Designing Reaktor Kick Drums

This is just the first installment of a short series that Owen has put together for the Reaktor community about designing drums and percussive sounds in Reaktor. They are all full of wonderful information and presented in a way that anyone can follow along with. But they aren’t just delivered well, the sounds are amazing! This particular video tutorial shares how to create Reaktor kick drums that mimic the classic Roland 808 and 909 bass drums, which have been a source of inspiration fro artists and producers, and a benchmark for sound designers for many years in the industry. The lesson goes over how to calculate Freq and Q (Quality Factor) from reading schematics. The video also shows how to modify the Core static BP filter to use Q values instead of Resonance. So without further ado, let’s jump into this and see what he has to share!

The bulk of this tutorial is spent on explaining the translation of schematics into the values and terminology that Reaktor uses. This is incredibly helpful because so many of these things would fly right over the heads of most people, but Owen does a great job of breaking it all down in a language and approach that just about anyone can keep up with. Once of the trickiest things about creating these Reaktor kick drums is making sure all of the conversions and translations are done correctly, which is exactly why he takes his time going through all of it. The perfect balance of envelope shape, filtering and quality factor are all managed through one simple Decay knob in the finished interface. Brilliant stuff!

Owen Vallis is one half of Flipmu, and has been working on a series of Reaktor tutorials for exploring intermediate to advanced level digital synthesis. The series looks at such topics as building classic percussion sounds from the Roland-x0x boxes, various ways to approach building a vocoder, sequencers, additive synthesis, and physical modeling. Future tutorials will look at the lower level Reaktor Core, and cover topics such as convolution, auto-correlation, and hopefully some generative systems such as Markov Models and “learning” based macros. 

Flipmu is the home of multi-media artists Owen Vallis and Jordan Hochenbaum. They explore technology, art, sound, and music by building things to interact with.  Previous projects have included the Arduinome, the Chronome, and multi-touch installations using the BrickTable. Both Owen and Jordan teach at the Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence, and Design program at CalArts.

Cheers,
OhmLab