Jamming with NI Reaktor, Razor, Carbon 2, Kontakt & Guitar Rig

Published on Oct 2, 2018 Synth & Sundry

"Made sounds on Reaktor synthesizer instrument Razor and modified sounds on Carbon 2 and Kontakt. I added Guitar Rig and Driver effects.

I love that the Razor synthesizer runs the whole gamut of components in its engine, from oscillators, through filters and even reverbs and compressors exclusively through its additive model. Yes! Even the reverbs are created by manipulating individual partials. What blows my mind is that you have different oscillator, filter and effects models that you can drop in to your hearts content. The fact that all this is happening within Reaktor is incredible. Razor is to additive synthesis what Diva by uHe is to virtual analog synthesis.

The sound that I made with Razor is done completely from scratch. This is was super fun to program and I was happy with the sound design results I got.

I was able to add some expressiveness, even without a dedicated control surface, by assigning some vowel parameters from the formant oscillator (a big reason why I got this) to aftertouch. Some other settings were also set to velocity, modwheel and pitchbend.

It can be a bit of a drag on CPU for older computers but well worth it for its left-field sounds and ease of use for sound design and production.

Carbon 2 is also a Reaktor instrument but a little bit older. I got through a Reaktor player bundle of some sort. I picked a preset that sounded rather good, modified it a bit and added saturation which worked well with the off-kilter quality of the sound.

Finally, the weakest of the bunch is Kontakt player library sound which I spruced up a little with Guitar Rig to add some heat to what was otherwise some lackluster sampled instrument.

We hope you enjoy this. Random shots of cats and plants occasionally cut through the screen capture of Ableton Live 9, my DAW of choice.

In other news, here's a playlist with finished tracks that sound more polished than what you heard here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk9F0..."