Creating Custom Knobs with the Mouse Area in Reaktor, Part I

This video tutorial is the first part in a series on designing complex, custom knobs in Reaktor, taking advantage of the new features added to the Mouse Area module in Reaktor 5.92.

Reaktor 5.92 gave us two new features for the Mouse Area – the ‘Mouse Over’ output, which tells whether the mouse is currently hovering over the Mouse Area, and the ‘Always Send PX and PY values’ checkbox in the Function tab of the properties. Combined, we can use this information (with a little bit of math) to split a Mouse Area into several  circular components.

In this first video, I use the new features to create a toolset for splitting a Mouse Area into circles of arbitrary number and size, and display which (if any) is currently being hovered over by the mouse, lighting up the active area. Next week, I’ll show a macro we can use to control any of the areas we’ve made as you would any Reaktor knob, and in a third video, I’ll show how we can use this setup to create complex setups, such as mimicking Massive’s knobs, and more.