This is probably one of the last my simple building blocks before I start to post my completed ensembles and/or instruments. And since I described almost all of the building blocks it’s not a problem to describe the completed things. Well, let’s take a look at the filter design which I’ve left as it was in one of my synths, the design is quite optimized because I had no plans to publish my synths until I realized that the number of my ideas is far bigger than time I have to explore it’s actual creative potential, and I need to write them down before another bunch of them kidnapped the time window.

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It’s funny to note that most of Reaktor users use Reaktor to generate pure audio only, and all of them are full of enthusiasm to find absolutely unique and fattest sound ever. There is no anything bad about it, except one thing – people create thousand of sounds a day and there are very few ones I would kill for. People do the same with the same tools mostly to show some balls, erm, the same balls. People build synths with 10 x 10 modulation matrix to produce x2 madness of the last version with 9 x 9 matrix. There is nothing wrong with it, but these sounds ain’t gonna touch my soul until they brilliantly sequenced. There is no separate sound that changed my life relief, and there is a bunch of sequences that shaped out my biography. There are tons of samples around I would kill for. Quite big magic part of the samples is the elements sequencing. I began my music making practice with huge hardware limitations. I was very limited with sounds and I made things that just put in me shock these days. Now I got gigabytes of samples and I’m confused. It’s obvious the most of them ain’t gonna be useful, but they gonna steal my time. The magic of my talent is in the sequencing, and my brain don’t give a damn for the gigabytes, if there’s a sound to play with – the limits gonna be my path to the pure art of sequencing. Let me introduce a new term on the blog – Sequence synthesis. That’s the subject of the rest of the post.

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Another my ordinary building block – Custom Wave Oscillator (CWO). Another bone to my synths. I could say there is no anything special, but I have to admit there are things that do unique stuff working side by side to the other ordinary building blocks. By the end of this year you’ll get what the hell I’m talking about (I hope ). Right now, there is general info for the macro:

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One of my recent ideas is a wireless LFO mixer unit. I was never happy with these simple waves of the classic LFO, it’s too way predictable and let’s be straight – boring. So, I sat and did this quite simple macro. The peculiar property of the LFO mixer is that it’s always gives fixed 0…1 range at the output. No matter what’s up with the mixing sliders (except the case one of the incoming LFOs has wrong range), the mixer will keep the mixing scale and the output will be within 0 and 1.

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Parabolic LFO shaper

Another simple marcos which I’m going to use hard is Parabolic LFO shaper. There is “Parabol” shaping module in build-in Reaktor libary, but “as-is” module produces one-side parabol shaping (you can’t mirror the parabolic shaping). There is a small addition that makes possible two-side parabolic shaping. Another fundamental thing in my synths.

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You’ll be probably surprised that I’ve spent a week just to create a perfect LFO modulation of mine. The most of synths I’ve seen use regular multiplication (or addition) to modulate a signal/value with a LFO, this is very simple and effective enough in the most cases, but not to me. When I sat with a pan and a sheet of paper I was going to get maximum possible usage of the “modulation” slider. I’ve reviewed a few combinations of input and modulation signals, it’s rates and phases. I’ve concluded the main purpose of the modulation is a work side by side with a LFO which typical range is 0 to +1, and the modulation macro should be available to flip the modulator signal without any routing modules (to smooth the process of the modulation in case the modulate amount is being automated/modulated as well). Using the same modulation range with LFO made possible to create some “modulation of modulation of modulation of ..” in very easy way. Here is the screenshot of the finished modulation marcos:

• mod – modulation LFO input, typical range: 0 to +1
• in – input signal to be modulated, max range: -inf to +inf
• out – output of the modulated wave, typical range: =< input
• modulate knob – modulation amount controller, rate -1 to +1, negative values flip (from +1) the modulation signal (example: 0.3 becomes 0.7), 0 means no modulation.

So, quite simple, yeh? The main idea of the macro is having a simple, full-range and predicable modulation. Of course, a modulation in Reaktor (or any modular synths) is not a big deal, everyone do this in his own way, but with the modulation post I’m starting new category “Building blocks” to prepare you for the synths of mine which use all these blocks. This kind of modulation I’ve described is my most fundamental thing of the synths and filters, I guess.

And here is the modulation macro download link. See ya soon.