Designing a Huge NI Razor Vowel Synth in Reaktor

This is a rather entertaining video tutorial which shares how to make a wicked Razor vowel synth that will blow away your fans and add soem serious impact to your next dubstep production! The unique approach to sound design in Razor lends itself to big bass instruments and is quite intuitive once you get a handle on the interface and how modulation assignments work. We highly recommend the synth for any Reaktor user who is intrigued by additive synthesis or into sound design in general. It really is quite an amazing synth to play with! Alright, let’s check out how this Razor vowel synth is made.

Start off by loading the Errorsmith INIT snapshot (preset). The entire synth is dropped two octave, some Glide is added, the Random knob is turned all the way up and the synth is set to run in Monophonic mode with a Single Trigger  before any sounds are worked on. A Formant waveform is loaded into Oscillator 1 and a Sick Pitchbend waveform is loaded into Oscillator 2. Make sure you match up your settings for these oscillators with what is shown in the video before moving on.

Once the basic sound for our Razor vowel synth is set up, we can begin to get the vowel character going. First a Vowel Filter is loaded into the Filter1 panel. With the proper setting in place this will be the bit of magic that makes this synth so awesome. Once you have the parameters dialed in, an envelope is set up and assigned to modulate the crossfading between vowel sounds, as well as the Formant parameter. This same modulation envelope is assigned to control the Formant knob of Oscillator 1 and the P OFFS knob of Oscillator 2. The Main Amp Envelope is also set up at this time to ensure the right delivery.

Now a Synced Reverb is added to our Razor vocal synth to fatten it up a bit. By using the Spectral Clip feature you can cut out a lot of the unwanted, or unnecessary, high end frequencies. And for some super low end support to really beef this sound up, the Safe Bass feature is enabled.

Cheers,
OhmLab