dumb reaktor roundup

as i was sitting at my workstation mere moments ago, sort of half spacing out, when i had one of my favorite of classes of thoughts: random, seemingly auto generated, short strings of words or phrases. often nonsensical, sometimes funny, with varying levels of relevance to immediate reality, inner or without.. this time it happened in the process of trying to track down an old documentation file that i wasn't sure of where to look for, and at this point a few words just bubbled up, and while seemingly not unrelated to the current task, were devoid of any intentional form of connecting thought:

dumb reaktor roundup.

this may well have been a subconscious appraisal of the physical action i was currently in the process of, but still at half attention, a free associative jump took it as, 'oh the dumbest thing i ever built in reaktor, that's easy....


it was at this point executive control kicked back in and, taking inventory of the mental moments i thought 'that's a fun idea for a thread', to ask about the dumbest thing builders have made in reaktor. more specifically, a project you have completed, successfully or unsuccessfully and had instant regret for the irreplaceable moments of your life wasted to bring such a terminal flop into existence. possibly it didn't work as expected, or as in my case maybe it worked exactly as intended and the knowledge itself, that you thought building such a thing was ever a good idea in the first place, is the shameful part. i'd wager that anyone who's done their share of reaktor programming, has at least one whether they'd care to dredge it up or not

anyway 'll start. mine::: key snapped FM.

shortly after getting acquainted with the particulars of audio rate frequency modulation, disillusionment set it. it seemed, at the time, to be a buzzkill that modulating the frequency of oscillators with other oscillators came with an unsatisfying trade off between "something is really happening to that sound" and "this sounds like a musical note, made of perceivable and understandable frequencies".

this led to the reasoning that if the fm was done with a waveform whose shape and intensity of modulation were such that it spent almost no time modulating the oscillator to and around frequencies that were not tonally relevant, and every other point modulating on or to frequencies that were related. and in case you're thinking that means as in regular fm synthesis, no. what it meant was 'frequency be damned, just quantize the modulating oscillator so that its levels can wildly jump between values where its pitch would momentarily be another note in some related scale

and the answer is, yes, indeed it can be done. i wish i could say it even sounded as bad as it i'd lke to say it did (it did sound bad) not only from the horrible extra aliasing this must have been added, but the mere concept. it did quantize the fm at audio rate pretty much as expected, which was merely.... not great. not quite unpleasant, sub-pleasant. what it actually sounded like was... it about time to pause and reflect, and reassess some basic priorities

 

I spent hours building an anti-aliased 'analogue' bit crusher... Idea being that it would behave like some sort of analogue comparator based AD converter type of thing... Sounded a bit like a proper bitcrusher, but kinda boring , and used WAY more cpu.

 

This

took up way too much of my life.

 

If my screen is upright, everything will fit in.

 

It was in your experimental series, if I remember correctly.

 

Yes, but I removed it. After all that work it just didn't sound how I wanted.
Perhaps I will revisit it someday. I think I could do a lot more with a lot less.

 

Some new builders don't start with ens › ins › macro. They set their building blocks direct in the ens and don't use macros.
It's heavy to follow the fluid of data.

 

I think NI did that too in some products, if I remember correctly.

 

They jump over the good ol' rules, IMO.
It's easier in the structure if you come back month later and there is a good organisation inside.

 

ok, analog bitcrusher is hilarious. the only digital artifact that never needed improvement. the idea behind it is sound, though

 

dude.....

iono this looks cool as hell. props for including the actual file, what does it do?

im curious as hell to look under the hood, but no way in hell that's gonna happen before a good sleep

 

Sounds great! Here's the waveshaper block from the Nano Pack. It uses a bunch of different wavetables for the shaper, there are a few 'stair-stepped' shaped tables called 'CRUSH 1', 'CRUSH 2', 'CRUSH 3' etc on the 'select' knob for a bit crusher type sound. The shaper uses ILO (infinite linear oversampling) so it's pretty low aliasing, and then 8 times oversampled on top of that for extra reduction.

 

It's a High-Frequency Chaos Generator - Initialized snapshot is howling like Nopog's sister.
It's on my hdd since 2016-11-30.

The osc only is smaller

@ Alex:

Must I authorize it again or is your attachment free to use?

 

It’s a chaos / random tone generator that’s supposed to achieve a super varied output by switching between many different signal paths. It doesn’t work though, it always sounds the same.

I like the modulation sources and sequencing parts, but I think it would be better with simpler routing. I could just add a few more oscillators to achieve variation instead of all that mess at the top. All that filtering really kills the sound.

 

ah nopog. if cal were still around he'd probably have something triumphantly, epically stupid to add. there are too few builders of chaotic alignment anymore.

 

i really like the sprawling complicated layout