Updated: In comments, Random Chance does spot two errors in the video – hey, this thing is barely out, so I know it’s easy enough to make mistakes: Apologies to Apple and Emagic veterans, but that has to count for something big.) (Let me say it again: this is someone who finds the Logic Environment intuitive, and can explain it to others. If you pay attention, class, you’ll learn something. Listen closely to what he’s saying, breathlessly, because as always Steve has immediate, sharp insights into what everything’s for and why it matters. Steve does not work for NI – this is what it sounds like when he’s excited about something. He walks through the interface one module at a time. Steve Horelick, the man who gave us the Reading Rainbow theme song on his Fairlight CMI and then went on to make Logic Environments that produce otherworldly musical landscapes, has his own take.
Thanks to advance availability, NI has already got some buzz going around the creation, so we’ve got a tutorial and free loops from our friends to share with you. Making a tool that a wide audience can use to vastly-differing results is another matter entirely. It’s one thing to create a strange creation for yourself, and there’s something even strangely pleasing about making it idiosyncratic. What strikes me is that, working with NI, he’s come up with something that could be widely used. For his part, Errorsmith (also part of MMM and Smith n Hack) has been a forward-thinking Berlin staple for many years, and a DIYer at heart, combining just these sorts of modular monsters in his own work.
The software is the result of a collaboration with artist Errorsmith, and represents an ongoing series of artist co-produced software releases from the Berlin-based Native Instruments. Go make something that doesn’t sound like any recognizable genre. There’s also a genre-spanning preset library, though the ubiquity of NI tools in Dubstep have caused people to already make that connection. Under the hood, the project packs some 320 partials and internal sound shaping, dual filter sections with 20 filter types, “dissonance effect” modulation, and in case your mind remained somehow unbent, a 34-band vocoder. Whereas incredible sonic creations have been hidden too often in software behind banks of bland, faux knobs, Razor’s dynamic spectral display makes both the partials and their transformation in time clear and hypnotically beautiful. In a step forward for Reaktor, this synth doesn’t just sound different – it looks different, too. The result is a synth that gets sonically surprising in a hurry, and it represents the sort of multi-dimensional thinking I hope catches on in synthesis. Taking additive synthesis to a new conceptual level, it works with the concept of per-partial control but adds functions like wavetables, enveloping, and effects to each partial individually. Native Instruments has a new synth based on the Reaktor engine, and it’s one about which to be genuinely excited.