Do you use Reaktor? If not why?

[Hlis93]

By the time I could seriously consider getting it I felt I already had enough toys to play with

is there such a thing? I don't know about that!

[musikmachine]

Start a new bank and hit randomise

it's a good way to get a feel for the synth and the type of sounds it can produce,i'm finding it a really effective way of crreating new sounds and isolating the ensembles i like

I do the opposite. After I hear what is offered for snaps (which is not always much, I start an empty bank and then see what I can program. Some instruments work really well with randomize, many don't. If I do use the randomize function I will set many control to ignore it as this will cause problems for thing like volume for example. Personally, and I mean for me only I do not like the randomize function unless it was worked in to the instrument and is meant to be part of it. If the instrument is complex enough many times it will just produce non-sense.

I use the randomiser as a starting point and then fine tune the sound.I was under the impression the randomiser was a good thing!

I think it's useful as there are so many instruments and so little time.What i do when i find a sound i like is look at where the parameters are and then tweak them to hear how they affect the sound.Like others have said,some of the instruments aren't exactly obvious!

[Har]

As Scot pointed out earlier: yep, I do loves me some Reaktor. After years of people telling me I should look into it for what I like to do, I finally did and found that they were right all along - to me it feels like the ultimate audio toy-store, especially in terms of wild processing and effects.

For my ambient guitar/Stick CD I wound up scrapping quite a bit of earlier stuff I had started working up for it once I started getting into Reaktor, and found myself coming up with tons of fresh new ideas.

You can hear some examples here: http://www.myspace.com/ambientguitarist

The track "Fulcrum" is just my Chapman Stick VERY heavily processed through Reaktor and recorded in two tracks in SONAR.
"Fulcrum II" was actually my first experiment with processing my Strat through Reaktor in standalone mode and recording the results in a single take, writing out to a WAV using the Record Box. Sickle helped me a LOT during this time, in terms of helping me better understand what I could accomplish by just thinking in a modular manner and chaining together existing effects.
"Urban Forge" is a more layered track, mainly featuring my Strat played with an eBow and then processed like crazy through Reaktor.

I never found the way things are layed out in Reaktor particularly daunting, but that may well be due to the sizable amount of time I spent before using Jeskola Buzz, and chaining instruments and effects together in a slightly similar manner...to me it didn't feel like much of a leap.

CPU: I was expecting it to be a lot worse than what I actually experienced: even when using it as a plugin within SONAR I found the CPU to be fairly reasonable - and I'm not exactly using a particularly new or speedy computer (AMD64 3500+ CPU with 1GB RAM).

[BONES]

TBH, I've never really been interested in Reaktor because I don't see the value for money in it compared to SynthEdit and, more recently, Synthmaker. After many years, I have so much invested in SE that I'm no longer interested in the alternatives as I would be starting over from scratch. These days I can do anything I can think of in SE, whereas I tried SM quite extensively for a while but could never get it to do anything that sounded good [although its easy to make things look good in SM]. I'm also really happy with the sound of things I make in SE, especially with some of the great 3rd party modules around, so there is zero motivation to spend more than the $20 I paid for SE, although I have probably spent a further $100 or more on 3rd party modules [as much to support the developers as to actually use the stuff they offer].

[Hlis93]

Funny because the few times that I have used SE I get fustrated and quite the program and leave it for months and then try again and again but I never get anywhere. It just something about me that doesn't do well with it has nothing to do with SE .

[BONES]

Yeah, the totally useless state of the help, which doesn't cover a good number of modules or concepts like sub-controls, probably makes it even worse. With better documentation, I'm sure SE would be way, way better than it is.

[Acrobat]

2. If you have looked into Reaktor and did not like it why?

The GUI is very important to me, since it's strictly related
to productivity. I don't like NI ones apart from the font they use which is very pleasant.

3. If you have no interest in Reaktor Why?

It's something in between a synth/sampler and a developing software,
so it offers too much flexibility for a synth, not enough for a developing software.

[Hlis93]

I have been argue that is need to go to the developer side. This is two-fold in my intentions...well three. First, export to plugin not just VST. Leads to second, forces them to make Reaktor actually work well as a plugin. and 3 not as important we will be able to share the instruments at the creator choosing with the rest of the world just as MAX/MSP, Synthmaker, and Synthedit.

My idea is a little more complex then that but that is basically the gist of it. This would fix many of the problems that are mentioned above as well as add some great new demensions to Reaktor. Please NI.

But with that Aside. I do find that each program like the above mentioned never really allow one to get the same basic sounds. I find that its best to create instruments in Reaktor that work best there, yet those do not alway carry over well to synthmaker, my other hobby. It also goes the other way. I have some synths in SM do not sound as good in Reaktor.

[laserbeak]

Reaktor Kicks ass. i love it. but, you can't code your own stuff. core makes up for that in some ways. but mostly, no.

[davidbuhau]

i love this piece of software... i also got it with komplete and didn't really use it much at first...

the learning curve is really steep, and i'm by no means proficient with it yet.

david

[zerocrossing]

Ethically impossible? What does that even mean?

Anyway, from an interview posted on NI's site:

Guitars and distortion have always been a focus of the "Nine Inch Nails" sound. How did you create those sounds for your current album?

For a large portion of what we did, we treated Reaktor like a guitar pedal, like the ultimate distortion box. Instead of having an array of pedals on the floor, a lot of the pedals became virtual in Reaktor. We went out of Reaktor into the amp head for most of the record. Running it through a real guitar amp and miking it up brought it back to sounding less like science fiction and more like real world. Some of the sounds were like "Wow, I haven't used it that way before". We had a lot of flexibility in the tone.

only way i could afford it would be to use a cracked version, and that is kinda ethically impossible.
i prefer to just deal with freeware stuff, so i can;t say the first thing about reactor or most other comercial products.
looks really cool, but, hey, i am a guitar player primarily so for me it's just not worth investigating...

[zerocrossing]

All that takes is a little organization of your library. If your library isn't organized, good luck trying to find anything.
Another thing which helps is self control; don't download everything in the UL. I download maybe six ensembles in the average month.
ew

True that, but it doesn't help that Reaktor's library is screwed up out of the box. I finally went through my Reaktor Library and moved everything out of all the folders into something that makes sense. Much better.

Mark

[laserbeak]

never eventouched anything in the library aside from L3 and this alien thing
making stuff in reaktor is very fun, cause once you learn how to make stuff as long as you keep at it, your project will get bigger and bigger and bigger.

[ew]

All that takes is a little organization of your library. If your library isn't organized, good luck trying to find anything.
Another thing which helps is self control; don't download everything in the UL. I download maybe six ensembles in the average month.
ew

True that, but it doesn't help that Reaktor's library is screwed up out of the box. I finally went through my Reaktor Library and moved everything out of all the folders into something that makes sense. Much better.

?

How is the library screwed out of the box? How would you categortize the factory library instead?

And, thanks for bringing up this earlier post:

looks really cool, but, hey, i am a guitar player primarily so for me it's just not worth investigating...

@ pinkjimiphoton- you couldn't be more mistaken here. Besides all the distortion boxes, delays, reverbs, etc. you could create, there's also a tube model that's fairly usable.

ew

[Hlis93]

Reaktor is great for guitars as well . See my website

http://base-designs.com/reaktor

down the page there is broken tremolo by Sickle. It is for guitar. It would not be possilbe to do this with a stomp box. I don't have an audio sample yet but I will try and get one up tonight. Perhaps Sickle could get do one for me as I don't have my stuff set up right now.