In need of basic setup for live triggering

BmanRogue · Joined: Dec 14, 2005 Posts: 1 Location: Tennessee

Hey Folks,

Need some help here... i've been out of the game for a while & I'm trying to get up to speed.

A buddy of mine gave me a copy of Reaktor 3, I loaded it onto my laptop (2.8 GHz CPU & 1 GB RAM) I plugged in a Roland SPD-8 (Octapad) & used an M-Audio MIDISport MIDI to USB cable to connect them.

I am the Drummer for a Pink Floyd Tribute band & need to be able to set up different patches to trigger wav files of differing lengths as well as run some loops & pads.

What is the best (simplest) way to do this?

Thanks so much in advance for your help.
B

Kassen · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 2:56 am Post subject:

I think Reactor is a kinda roundabout way of doing that. Programming up a sampler is all nice and fun and educational but for this I don't think there are any great advantages to it.

Have your buddy give you Live4 (more stable then 5 and for this it will do).

Then it's on to figuring out how to set everything up. Do you want the loops quantised? All the choices you make there will affect how the whole things "plays" and what is best or even most simple will vary according to taste and stylist demands.

zynthetix · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 8:09 am Post subject:

Okay, I tried something very similar to this when working with a drummer on a kit of electronic drum triggers (routed into an alesis module for "midi translation" of the drum pad hits) and then running into other gizmos.

We tried doing some set ups with reaktor...these will work to some extent. If you have a drum module or similar device that you can plug drum pads into, you can set the module to send specific MIDI note #'s on certain channels when an associated drum pad is hit. (i.e. I hit the 'snare' pad and the module sends out MIDI note 64).

In reaktor, we had some simple samplers with note receivers as the 'gate' and 'P' (Pitch or sample associated with that pitch/midi note #) selection. This is basically done via making a MIDI Note In module, plugging this 'note in' into the P input of a sampler so it picks the right sample based off the drum pad, and use a 'MIDI gate' module and plug that into the A (or is it G) input of the sampler so gate gets opened when you hit a pad. If you'd like some pictures of an example, send me a P.M. and I'll send you a screen shot or something when I can. (I am using Reaktor 4 so I can not simply send you a file).

There is one thing that I found very troublesome about this set up...I could not get MIDI program changes to actually alter the "snap shots" or merely transpose the MIDI note input up an octave (in order to get a new kit of sounds assigned to the MIDI note numbers one octave up). This was bizarre...I actually posted a message about it on the Reaktor forums and the answer I got was "Thats weird...well Reaktor 5 should do it, buy that." Not a very useful answer considering I shouldn't have to spend a couple hundred more dollars to do some basic MIDI manipulation that should work in the first place, and I don't know how much NI addressed bugs dealing with MIDI hardware interfacing.... just letting you know that you should make sure all of the MIDI signals you would like to send or use in Reaktor in anyway should be tested with little patches to make sure Reaktor 3 actually responds to all the MIDI signals you'd like to use...it sucks spending a few hours on a patch and then finding out Reaktor is not responding to a basic program change for some unexplainable reason.

For a purpose such as this, I don't think you'd need all the new bells and whistles in Reaktor 4 or 5, you should be able to do what you want in Reaktor 3 in the same way.