The evolution of a noise instrument for the soft synth Reaktor

Careful - these sounds
are LOUD!

Free WAV files
Not everyone has time to create their own laptop noise, so I've made some for you to use!

LaptopNoise.com

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Laptop Hell!
Noise Evolution
My Setup

Step inside the evolution of a noise instrument.

What started out as simple noise instrument has evolved into something I call "Laptop Hell". In the beginning, I called it "QuadOscs" for 4 oscillators that made up the insturment. It also had 1 low-pass filter and an envelope. Big deal, right? Well, take a look at its face and inner guts, then give it a listen with the mp3 below.

Have a quick look at my laptop noise setup

face panel for QuadOscillators noise instrument in Reaktor.

hj93o
Video for your iPod or Quicktime player. Screwed up images and laptop noise. This one's big [30 Mb]

Hear the QuadOscs instrument.

Below: The "guts" of the QuadOscs noise instrument. Lots of stuff going on underneath the simple panel shown above.

What's Going On?

This is a brutal noisemaker mainly because of the way I've got the oscillators interacting with each other. More like they're fighting each other. Using "math" in Reaktor I "multiplied" and "divided" oscillators into and sometimes by each other. Also, I took the square root of one oscillator and multiplied that by another oscillator. Basically, I wanted to create chaos. Then it goes to the filter. The signal flow is pretty much left to right.

UPDATE: 1/23/06 I'm still tweaking this instrument and added more oscillators and options. It's now called Laptop Hell!

Below is a picture of the face of this evolved beast. It's got more knobs to control stuff and crossfade sliders to "morph" between oscillators giving even more sonic destruction options. This instrument can now turn a laptop (or desktop) running Reaktor into one of the most annoying things that's ever existed! Ahh, how humanity is sure to benefit from this.

Now Hear Laptop Hell!
Careful, this mp3 is real loud!

Below: behold the guts of this evolved synth. You should be able to see the "foundation" of the synth from above plus lots of additions.

I added a few new oscillators which opens up the sound palate quite a bit.

Laptop Hell!
The noise ensemble created for Reaktor is ready to download free

And it's updated with even more features than is shown on this page!

inside look at the LaptopHell instrument