We’ve been busy at kore.noisepages.com hacking away on Native Instruments’ software to share more playable tools and tips. Peter Dines has built a really fantastic tool called Frankenloop. It’s a "step sequencer with a twist" — probability settings for each step so that it sounds different each time. Peter has released it under a ShareAlike Creative Commons license, so we actually hope you’ll take this and customize it to do whatever you want, and release it under the same license.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Introduction to Frankenloop from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Download and explanation of how to use it:

Introducing Frankenloop: Free Reaktor-Powered Step Sequencer with a Twist

Peter will be revisiting how the tool was put together and how you might use it in Kore in future episodes stay tuned.

We’ve had some running themes going on the site in the past few weeks.

I’ve been talking about Kore for sound design and performance:

Sound Design for Imaginary Instruments: Kore, Guitar Rig

Sound Design for Imaginary Instruments: A Kore-Prepared Piano

Sound Design for Imaginary Instruments: The Results

How to Control Reaktor Patch Parameters with Kore

Kore: The CPU-Saving Power of X in Live Performance

That reflects for me the appeal of Kore in my work, which is to use it as a meta-instrument for shaping and playing sound. I got to play my first gig with just Kore — Reaktor stood in for Live. (I expect I’ll bring Ableton back into it, but it was fun to do.)

… and Peter Dines has (at my urging) been gradually building up some resources for learning Reaktor patching, with a couple of additions from me:

Mutek Interview: Exploring the Reaktor User Library with Fennesz

Revving up Reaktor: A Refresher on Clocks and Events

Next Steps with Reaktor: Tutorial Review

Tim Exile: Reaktor Video Master Class/Demo

We’ll keep developing these themes. Over the coming weeks, looking at what we have slated, I think we’ll have a sort of live, online manual for these tools. We really do welcome your feedback — and I have to say, I’m really pleased to have heard from you as this is a new idea. I’m learning a lot from it. Now if you’ll excuse me, back to hacking.

Hope this gives you something to play with over the weekend, Reaktor and Kore users — it definitely does for me. Now I just need some rainy weather that encourages me to stay in and work on it…