favorite reaktor ensembles

So yeah, today I have been playing around with the tim exile one called vectory which is included by default, which is fucking awesome since I figured out how easy it is to load your own loops into(been messing around with acid basslines, drum breaks, vocal passages). I've become really inspired by what I can do with it.

One other one that I really like is called "Grain Perception". Its a little bit hard to use, but it will sync with your host and has its own sequencer. Its good for live sampling and grain resequencing of it. I also like the orange grains, white grains, etc. effects.

I'm mostly interested in things like that. Also interested in interesting delays, reverberators, and modulators that people here may recommend. Multi-effects with sequencers? Crazy go-plasticish delays? Other loop manglers from the user library?

But yeah, enough about what I like and want, tell me your favorites. Reaktor is like a rediscovered gem of mine. I bought it a while back but have made almost no use of it, as it was clumsy for me and I wanted to do other things with my music, but now I see how great it is. I'd like to make good use of it again, because today I realized how powerful it is again.

The Space Drone ensemble is a staple of my jam sessions. I've never seen another synthesizer like it. For those of you who do not know, the concept is based around up to 96 separate noise-based voices that trigger in a stochastic fashion based on the density parameter, and base fundamental pitch that you dictate. The pitch of these noise oscillators is determined by highly resonant bandpass filters tuned to the fundamental pitch specified. It can be strictly tuned or made to oscillate in the general vicinity of that pich frequency. What gives the sound it's character are the global amplitude envelope controls of attack/decay, which is a simple concept, but very versatile in creating a complex combination of individual voices. I believe the ensemble was built for the use of long, sustained, tones that slowly fade in and out, but I find it most interesting when the the individual envelopes are set very short. It allows for a lot of different watery sounds, almost like the sound of an individual drop of water being varied and repeated in such volumes that it instead creates the sensation of a running faucet. I'd create an audio example of me performing with it, but I'm in a weird state of limbo when it comes to moving to a new place to live and wont be able to for at least two days.

I've been ignoring reaktor for way too long. please point me towards some nice ensembles so I can try to pick them apart and learn how to make nice new ones.

i like the newer groovebox one a lot called Aerobic, sounds like a fucking machinedrum or probably the closest thing to one without buying it.

Limelite is also great if you're in the mood for some fruity loops like jamming. I use it a lot, sometimes i ise it to improvise live with slaved to my hardware drum machines.

I also like Reaktor's vast array of physical modeling synths, the most famous of which is Steam Pipe. That's probably the easiest one to control.

There was this amazing ensemble for Reaktor 3, but i dont know if it will load in 5 called Satin which used 32 comb filters to create a fake acoustic sounds, it could sound anywhere from a guitar pluck to a full on indian sitar drone.

for effects i'm in love with Echomania and Springtank, they are indispensable for me for doing anything spring reverb or dub delay related. I haven't found a dub delay that comes close to the power and authenticity of echomania outside of Reaktor.

Space drone synthesizer sounds quite awesome, would you mind sending it to me?

I will have to look through my patch directories ( i have over 10 gigs of R4 and 5 shit) to come up with some other good names. there are a lot more i know it!

Bubba, have you checked out the idm centric Reaktor patches i host at the RLR website?

if not go here http://www.recordlabelrecords.org/reaktor.html

i made a particularly useful one called Squarepusherizer which takes a 2 or 4 bar drum or anything loop and will chop it up in real-time for you.

  On 9/3/2009 at 4:42 AM, Bubba69 said:

So yeah, today I have been playing around with the tim exile one called vectory which is included by default, which is fucking awesome since I figured out how easy it is to load your own loops into(been messing around with acid basslines, drum breaks, vocal passages). I've become really inspired by what I can do with it.

I had a problem with this one. I was working on a track on the plane when I decided I wanted to fuck around with a loop in Vectory. I exported the loop from Ableton as a 44khz 16bit AIFF and loaded it in. I set the BPM to be the same and put the sample in HI quality mode. Yet for the life of me I couldn't get the loop to sound regular. It sounded all muffled. Did you run into this issue at all?

  On 9/3/2009 at 4:42 AM, Bubba69 said:

So yeah, today I have been playing around with the tim exile one called vectory which is included by default, which is fucking awesome since I figured out how easy it is to load your own loops into(been messing around with acid basslines, drum breaks, vocal passages). I've become really inspired by what I can do with it.

I had a problem with this one. I was working on a track on the plane when I decided I wanted to fuck around with a loop in Vectory. I exported the loop from Ableton as a 44khz 16bit AIFF and loaded it in. I set the BPM to be the same and put the sample in HI quality mode. Yet for the life of me I couldn't get the loop to sound regular. It sounded all muffled. Did you run into this issue at all?

I didn't really notice anything but then again I wasn't going for a clean sound. Maybe it is an issue where the eq cannot be fully turned off?

anybody seen the new tim exile ensemble? http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/producer/powered-by-kore/the-finger/

looks pretty much like artillery 2, which I already have.

can you do floating point modulation with reactor ? in other words : precise knob tweaks ?

I'd imagine actual knob tweaks have a granularity of some kind, I'm sure the GUI update clock isn't sample accurate as well as the need for mouse movements to be scaled down to some degree, i don't think there is a single plugin I know of that allows you to adjust a value by a single binary bit with ONLY the mouse. However I know that certain aspects of reaktor are sample accurate. I'm sure audio rate modulation is possible, especially at the core level, but oversampling would be needed to eliminate aliasing. For the most part reaktor's internal modulation isn't divided up in chunks, its true floating point(or whatever it uses to store values, could be 32bit integers at the code level for all I care).

  On 9/18/2009 at 9:14 PM, Bubba69 said:

I'd imagine actual knob tweaks have a granularity of some kind, I'm sure the GUI update clock isn't sample accurate as well as the need for mouse movements to be scaled down to some degree, i don't think there is a single plugin I know of that allows you to adjust a value by a single binary bit with ONLY the mouse. However I know that certain aspects of reaktor are sample accurate. I'm sure audio rate modulation is possible, especially at the core level, but oversampling would be needed to eliminate aliasing. For the most part reaktor's internal modulation isn't divided up in chunks, its true floating point(or whatever it uses to store values, could be 32bit integers at the code level for all I care).

There are lies, damned lies, and then "information" posted in EKT. Reaktor has both audio signals and control signals, the latter of which will update at a configurable rate as fast as 3200Hz. I mean, does nobody read the manual or explore the menu options, ffs? Some modulation inputs will accept either a control or audio signal, and some will only accept control signals. Sheesh!

  On 9/17/2009 at 6:03 AM, jubes said:

can you do floating point modulation with reactor ? in other words : precise knob tweaks ?

yes of course, i take it you've never once used reaktor?

  On 9/18/2009 at 11:40 PM, children r r future said:

  On 9/18/2009 at 9:14 PM, Bubba69 said:

I'd imagine actual knob tweaks have a granularity of some kind, I'm sure the GUI update clock isn't sample accurate as well as the need for mouse movements to be scaled down to some degree, i don't think there is a single plugin I know of that allows you to adjust a value by a single binary bit with ONLY the mouse. However I know that certain aspects of reaktor are sample accurate. I'm sure audio rate modulation is possible, especially at the core level, but oversampling would be needed to eliminate aliasing. For the most part reaktor's internal modulation isn't divided up in chunks, its true floating point(or whatever it uses to store values, could be 32bit integers at the code level for all I care).

 

There are lies, damned lies, and then "information" posted in EKT. Reaktor has both audio signals and control signals, the latter of which will update at a configurable rate as fast as 3200Hz. I mean, does nobody read the manual or explore the menu options, ffs? Some modulation inputs will accept either a control or audio signal, and some will only accept control signals. Sheesh!

okay... are you saying I was lying? Although I said that audio rate modulation is possible, i specifically mentioned at the core level, is this not possible? I tried to dodge around my uncertainties by using phrases like "id imagine" and "certain aspects". 3200Hz? Didn't know that was the limit, but it sounds beleivable, makes sense. Are control signals limited by a certain granularity in the other dimension(besides time), value?

whenever you build a reactor patch it's actually being soldered together by children in a NI factory in India. The sound is then patched back to you via the internet which is why there is a lot of latency and unpredictability. It's actually all analog.

  On 9/20/2009 at 4:13 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

whenever you build a reactor patch it's actually being soldered together by children in a NI factory in India. The sound is then patched back to you via the internet which is why there is a lot of latency and unpredictability. It's actually all analog.

thanks for stating the obvious