Reaktor Secrets Revealed!

If your music relies on fresh, ear-grabbing sounds, you'll love Reaktor. Native Instruments' flagship softsynth isn't just packed with cool presets: it's a set of more than 20 different instruments, all of them packed with cool presets. Reaktor's waveshaping, granular, and analog-style subtractive synthesis styles give sound designers an endless variety of sonic resources — and if for some reason you can't find what you need, you can pop the hood and create your own synth using Reaktor's basic components.

Reaktor's resources are so extensive that I had trouble figuring out what to focus on in this article. What you're about to read isn't "the basics of Reaktor," nor is it "how to make a synthesizer from scratch using Reaktor modules" (a fascinating topic, but most of us would rather make music). Instead, I'll steer you to several of Reaktor's factory Ensembles and point out ways to use some specific features that you may not have noticed. If you don't yet have the program, download the free demo here.

Carbon-Based Life Forms

At first glance, Reaktor's Carbon 2 instrument (Figure 1) seems to be a fairly standard three-oscillator, analog-subtractive synth. But the variety and color of the factory presets suggest that it has some hidden depths.

You can apply saturation (mild distortion) both pre-filter and post-filter, for instance, using the small controls at the top of the filter section. This is a great way to fatten up a sound. Try selecting three sine waves in the oscillator section, detuning them slightly, and adding lots of saturation both before and after a resonant lowpass filter. This patch creates a thick, unstable warbling tone.

Figure 1. Reaktor's Carbon 2 synth has three oscillators (left) and a versatile multimode filter (center). The saturation parameters are circled. The envelopes and effects share panel space on the right thanks to Reaktor 5's much-needed panel tab system. (Click to enlarge.)

The Carbon documentation has a few glitches. On the oscillator sync page, the tooltip asserts that high values of the Sft-Hrd parameter cause soft synchronization, but this is backwards. A setting of 40 or 50 will increase the "grit factor" when the slave oscillator's pitch is swept by an envelope in a classic sync patch. Here's an example of oscillator sync:

Carbon Soft Sync (580KB MP3)

Both the tooltip and the printed Instrument Guide fail to mention that the width of the pulse wave can be modulated from the oscillator wave page (see Figure 2). And speaking of modulation, it's not correct to say that the dual inputs for Src A and Src B in the oscillator and filter pages "mix" or "sum" the two input signals. If the first input is left blank, the second input can be used for external modulation (from a mod wheel, for instance). But when both inputs are active, the two signals are multiplied, not added: the second input scales the amount of the first input. That allows you to control the depth of LFO modulation from the mod wheel, which is an essential feature.

Figure 2. The manual doesn't mention it, but here's where you change the pulse width of a waveform. Automating this parameter creates a rich, animated sound.

Carbon's effects are standard fare, except for the pitch shifter. I like this with settings of 7 and 12 half-steps, the reverse button lit, and the grain knobs most of the way to the left (producing large grains; see Figure 3). Playing one note at a time produces an animated open-fifths texture, as you can hear in this example: