Reaktor Secrets Revealed!
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

It's Alive

Figure 7. The Recall by MIDI checkbox in the Ensemble Properties window enables the Ensemble to respond to external program change commands.

Below we'll have a few tips on using one of Reaktor's more visionary Ensembles in Ableton Live. If you want to play Reaktor live as a stand-alone instrument, here are some ideas:

Reaktor can respond to MIDI program changes. To enable this feature, right-click (Mac: Control-click) on a blank part of the background window and select Ensemble Properties from the pop-up menu. (This menu item may be labeled Instrument Properties.) Click on the Function tab — the one that looks like gears — and check Recall by MIDI.

Figure 8. The morph slider is useful both for real-time control and for coming up with new ideas for presets.

The morph slider in the Snapshots window provides a great way to make complex changes in the sound onstage with a single gesture. Select a preset you want to morph, move the knobs you want to morph, use the Append button in the Snapshots window to save it, and then select the original and your new version in the two morph slots. MIDI Learn can't be used to assign a MIDI Control Change message to the morph slider, but the assignment can be made manually. Open the Properties box for the instrument, go to the fourth tab page, and choose a number under Morph Ctrl in the right column.

Morphing only applies to knobs, not switches. If a knob isn't responding to your morph moves, right-click (Mac: Control-click) on it, open the Properties box, and uncheck Mrph/Rnd Isolate.

To make sure I wasn't missing details on morphing, I logged onto the Native Instruments user forum and did a quick search. This forum is a terrific resource for any Reaktor user—the company's tech support team tracks the messages actively and responds to queries.

Skrewell Days

Figure 9: Skrewell is a tone generator that plays happily by itself for hours, producing eerie mutant tones.

There are no secrets to reveal about Skrewell — it's all right there on the surface (see Figure 9). Skrewell generates bizarre quasi-random bursts and sheets of tone by itself, and while you have extensive control over the sounds thanks to 64 parameters and three modes, it's just about impossible to predict the result of tweaking.

But let's say you're playing some ambient gigs with Reaktor and Ableton Live. Maybe you'd like to take a break and leave Skrewell playing by itself in order to amuse or perplex your audiences. Here's an easy way to keep them on the edges of their seats.

The four knobs at the bottom of the Skrewell panel (Osc, Filter, Delay, and Flow) can respond to external MIDI control. After inserting Reaktor on one MIDI track in Live and loading Skrewell, create four more MIDI tracks and name them osc, filter, delay, and flow. Set the MIDI output of each track to the Reaktor track, and set the Reaktor track to IN mode.

In each of the subsidiary MIDI tracks, create a clip. Extend all of them so that they're a number of measures long — and make each of them a different length. This is important, as it will cause Skrewell to not repeat itself anytime soon. In the osc track, switch off Snap to Grid and draw a MIDI CC1 curve. The exact shape doesn't matter, but you may want a mostly smooth contour with perhaps one or two brief interruptions of different values to provide contrast.

Go back to Skrewell, right-click on the Osc knob, and select MIDI Learn. Then start the clip in the Live osc track. That will assign Skrewell's Osc knob to CC1. Stop that clip, then go to the filter track and create a CC2 contour. Arm MIDI Learn for Skrewell's Filter knob and start the CC2 clip. Continue until each knob is assigned to its own CC.

After slowing Live's tempo down to 60 bpm or less (so the controller changes will be more gradual) and possibly adding a delay line to Skrewell's output, choose a Skrewell preset, trigger all four clips, and head over to the bar for your favorite beverage. Here's an example:

• Skrewell's Drink Break (7.5MB MP3)