Reaktor Sound Design for Cinematic Projects

I produce a lot of audio for the filmmaking world and many of the ideas presented here are very useful and a very good way for people to get started using Reaktor for actual sound design, rather than just a giant effects processor. Many people find themselves daunted by Reaktor in general, with so many options presenting themselves at every turn. But embracing the random sonic encounters can often time benefit you in unexpected ways and reward you with exciting and truly unique sounds to use in music, foley, sound effects, cinematic and gaming projects. Reaktor sound design is it’s own special thing in the audio world, and this lesson in keeping an open mind and playing around will hopefully help you find a new way to achieve some unexpected awesomeness.

First, an instance of Reaktor is loaded into a MIDI track, and then several empty audio tracks are created to act as holding places for different bits of audio made during the Reaktor sound design session. Routing Reaktor into one of the empty audio tracks, via a bus, is an excellent to capture audio on-the-fly and set those recordings aside to keep the session moving forward unhindered. Logic Pro is the DAW featured in the video, but any DAW will allow you to achieve the same results.

Using a sound generator, rather than a synthesizer for instance, is a great place to start out with because they produce sound without any need of input from you. There are plenty of snapshots, or presets, to choose from when you select a factory sound generator. And once you have some sound being generated, you are free to begin tweaking and manipulating to your heart’s content. When you record the session the audio track will capture the sounds, rather than the track that you have Reaktor loaded into. As you move form idea to idea, you can simply drag and drop the audio regions you have created to their own audio tracks (which is why so many were created in the beginning of the lesson. This is a nice workflow for Reaktor sound design sessions when experimentation is the main focus.

Once you have some usable material in your arrangement window, you can begin processing the audio clips to meet the needs of your projects. This is exactly why Reaktor is so incredibly powerful, because not only are you basically presented with endless possibilities within reaktor, once the sounds are in your DAW, only your imagination can limit what you can do with them. And do not forget to try layering the different sounds you end up with in a session to make your creations even more complex and interesting! This approach to Reaktor sound design is not only a lot of fun, but it is very helpful in keeping things fresh and new. Both you, your work, your clients and your fans will all benefit from it!

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Cheers,
OhmLab