David’s Adventures Through the World of Music Creation and Sonic Exploration

I’ve been a Clavia Nord Modular G2 user/patcher/programmer/tweaker (pick any that applies) for over 4 years, and I’ve been using the ‘classic’ version (a borrowed Nord Micro Modular) for 3 years before the G2 era. It’s an amazing machine and I’ve seen some people doing some “crazy shit” with it. By the way, if you have a lot of spare time you can dig through this.

I got Native Instruments Komplete a week ago but I haven’t had the time to install it until today, and I only installed a few of its components to start with - Absynth and Reaktor. After reading through the first 50, or so, pages of the Reaktor manual - yes, I’m one of the very few who actually reads an Operational Manual - I started building my first synthesizer.

In the Nord Modular you start off by adding an oscillator and connect it to an amplitude envelope generator before connecting the envelope to the outputs. You also need to connect a gate signal cable to the gate input of the envelope generator. That’s an extremely basic, and quite boring, sound. In Reaktor, however, you start by connecting a gate to the an envelope and the envelope to the input of an oscillator. If you only connect the oscillator directly to the output you won’t hear a thing. But if you connect a Nord Modular oscillator directly to the output you’ll hear a drone - an E4 if I’m not mistaken. So Reaktor actually feels a bit backwards, as I wrote in my tweet earlier today. I’ll probably get the hang of it but I must say that I think the Clavia approach is more logical. Besides that, I really love the way Reaktor is structured (pun intended - but you probably need to be a Reaktor user to get it, sorry) with building blocks and macros and so on. That’s something the Nord Modular G2 is lacking. I’ll try to recreate some of my G2 patches next week if I’m too bored with composing new songs. I know they won’t sound the same, but it’ll just be for fun and I might discover something cool to blog about.

The downside of having a powerful tool as Komplete 5 at your hands is that it actually CAN affect your creativity in a negative way. But it’s just sooo darn fun tweaking, patching and fiddling around with all the nifty tools and toys!

Any hint on where I can find some cool graphics to use in my panels?

Happy patching fellow Reaktorians!

We’re still working on the tracks for the upcoming mindXpander live gig at Norbergfestivalen. It’s extremely fun and we’ve just re-written a track from 1994. It’s called “Out of Gas” and features one of the best basslines ever written in the history of Space-synth and italo-disco ;o)
Excitement is starting to build up now. Really, really, need to practice!

Get your tickets here.

Beside that, I’m trying to work in parallel with the long awaited Ypsilon 5 album. Bare with me…

New picture up at Xpanderland as well! Big shouts to Estethia for the magnificent camera work, lighting and retouch.

Track of the week is Thermostatic with “Driving” (Spotify link). If you’re reading this - can I remix you guys?

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