Recording MIDI from Spiral in FL Studio

By Peter Dines

Last Spiral post for a while, I promise!

I noticed in the NI forums that user Jedinhopy couldn’t record Spiral’s output in FL Studio. I checked, and found that this was the case… fortunately, there’s a workaround. This is Windows only, but then, FL is also Windows only.

First, get MIDI Yoke installed. This creates virtual MIDI input and output ports. You will find a million uses for this, I guarantee.

Then, in FL Studio’s MIDI settings, make the following adjustments:

MIDI Yoke one’s FL output port is set to 1, and it’s also activated as an input.

Now, in the wrapper for your instance of Reaktor Spiral, do the following:

(click image to enlarge)

The MIDI output port for Spiral has been set to 1, same as the MIDI yoke port in FL’s MIDI settings.

Now, make sure the focus is on the channel you want to record to – in this case it contains an instance of the Lazysnake plugin – and record. Voila, notes in the piano roll.

Beware of this trick in other setups, because you might create a MIDI feedback loop with unpredictable and sometimes unpleasant results. But the way things are routed here it’s not a worry.

By the way, if there’s another easier workaround for this, do let me know!

Reaktor Sequencers Pt. 1, and Download Free SQ4 Percussion Sequencer

Reader JL writes: ( FROM NOISEPAGES )

The current states of Reaktor sequencers is rather confusing: some output MIDI, some don’t, some output both note and CC data etc. A “Reaktor sequencers demystified” article would be welcome, and might encourage more builders to do more development in this area.

An excellent idea. JL mentioned that he liked the factory SQ8 sequencer’s random playback modes, but wished that it sent MIDI instead of just gate signals. The SQ8 is a percussion sequencer with 8 rhythm channels and variable loop length as well as shuffle.

Instead of MIDI output, the SQ8 has eight individual gate out ports. The gate signals it sends are like the internal Reaktor events you’d normally send to trigger an ADSR envelope module. Here’s what it looks like at the ensemble level:

To hack MIDI into this, there are two ways you can go about it. You could attempt to modify the SQ8 instrument itself, or you could add MIDI capability in a secondary instrument that receives the 8 wired connections. I opted for the latter route, and I’ll explain why. If you look at the front panel of the SQ8 above, you’ll notice that it has a massive voice count of 512. This is a Lazyfish creation, and that’s how he rolls, with the number of voices acting as individual notes or slots in the sequencer. Re-multiplexing the gate outputs in an instrument with 512 voices gave me the vapors.

Here’s what I did -

Instead of an audio producing drum instrument as a target, the gate connections go to an 8 voice Midifier instrument whose internal structure looks like this -

You can study the structure at your leisure when you download it but the important thing here is the MIDI Note out module on the right. After re-multiplexing the 8 gate signals into a single stream, this is where the internal signals are formatted as MIDI that can be transmitted to another Reaktor instrument, or sent out to another synth or sampler in a host.

The front panel of the new Midifier instrument has a root note control that sets the lowest note of the sequencer, and the other 7 tracks increment upwards from there in semitones -

Now you’d think that after all this you’re ready to load this into a host and start sequencing, and you’d almost be right. After all that work, I discovered a bug in the SQ8 sequencer that caused it to play an extra note before resetting to the beginning of the sequence, which caused it to go out of time. I’ll let you download it and try it yourself to see what I mean. Far be it from me to criticize Lazyfish’s programming – I think that in general people don’t pay a lot of attention to Reaktor’s native sequencers, seeing it as more of a synth and soundscape generation package, so this probably never go the same intensive end user shakedown as some of the factory synths.

After spending a couple of hours building and testing, I was reluctant to let it go at that, so I decided to put together a four channel version of the SQ8 using my Roux sequencer macros. They may not be as pretty as the poly-object based SQ8’s step sequencers but I know they get the job done. As an added bonus, my version has individual sequence lengths and swing controls per sequencer.

Here’s what I ended up with -

Download the SQ4 sequencer

This version implements swing, which was missing in earlier versions of the Roux macro. I hacked in a forwards, backwards, back and forth and random play mode macro from Rick Scott’s remix of Santoni Pascal’s remix of Martin Brinkmann’s original Mumosq. So what we have here is a sequencer with a tangled pedigree. As well, each sequence has its own MIDI pitch and a note name display. I’m thinking the pitch controls could be automated for extra weirdness, but this is just a first draft – I’d like to get some feedback from people before I go complicating it any more than it already is.

A quick look at its MIDI structure -

I used To Voice modules to assign each sequencer’s output to a voice. If a step is active, it first triggers the pitch, which is held at a Value module, then sends out a gate signal.

Event merge modules combine the four voices from the four percussion sequencers and send them to a MIDI note out module. Remember that modules or macros with yellow active indicators are polyphonic (process multiple voices) and those with orange active indicators are monophonic (process one voice). Most of the Roux sequencer macro is monophonic, and only uses poly structure in this modification when the sequence hits the To Voice module.

Fire it up in a sequencer or standalone, direct its output to some percussion, and let me know if it performs stably for you. I’m particularly interested in whether or not it resets to the beginning of the sequence for you and keeps time properly. If this turns out to be a good solid base, I’m going to look at fancying it up graphically and functionally - so don’t be shy about submitting bug reports and feature requests!

A reminder: to send to another instrument in standalone Reaktor, or to another instrument or synth in a host, use the MIDI out dropdown menu in the instrument header.

Also, bear in mind when working with Reaktor sequencers in a host, you should activate Reaktor’s autosave feature - otherwise you could easily save the song in your host and exit, losing the Reaktor snapshot sequence.

Coming up next from me, a Kore optimized controller-centric mono-sequencer for melodies. Here’s a preview: