Making a Polyphonic Unison Macro in Reaktor

Simply put, this polyphonic unison macro will take one MIDI note and provide us with two slightly detuned voices, which will make tones from the oscillator much wider and a bit more interesting. It starts in Reaktor Structure View, where all of the routing, etc takes place. First, an instrument with eight voices is set up. Then another instrument is placed inside of the first one, but this second instrument has only four voices. The four voice instrument will parse the signals coming in and then output them into the eight voice instrument, which will eventually produce the voice doubling we are after.

This is one of those lessons that may seem convoluted, but is really a pretty simple process once you look at the finished project. The initial sound coming into the four voice instrument are parsed into four separate signals and then outputted to the larger instrument. Within the eight voice instrument, voices 1-4 and 5-8 have the same inputs respectively. So voice 1 from the smaller instrument is voices 1 & 5 in the larger one. Voice 2 becomes voices 2 & 6, etc. This is how the doubling of the voices is accomplished!

Once the new gating and pitch programming has been wrapped up, it’s just a matter of adding something to generate some sound to make sure it all works! A Pulse Sync oscillator, with a basic ADSR Envelope are added. Clean up the actually user interface, and it should be ready to go! In the video example, you can clearly hear the two voices. Adjusting the Spread parameter will provide you with more or less detuning. If beating occurs, due to detuning, you can work around this problem by panning the voices in opposite directions to spread them out over the stereo field via the Stereo parameter.

Cheers,
OhmLab