This tutorial is mainly for my students at The
Norwegian Academy of Music but everyone else is welcome. There may be
parts that still is in Norwegian but I'm working on translating everything
to English.
If you have any comments or suggestions please e-mail me.
I prefer positive an constructive comments :-) after all I'm doing this for free
(its
not
a
part
of my work at the academy to produce tutorials on the internet).
Reaktor granulation with Grain Cloud.
Reaktor has a beautiful module called Grain Cloud.
This module has all of the classical" granulation techniques easy
accessible in one module.
This tutorial will, in the end, give you much better functional granulation ensemble then what we built last time with the Sampler FM module.
Start by opening a New Ensemble.
In the structure window open the Instrument module buy double clicking on it, look at the animation below.
Delete all the modules inside the instrument except for the output modules, look at the illustration below.
We are now ready to start building something :- )
Right click in the structure window and there you choose:
Insert Module>Sampler>Grain Cloud, look at the illustration below
Lets look at the very basic of Grain Cloud,
just making a sound when playing
on the MIDI keyboard. This is how the first step will look like:
The programming above looks like this:
The video below shows:
Using Att and Decay to "soften" or
de-clicking the sound.
Programming using Grain length:
Even if this is a very simple granulation programming,
it can produce interesting
results.
I often find these simple programming very rewarding to work with as they
gives you an easy controllable ensemble and you quite quickly learn the programming
possibility and therefore can master the ensemble. And mastering a prossese
is essential, you want to become an skilled craftsman, don't you?
One of he most important part in getting an interesting and usable sound,
at this basic programming level, is the sound source material, so before
you dump this ensemble as being limited or "boring" you have to
try different sound sources.
I could easily add MIDI controllers to Position by marking the
Position controller. Clicking on the MIDI learn button and then using an
MIDI controller on my keyboard.
Look at the video below.
Despite the fact that I'm just using two controllers
its very difficult to make a precise and controllable programming.
You have to practice to make this
work! And use different sounds! This little ensemble will need hours of examine
before we know what it can do....!
And, have you noticed there is something very wrong with our ensemble.? What?
Density- Distance.
To solve this we have to use the distance controller.
The Distance controller
makes it possible to control when, how often, to start
a new grain.
If we have a Grain Length of 500 msec. a Distance setting of 500 will repeat/loop
the grain. A distance setting of 100 will start e new grain every 100 milliseconds
and we will hear 5 grains on top of each other, offset by 100 seconds each.
Look at the video, it explains it all.