Old Reaktor
Is Not
New Reaktor

From: but new is old
as well as new and hyper new
dialup252-220.dotcomisp.net

Reaktor 2.3 is really ancient now, of course I still like it, especially the way it looks, kind of an Afirka Korps Radio Shack look, the "Rommel's Walkie Talkie" effect. I started with Transformator 2.0, the sampling "half" of a duo, Generator was the name of the synthesizer side. Together they were called "Reaktor". I figured I had way too many synths, so I only got the sampling part of it, and I got it as an afterthought. I already bought Unity DS-1 by Bitheadz, and Gigasampler by  Nemesis, both are "prime" weaponry in the sampler game, DS-1 was the "hip" one, Gigasampler was the "serious" one, and as I walked out the door I thought, "what the fuck?" and I bought Transformator for on the side, just goofing around, you know, like when you tool up seriously, and then throw in a little doodad extra just to take the edge off? It still took me almost 6 months to get ANY sound out of it at all. One day I started wondering WHY, and I had a flash of insight, just a Reaktor moment "maybe", I tried it, and suddenly I hear the first Reaktor noize. It wasn't very good at all, my first impression was that it was cheesy german disco SHIT, and it WAS. I had to get used to it first. I had to overcome a certain preference to not hear fuzz tone distortion Cheesedickness.

Finally I found an ensemble, a custom made one, built by this young german cat named Martin Brinkmann, its called "8dex", it has 6 Loop Engines and 2 - 16 Step Button Sequencers. It all runs in sync, you add in your own samples, its mostly a kick drum, a snare drum, and then 6 synced up loops, volume layered with 8 times 8 variations of balanced mxes PER SNAPSHOT. Then I had to ask "What the fuck are these SNAPSHOT thingies?" I found out they were a list of saved presets that had a mysterious relationship with 3 or 4 other identical lists of present names, but with the names changed, ever so slightly. Finally you learn how to listen for it coming towards you, I got real lucky doing that, it MADE NOIZE when I thought it would. Big Landmark. I honestly could not predict what happened next, I just didn't think it could pull it off, but it didn't take very long until the pitiful little experiments started generating these "chunks of inspiration" that started blowing me away for TWO main reasons. #1 it made a viable rhythm usable in the context of a song, and #2 the actual sound that came out WASN'T COPYING ANY KNOWN BAND, it was uniquely original, it reminded me of me, and best of all, lots of it sounded like a me from the FUTURE... a FUTURE ME. I knew for sure, "that's what I've been searching for!!!!"