Some ideas on how to add some beautiful (analog?) imperfections to your Reaktor synths in Reaktor Primary.
The definition of “analog warmth” is pretty nebulous, but it brings to mind things like tube distortion and tape saturation–imperfections to the “fidelity” of the sound. Digital sound has imperfections too, of course, but these are aesthetically different (though perhaps no less interesting). In this video, though, I talk about some ideas in how to imitate the imperfections of analog in our digital Reaktor 6 synths.
Performance on traditional, acoustic instruments, of course, produces a huge amount of micro-variation across each note, and so it can be expressively engaging for us to be able to introduce that same imperfection (analog warmth?) in our digital instruments as well.
In this video, I build a bad sine wave by frequency-modulating my oscillator with noise, and then feeding back the output back into the modulation. While I build this out in Pure Data, the same can be done in Reaktor, Kyma, Max/MSP or any other synthesis environment.
0:00 Introduction, The Beauty of Imperfection 1:26 Slider-Controlled Sine Wave 3:28 Adding Noise 4:35 Frequency Modulating with Noise 7:24 Filtering the Noise 8:20 Feeding Back into FM 9:55 I’ve gone too far 13:26 Reaktor Examples 14:18 Closing Thoughts, Next Steps
