations of an under-appreciated Reaktor factory library classic. I was pondering recently how Reaktor 5 was so far ahead of its time that people are only catching up to it now. This is nuts since Reaktor 5 was released in 2005! Brent is doing a fantastic job documenting and exposing wonderful factory ensembles that were, truth be told, sort of unceremoniously dumped on the world with little fanfare or explanation.


Says Brent:

Lurker is one of REAKTOR’s most beguiling effects—and also one of its most inscrutable. It uses a complex and powerful modulation sequencing system to control various parameters on two independent delay units. The versatility of these two delays allows you to transform audio (from either Lurker’s sampler or from an external source) into everything from rhythmically precise textures to trippy comb-filtered psychedelia.

Enjoy the video, and when you want to try Lurker yourself, it’s right there in the Factory tab of your Reaktor browser sidebar.

Taking Reaktor L3 to the Next L3vel

In this video, Brent Kallmer continues his series on digging into Reaktor factory library instruments, this time with the L3 slicer and sequencer.

Reaktor 5 factory ensembles like L3 have been around since 2005 and are still, I think, under-explored and under-utilized. A sign of how forward-looking these instruments were is that they still look and sound fresh 8 years later and remain ripe for exploitation.

Brent says:

While loop slicing is nothing new, L3 remains a gem on the basis of the results it produces and the elegance and simplicity with which it produces them. Of course, this is not to say that L3 didn’t scare me off for longer than I care to admit.

Let Brent be your guide into the jungle of L3. More here

MASCHINE and REAKTOR: Stack-and-Send FX

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.

Video Tutorial: Antonio Blanca’s NOD-E

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.