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 noteâs 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.
Last time we looked at sending random notes from Reaktor, everything was hunky dory except the ensemble didn’t send note-off signals to its destination.
Note-offs are required because otherwise you end up with stuck and hanging notes. If you’re sending to a synth patch you could inadvertently create drones. If you’re sending to a drum synth or other percussion instrument, you might not hear a drone when the note fades but it might still be active, consuming CPU. This has happened to me when I’ve tried to trigger Drumspillage from Reaktor.
The fix is very simple and uses part of the same structure we used to send MIDI out from Krypt – a note-off macro.
There’s also a NoteLen control, unlike the earlier version in Krypt. This control determines the length of the triggered note, so it doesn’t require a new note to turn off the previous one.
Now let’s have a look inside the NoteOff macro:
It’s a bit complex, but the gist of it is – the Value modules on the right, just before the merge modules and P and G terminals, hold the value of the previous note and a zero. The Order module is wired up so that when a new note is received, the macro first sends out the pitch of the previous note with a zero velocity. That’s one way to send a note-off. The macro then sends out the new note with whatever velocity came in through the G terminal.
The Hold module holds the note on for however many milliseconds you’ve set as the length of the note, then drops the value to zero, which again sends out a note-off.
You can download the updated ensemble here and experiment with it yourself.
Update: here is a version of the note off macro that is more suitable for popping into other sequencer ensembles, which often have trouble with stuck notes when sending to external synths and hardware.
Behold and beware: Trevor Gavilan has released the Reaktor Ass Fister on an unsuspecting world.
Inspired by the infamous Metasonix tube powered hardware units and with sound design by Jesse Voccia, the AF-150 is a Reaktor effects unit based around the humble slew limiter module. Amazing what you can do with simple structures in Reaktor with some imagination! Get it here, where you can also download the Semi Fuzz.
I’ve only tried it on drum loops so far and to say it utterly destroys any sound routed through it is an understatement. It can sound like a contact mic fixed to a circular saw cutting through cement blocks laced with steel rebar. That’s my first impression, anyhow. đ
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, letâs take a look at how to bounce individual parts of a groove from Aerobic and SineBeatsâtwo 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.