On Thursday I had the booster jab and on Friday the best I could do was sleep and eat and huddle under the duvet with a hot water bottle so that’s why this is a bit late.
Overall, I think I made a good stab at digging into Reaktor’s modular system. It’s very powerful and very customisable, and quite frankly I could spend the next 6 months just with this tool and never get bored. Frustrated maybe. But it would never be dull. As it stands though, I’ve allotted 2 weeks to get well up to speed on how this modular rack synth system works. I’m a week through that now.
The documentation that comes with the software (though very thorough) isn’t written in nearly as clear, plain English as Serum’s was. This is a great example:
The Snapshots of the Snapshot Master are the Snapshots that are used to populate the Snapshot menu in the Toolbar.
The first part of my journey through NI’s Reaktor documentation has involved a great deal of time learning how to save stuff. It’s a little bit cart-before-the-horse as it would have been nice to build something worth saving first…
However, I see where the manuals’ authors are coming from, as the way that the app is built involves a hierarchy of ‘things’ that you can save whatever-you’ve-built as – racks, instruments, macros, blocks… you can build in various different levels of complexity, which they label as ‘Core’ or ‘Primary’ or ‘Blocks’. I’d be lying if I said I properly had the hang of it. And then there’s making sure that, if you’re using it as a plugin in a DAW (such as Logic X), you’ve set the settings up correctly to either automatically or manually save everything correctly within each Reaktor instance.
As I was starting to lose my rag a little towards the end of work on Wednesday, I decided to say fuck it and just play without reference to the manual to see what I could see (this was partly a test to see how much information I’d retained).
I ended up making this lovely bit of sound from tweaking a pre-made synth/effects block within Reaktor called ‘Form’ that incorporates audio sampling (whereas all the other ‘building’ I’ve been doing involves basic synth stuff like oscillators and ADSR modules which tbh I’m not at all excited about). I dropped a bit of a violin recording into it and out popped this GORGEOUS random musical sound design that’s really playable. A bit of improvisation made this:
This is sort of the basic melody that Form has made somehow quite randomly but very musically from the original audio:
For comparison, this is the original raw material:
It’s so completely different!
That’s me on the fiddle, from a previous project of mine (before much autotuning in Melodyne and the liberal application of reverb). You can hear how basic, dry and unedited it is. How does this ‘Form’ synth module within Reaktor take that original sound and create something so different and lush and so cool? And how do I replicate that on demand?
It’s given me enough evidence to show that it’s definitely worth ploughing on with another week’s worth of pure exploration. I’ll dip into the manual when I’m flummoxed by a setting or structure or whatever, but, otherwise, I’m ready to learn more this week by experimentation rather than following said manual.
Journal
13/12/21
First impressions: Native Instruments (makers of Reaktor) has a lot of tutorial and getting started info alongside documentation, for all of their applications. Useful later in course for Kontakt etc.
Reaktor appears really similar to AudioMulch (from what I can remember of AudioMulch from early 2000s) only possibly both easier and more complex. I suspect there’s crossover with Logic’s Environment (to come later in the course too).
Reaktor’s definitely easier on the eye, but has loads more pre-built modules. AudioMulch is ancient though (but I still have a soft spot for it). I’m still a bit peeved it doesn’t work on 64bit Mac.
Possible tasks/focus/point of this course: finding ‘the lovely’ (this is becoming a bit of a repeating motif in life, but that’s another story) or making something lovely out of aggressive/vicious sounds
14/12/21
Wish Reaktor had a zoom function like Serum. The latter was much easier on the eyes at 130% zoom.
Ah! Reaktor has a player/record to file function! This could be incredibly useful. Serum, take note. (Although Serum is plugin-only, not standalone, software, so I suppose that’s what the DAW is there for.
Calarts course – free and appears to be v high quality from the few samples on NI’s site. On the Cadenze site I signed up for the full course with the intention of digging into what grabs my attention rather than following from start to end. There’s far too much material there – I wouldn’t be able to fit it in these 2 weeks.
The theory of synths (and history) is *quite* interesting but the sounds that come out it don’t excite me. Only when they’re put together in musical form do I get excited. The sounds might inspire musical form, but the technology behind it isn’t at all exciting to me. It’s interesting only in its applicability to create something musically surprising. Plus I have a future-person’s ear of having heard diabolical 80s scores made with synths that are just dreadful. Eg Maurice Jarre’s ‘Witness’ score. So very bad. Just awful.
Jumped in too far ahead in the course. Thought I’d have a good grounding in Wavetable stuff after last week on Serum, but *building* a wavetable synth is very different to using one with a lovely intuitive UI (like in Serum). I don’t know if I want to be able to build a wavetable synth, or any synth, in Reaktor, but I do want to know how it *works* so I can make it sound more like what I want it to sound like. That means I need to know why and how specific sounds are made so that I can make my imagined audio into reality.
So I’m watching the course from the start at 2x speed with subtitles and I’ll stop when I get to something I don’t understand.
It seems Reaktor is really good at emulating classic synths (not interesting to me) but also means you can take it to pieces and use individual bits of the synth system to build your own. That means I can use my own source material and my own ideas about what I want it to sound like (if I do indeed even have an idea, which often I don’t – instead, focus now on experimentation and play).
… Well this is frustrating. The course resources don’t match the video on Cadenze, so having to interpret new concepts within a slightly differently structured environment or patch or ensemble or whatever you want to call it is taking too much time. Or rather it’s spending time on stuff I don’t want to spend time on. I’m dumping the Cadenze course. Going back to the manual.
The best line I’ve come across in the documentation is:
The Snapshots of the Snapshot Master are the Snapshots that are used to populate the Snapshot menu in the Toolbar.
Righto.
(I get it. It makes sense with the pictures that come with it in the manual. I’m just being facetious. But I still find sentences like this hilarious. Maybe I need to get out more.)
It is becoming clear that a certain amount of time is spent deciding on the likelihood I’d need to use the information I’m reading. Wading through a ‘deep dive’ document suggests I may not need to memorise the majority of it; at least, though, I know where such in-depth info is stored should I run into a need to use it. In that case, none of my time is wasted, it’s just that some of what I’m learning from the documentation is more immediately applicable (and thus much more inspiring) than other bits.
Eg, whilst wading through a lot of dullness around saving and deleting snapshots (which are just a bunch of settings on a particular instrument that make it sound a certain way) there’s the ‘Morph+Random’ dialogue, hidden away at the bottom in the corner, when this could be a most delightful way of whiling away a few hours one afternoon –
Why would you hide that away like that, Native Instruments??
15/12/21
Reaktor does not have a zoom, despite its tiny tiny text (yes maybe I do need reading glasses but this text is minute) BUT Mac’s Accessibility feature does have a zoom option – here.
I used the ‘picture in picture’ mode so I can move the mouse around like a magnifying glass.
I’ve spent two and a bit days learning this tool and hardly making any noises AT ALL with it, new or otherwise. I do not think this is the best way to learn (for me).
Woop woop now I’m building a synth – FINALLY. Ah but now the manual and the app disagree. The names of the ‘macros’ are different. ARGH. Bane of my existence. Fuck it. I’ll just pick a different macro to work with.
ARGH so it turns out the one I picked is the SAME macro just with a different name. NOT GOOD Native Instruments, NOT GOOD. Would it kill you to check your work?
Eg. from the manual
Now my versions – WHERE IT HAS 2 DIFFERENT NAMES:
I am ratty because I’ve spent such a very long time wading through both an uncomfortable-to-watch, not-that-useful video course and a very dry manual and my patience is wearing thin.
THESE ARE SUCH SIMPLE CONCEPTS how do these people make them seem so difficult and laboured. It’s basically lego with a bit of math and extremely tiny text.
I have no interest in walking. I want to run.
After several hours of wading through the treacle of ‘Primary’ programming in Reaktor, I feel like I’ve got the hang of it and am done with learning how to build a simple synth, effect macro and sequencer macro. I could go deeper but, quite honestly, I’ve lost the will to live a little bit so I’m going to jump to ‘Blocks’ which look a million times easier and will make interesting sounds ten times faster. At least I’ve a clearer idea now of how it all works under the hood. That’s some hard-won knowledge, mind.
—
Poking around, I discovered ‘Form’: a ‘sample-tracking’ synth, whatever that is.
IT IS GLORIOUS.
Dropped in some solo violin from a previous project with a few tweaks to the settings and it’s made a brand new, playable melody fragment.
It’s very playable. I improvised a tune. John said it sounded like it should be on the score for Ad Astra or some such serious thinking person’s sci-fi. You know the type. I’ve called the patch and the track ‘Contains Multitudes” (see track above, at the top of the post).