Share your workflows for making music with Reaktor

Inside Rounds synthesizer is a bug

set Separator to mono and it's fixed

 

How did you discover this bug?

 

Lucky shot!

 

This is one technique i use to control and get material and songs with structure out of generative chaos and sculpt it into a bpm kind of a track we can recognise as music.
This is some kind of hip hop project, its maybe halfway in progress. what you see is a full album with spare material at the end
8 tracks around 40 mins
Right at the top in mute is material for later. i have a fractal piano genaerative piece in midi, so it might get used in a synth as well later.
Lots of vox down to track 19
track 21 is a midi version of the Main track which is number 22
But then it all starts with the Origination of chaos ensemble - its the foundation... all goes from this one track 22
to get it in the first place - it its a purely random recording set to GEN so its autosnapping. i leave it for 40 minutes.
Then i skip throught the material with a loop region of 4bars or whatever time you like, always looping
i have a shortcut that will skip in 16ths or 8ths and just hit N and it goes to the next loop, its quick to scan through and make a region each time you find a loop.
by the end i had 100 loop sor something. i delete all the other stuff so they are all lined up, and from there they get organised into tracks and each loop will get looped up so its repeating 4 or 8 times. thats why you see so many loops now. I like a tidy project so as i go throuhg i will join all the loop regions so they are in groups of 4 or 8. at the moment every single loops has a region.
then important are tracks 23 + sub. they are duplicates of the same original Orig of CHaos
one is a octave upwith a lead gutiar distortion, the other an octave down with cuts on the highs, boosted lows and stuff. This gives a big full spectrum of sound from which to launch from.
So that solid wall of black is creating the foundation of the whole album. but as the project progress its often going to drop out and be replaced, by other chaos gen material that i check out later, track by track. so far i already been through tracks 26 to 40 and have selected good material and deleted the rubbish.
So If you look closely track22 is already being broken up in places ... and that will continue as i check out tracks 42 -49 which have some more chaos gens.
So 22 will end up quite broken up, but it will still retain the common theme or charater to the album.
From there i have to get drums, in this project there is a chaos band so i have some drums, but also i have from 57 to 65 which are drums drums generated from Battery with the geiger trigger and modulating the articulations, so they are constantly changing.
i'm gonna hand program al these drum and mash em up beat by beat to fit with the material later and some processing and fewother drum gens i guess to spice em up, then some stuttering, right at the end i'll run some cymbal gens, just in case theres not enough chaos already.
i got a snare gen already there in red, that will get me some good auto snare roles
the track 50 beatloop will be deleted. it is just exatly that - a mix of 5 or 6 different ready made beats as a guide
a few more gens on the last few tracks and voila... a totaly generative Reaktor album.
this album is quite simple....for example i have often used a 2 into 1 but in my next avant garde album i have generated 4 full albums like this, that i have merged into one project so i have 4 times as much material, then i am procccesing all that so i get variations of all these without running more gens - giving me about 16 different albums of material, this is how you can get really contrasting but related material all fused into one album.

then to contrast that check this one... totally different again. absolutley no guides, no bpms, no loops - but you can see its the squidrift tracks 11 + 12 that are the foundation. That gaves a time refrence from which to compse everything from, everything else is related to Squidrift in a musical way, but just in my head, in reality its all completely out of any time signature.

 

Same as I do but can't get a soooo large hc from my 20'' screen. Some times I set me a limit: create music with less tracks. Maybe 12 insteads of 24.

 

SIDtoMIDI2HGFastralDreamer-Project
Just realized a three track piece of music.
Starting with some extracts from SID to midi file in Cubase. Driven two lines to HG Fortunes Astral Dreamer and add a track from the last version of Pandoro 19.
Mixed down in MagixMusicMaker and SIR at the effect end.

No mp3 demo. The new forum rules said attachment up to 12 MegaByte and demo is 6

 

Nor in rar neither in zip. Forum don't accept my demo.
Cal do you own SID files?
HVSC Web Page -> http://hvsc.c64.org/
49.000 are here. Updated last in June this year

 

Okay, I load it up to internet archiv
https://archive.org/details/SIDtoMIDI2HGFastralDreamer
with some other digit 8 demos

 

SID to Wave is JAM from 2010 (Java)
http://www.creamhq.de/jam

 

My main musical background, from when I first picked up an instrument outside of music lessons as a child (late 1960s), is as a solo improvising guitar player, and my musical models for this are mostly non-electronic, including ragas, 20th-century "serious" chamber and solo music, free jazz, and last but most important, acoustic guitar instrumentalists. I was never a public performer, so my "sessions" were all about practice sometimes morphing into performing, aided eventually by access to increasingly powerful recording gear, so I could capture practice sessions whenever they blossomed into anything that felt more expressive; IOW, performance experiences.

With the advent in the 70s and 80s of lots of affordable electric guitar processing tools and soon, home-studio gear, including some keyboards and eventually, computers, I began to find myself designing sounds more than actually practicing the instrument, but in practice this seemed like just an extension of it: sound-design experiments would just as often blossom into improvised performances. As I experienced the sound-design process, which began eventually to mean the patch-making and saving process, I was making my own unique instruments, whose sounds molded the way I would play them, which in turn molded the sort of sounds and tools I was interested in.

Reaktor was the first sound-/instrument-design software I totally connected with, back with version 1, and I used it then, and still use it now, exactly in the same way as my old electronic guitar gear and home studio, which is also how I use all my other music software: I practice/learn it by exploring the sounds and FX each device seems to be good at, evaluating everything as an instrument, saving snaps as I go, with my mouse ever ready to click the record button whenever practice seems to be morphing into performance, and my snap history often serving as both the instrumental interface and the source of performance inspiration. So, I don't assemble bits and scraps for future arrangement, even though I often imagine that's what I'm doing. Instead I practice until a performance happens out of the new familiarity I've developed with any new device or set of tools, record myself, and eventually edit the performances to some extent in an audio editor, quite rarely in a DAW, though I do often practice>perform with plugins that I'm exploring inside a DAW in much the same way. Either the Reaktor record button or the DAW is just that, a recording device built into the instrument.

I still imagine a day when I'll have nothing to do but make my sort of music, and I'll graduate to composition instead of improvisation. Maybe, maybe not! The few times I've already tried to assemble parts as tracks in a DAW, the results have never approached the magic that visiting improvisational inspiration sometimes achieves, and when it does it, justifies and refreshes the old familiar process, now fed so marvelously and continuously by the User Library, and by plugin and music-app devs.

 

In a few years when you reached the age of 66 there is a pling in the air. You take some of your live recording audios and build songs.

 

That was already a few years ago

 

Then the time is high up. Start just yet, please!

 

Wow this thread became active again when I wasn't looking! Lots to read through. Thank you everyone! Cal, what DAW do I see in your image? What is squidrift?

 

Paule, you are using these SID files as a composition source? You are grabbing parts of them?

 

thats Reaper in the screenshot and Squidrift is the name of the ensemble i chose to use as the main source material for the loops... its a remix of Brett's SkyRift - on the U/L

In this case i left it auto snapping about every 30 seconds.

Its a machine with absolutly no sync....its worth pointing out that normally if i was going to start a project that i wanted looped sections and riffs synced to a bpm, i would probably start with a machine that was already synced....
when i design machines i make some that run in sync and some which are not.

the way to sync them is to set clock to external and have a sequencer, and also have LFO's or modulators that can be synced to DAW. this way its easier to find loop points as everything starts on a beat.

So by using Squidrift to make synced project i was going against my own normal, but it still worked great and i got 8 track of material from about 40 minutes of runnning it.

 

Are these snapshots from the album you posted about recently?

 

D.Vyd (David?) if I found interessting tracks in MIDI coming from SID files I use them for my (non-commercial) compositions.
You find in my upper post a link to thousands of sid files and in the midi/sid zip is a (pc only - never found in internet again) converter to midi files from 1997. With good function in Win7 pro. Set in options the hook for automatic and paste a sid file on the gui. Then save the midi file in the same directory. If you change to another dir don't forget to dehook for the first file saving in a new dir and so on. The midi files all use the same GM PrgCh (bass&lead). If you use resonic free player it sounds passable with the building-in SF2 set. Try to use other players.
For mac I don't know a program to convert sid to midi. Maybe there is a tracker could read sid and save midi?

 

I have 2 Expert Sleepers ES-3s and i use it mostly with my actual Modular together with Silent Way.

 

dcoffin, thank you for explaining your workflow. I also have found it difficult to piece together material into something that feels whole. I envy your performance background. Nedim, it sounds like you have the dream hardware/software synth.

I've toyed with the idea of making a magazine or journal dedicated to tracking the creative process for a single piece of music or art. There are many how-to videos about getting a certain effect, but fewer examples about creating a work from inception to completion. I find the creative process and decision-making about what is good and what fits where fascinating.