Blinksonic° has announced the release of FR3TZ°, a new instrument for Reaktor 6 by Native Instruments where string harmonics meet Euclidean beats in a granular cloud.
FR3TZ° offers a minimal concept of a 3-string-mechanical music box to generate fast and original melodic, percussive and ambient sonic environments. It also allows you to play guitar harmonics in a full polyphonic and chromatic range of 5 octaves.
String harmonics have a particular sound rendering and easily provide one of the most mysterious and subtle sonic mental images when they are punctually used in a guitarist performance. Obtained with a slight pressure on the strings with the tip of the finger raised above the frets, the harmonics deliver one of the most fascinating sounds that can be extracted from a guitar. The tonal result of this technique gives a sound with a high pitch value, some really interesting natural distortion and artefacts, to be used as a substantial waveform source inside a granular sampler.
Basically, there are only 3 octaves of « nodes » available on a guitar, but here, FR3TZ lets you play this little « squeals » and « squelch pickings » in a granular synthesis process with MIDI. On the 4 sampled instruments, up to 5 octaves have been constructed, after a process of resampling and retuning all the original signals.
Due to the tonal differences and characteristics of each node, the result is a playable set of prepared strings based on multi sample instruments. Background noise, buzzes and unwanted frequencies are part of the original recording takes, and have been preserved on purpose in order to keep a similar acoustic feeling of a prepared piano.
Then, various granular synthesis options and the complete effect chain allows to take advantage of this minimalistic waveforms to create organic pieces of reverse guitar, sweet string notes and even e-pianos tones.
FR3TZ° features
- 6 maps with 300 harmonics waveforms taken from 4 guitars (+50 percussion sounds ).
- 6 banks with 177 snapshots/presets.
- Granular sampler with start/length, pitch/fine tuning commands and grain definition settings.
- ADSR envelope.
- Travelizer Mode – XY axis pad with automation recorder.
- x3 16 Step Mono Sequencer with time sync and direction options. Define offset, number of step, channel velocity, note length.
- Note selector on each sequencers to select the aleatory notes that will be launched with a random octave shift..
- Distortion with 6 types (Clip, Sat, Q, Saw, Tri & Sin).
- Stereo Chorus.
- Simple Delay with “Boost” function to create instant infinite feedback loop.
- Space Reverb.
- 4 type Filter coupled with LFO on Cutoff.
- Binaural/stereo module with Doppler effect.
- Automated XY pad for recording the Binaural/stereo movements.
FR3TZ° is available for 49 EUR.
More information: Blinksonic°
