This is Massive by Native Instruments. No, not that Massive, but the one that’s buried deep inside the groove boxes of Reaktor. This thing takes drum programming to a whole new insane level.
6 yellow sequencer lanes feed notes to 6 different samples. Draw a line in the sequencer window, hit play and your pattern will now be heard. Draw a taller yellow line, and your sample will play louder (usually – there’s settings for this). You can change the length of your sequence (as shown). This is great for when you want your patterns to not be as repetitive, particularly if you make your sequence lengths an odd value.
The samples themselves are great straight out of the box. But of course it’s even more fun to load your own samples. These will need to be done via Reaktor sample maps.
There are also 2 effects – a delay (send 1) and a gater (send 2). While only 2 effects may seem a little limiting at first, don’t let that fool you. The power in this instrument is not in the effects (though these are actually very cool), but in the modulation.
There are 3 modulation tracks – orange (as shown), blue and green. The modulation tracks don’t play any notes as such, but they allow you to modulate a large number of parameters. Anywhere you see a light grey box – that’s a parameter that can be modulated. In my example, the orange track is modulating the sample select of the 4th track. So a new sample will be selected depending on the bars of the orange modulation track.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. I’ve only shown one page of this beast. There are a whole set of other pages – a page for envelope, sample start, filter and grain synthesis – all of which can be modulated as well.
As if three modulation tracks weren’t enough, the yellow sequencer tracks can also act as a modulation source. I’ve used this a number of times in my example. If you look at the second sequencer track on the right had side, you can see the yellow rectangle where it says “TRNSP” (transpose). So now what happens here is that the sample on track 2 will be transposed by the amount set by the yellow note lane.
To say that it’s powerful is a huge understatement. And power often equates to “bloody hard to use”. But don’t worry. Firstly, it’s not that hard. And secondly, I can help you through this. For those with some knowledge of beat programming, it will take about an hour to teach. If you are starting from scratch allow 2 hours.
Remember, I give personal tutorials, and Massive is something that any beat maker should get into. If you’ve got Reaktor, get in touch, and I’ll walk you through it.
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