Magnetic Field

UPDATE 23rd may 2010: I was walking in the same field today and took this pic

I was stranded at the farm in Toothill today without an internet connection and practically no TV so I did a bit of programming in Reaktor, which was a bit of a blast from the past. I wanted to build a synth similar in function to my Doepfer [which lets face it is a cheap attempt at a Buchla 100] and hear how it sounded in comparison

It's a lot easier to set up control parameters on the computer, such as envelope levels and CV curves, and everything sounds really sharp and punchy [on headphones at least]. It's amazing doing things like copying and nesting modules within modules. But on a real modular you end up with things you would never think of doing inside the box, just because they are there in front of you. On the computer you are always focused on one thing at a time, whereas on a modular everything is live all at once. They are both bloody good fun

I've been using Reaktor since before it was ported to the Mac in the mid 90's [it was called Generator back then]. I even bought a PC just to be able to use it. When it came over to the Mac I used it all the time in particular for laptop performances back in the day. I built my own granular resynthesis module that was really useful live. What's interesting to me is that Reaktor still has a 'sound' of it's own - somehow the programmers put a bit of themselves in the code

This patch is self generating and uses two sine VCOs and a third for frequency modulation of one of them, and LFO control of that. There's an 8 step sequencer and AR envelope shaper, and the clock of the sequencer is being modulated with a slow random source. I then copied that as an Instrument so there were three instances but due to the random nature of the clocks and altered envelope settings they played different things.  Then I made a mixer module to put everything through including my granular resynthesiser and some preset modules from the Reaktor library - a modeled spring reverb, compressor and phaser