Designing a Guitar Synthesizer and a Slide Flute in Reaktor

In this members-only installment you will be learning how to create two very different instruments within Reaktor. First up is designing a guitar synthesizer, which is really quite convincing in the end. And then we will take a look at how to make a slide flute. Two instruments that can be used in a wide range of music genres and styles of production. And they’re a lot of fun to make, too!

The Karplus Strong guitar synthesizer is all about understanding the math, of course, and knowing where to initialize the feedback in the audio chain. As usual, salamanderanagram makes it all seem simple as pie as he zips through the process. Lucky for us mere humans, he always does an amazing job of explaining things as he progresses through the steps required to make this instrument. And when it’s done, it sounds awesome!

As for the slide flute, I think that intelligent delay and feedback make this one one work. You have a few more parameters to tweak in the end, compared to the first sound, and it may take some time to get the right settings for you. But it really is a nice sound to play with and it handles processing quite well. So have fun running this one through some effects for interesting results!

Cheers,
OhmLab