CAKEWALK RAPTURE (software instrument)

[U&I]

 

Originally posted by Anderton Great resources, very helpful. Thanks!

 

 

 

Craig here's a link too a free .sfz beat slicing utility.

I'm just downloading it now.

Might do some funky things in Rapture.

If it does let us know.

I'm about too give it a whirl in Dimension .

 

Oh yeah link .....

 

Virtual Turntable

 

Enjoy.

[Magpel]

I confess to being a little confusexd by the SFZ thing. I know rgc:audio's older stuff well, and I know that sfz and sfz+ are rene's neat little soundfont playback synths (sfz, the free one, actually gets bit of use here 'cause I love the free NS kit drums and have quite a few nice Sonic Implants SF libraires)

 

So...wonder why he would reuse those same letters for what sound like such an unrelated purpose...

 

Rapture abnd Dimension Pro both look fab to me. Just the thought of having Rene's latest engine--features aside--has me drooling. Pentagon 1 is still one of my first call softies and I still think it sounds terrific.

[moosethree]

was the question answered: if you import sfx multisamples is the quality of playback the same as

Dimension Pro?

[Anderton]

>

 

Well, it makes sense to me, and there is a precedent: Propellerhead software invented the REX file format, and create REX players for playing those files.

[Anderton]

 

Dimension Pro?>>

 

No, it wasn't, and that's a good question. I have imported the same multisamples into both of them, and the sound quality is identical. However, obviously what you can do with the samples differs for the two instruments.

[dpcoffin]

Craig, I love these interactive pro-reviews, and am delighted you're looking at Rapture.

 

I hope you'll devote some space to comparing what it can do with other somewhat similar soft-synths besides Dimension, which never particularly interested me... Can you address what are other similar soft-synths from other makers? Off the bat, it seems like Motu's MX4 is comparable, since it's a wavetabler and has some serious mod options. It's the modulation options that really set Rapture apart, right? At least, that's what's got me most interested:) So ARE there any other soft synths/romplers/samplers with modulation capabilities that put them in the running with Rapture?

 

I guess there's no point in saying "Keep up the good work!" since you so obviously have been doing just that for decades now...so, thanks!

 

David

[Anderton]

Hey, why no Rapture posts?

 

Well, I've been getting ready for the Frankfurt Messe. But part of that was installing Rapture on my new LiveBook, along with some of my samples. Hopefully I'll have easy net access over in Europe, but if all else fails, at least I can prepare the sound examples, screen shots, etc. and upload them as soon as I get a chance.

 

Thanks for your patience, there's LOTS more to come!

[your fat mom]

craig,

 

thanks for the detailed review of rapture. i would really like to see cakewalk put out a demo version that could be tried out before plunking down my cash. i and others have raised this issue on another board. i don't know if you have the ear of cakewalk...but if you do, maybe you could pass this along. i would think they would be doing this anyway in an attempt to keep people from "trying it out" via p2p....but maybe there is another reason why there is no demo?

 

thanks

[Gonkulator]

 

Originally posted by Anderton Rapture , on the other hand, is a wavetable-based synthesizer – no French horns, no violins. In fact I’m pretty sure the wavetables are single cycle. (Okay Ensoniq ESQ-1 owners, you can stop being depressed that yours quit working several years ago!) The Big Deal here is the variety of step sequencing and tempo-related options that can add incredible motion to the patch …which we’ll explore during the course of the review.

 

 

I have been playing around with Rapture for a few hours. I was expecting, but haven't found anything "wavetableish"," ala Microwave or Prophet VS wavetables, about it. I wish we had a single definition for "wavetable." There is a lot of modulation fun for all, especially with the up to 128 step sequencer, but nothing like wavetable sweeps, or other typical wavetable fun. The included audio samples are all single-cycle. I keep wanting to combine them sequentially in a wav file, but I don't know of any way Rapture could use something like that. Unless I am missing something of course. There is a reference to sample offset, but That doesn't look like what I want either.

 

BTW, It is a lot of fun playing with the step sequencers. There could be more documentation.

[Anderton]

>

 

Very good point. Strictly speaking a wavetable-based synth uses very short waveforms as the basis of the sound. The type of thing you're talking about is a more complex iteration of wavetable-based synthesis.

 

With six elements, though, it shouldn't be too hard to do sweeping-type things. Let me see what I can cook up Seems the "joystick" modulator might also do what you want.

[Anderton]

I was working quite a bit with Rapture back at my hotel room while staying in Frankfurt for the Messe, and in addition to the cool stuff I'll cover soon, I did want to point out two limitations:

 

1. I can't find an undo option, so I end up "saving as..." a lot under different names.

2. When you're using multisamples, the voice multiplying/spreading option where you can get 3, 5, 7, or 9 voices out of a single sample doesn't work. It works only if you've loaded a single sample, although it doesn't have to be a really short sample.

 

One very cool feature is the LFO, and the fact that you can add your own waveforms. I use the LFO a lot to create staccato lines with pulse or sawtooth LFO waves that sync to tempo.

[Gonkulator]

If I remember, the .sfz format allows unlimited (meaning 128 I assume) velocity switching levels. I wondered about inserting different waveforms for each velocity, and then using velocity switching them in Sonar based on the velocity I programmed. It would be very weird when playing, but could be precisely controlled in the sequencer. One wave per note-on, but with legato (or not), you could simulate some traditional wavetable stuff, in a kind of crude way. Maybe?

 

Boy, it is real easy to insert your own waveforms in this program.

[Anderton]

Actually there are a ton of ways to get wavetable variations, it depends on whether you want these changes to be automatic, tempo-synched, or manual.

 

For example, one cool way is to tie step sequencers to amplitude for different elements so you can bring waveforms in and out at different times. I plan to try this later and hopefully can post an audio example.

 

You can also use the mod wheel or X-Y controller to morph between waveforms...

[Anderton]

First, apologies for taking so long to get back to this…it’s taken a bit longer to debrief from the Musik Messe than I expected. Anyway, I’m back and Rapturing away.

 

As I was intrigued by the question about wave sequencing, I did indeed fire up Rapture to see what it could do. It turns out that it’s very easy to string together wave sequences, or at least, seuqence up to six waves. This experiment is also a good introduction to the flexibility of the step sequencer options.

 

Here’s what I did. Click on the attachment to see a screen shot of one Element’s parameter settings. The basic idea is to load a different wave into each Element (I used four Elements), then assign the step sequencer for each Element to Amplitude. Then, you can turn the amp sections for the different Elements on and off sequentially by altering the step sequencer sliders. I used four of the FM waveforms because I didn’t want the sounds to be too different, but I later found that morphing between really different waveforms produced some useful sounds too.

 

In this patch, each step sequencer is set to 16 steps. For Element 1, the first four sliders are up all the way, and the rest are down. For Element 2, sliders 5-8 are up all the way and the rest are down. For Element 3, sliders 9-12 are up all the way, and for Element 4, sliders 13-16 are up.

 

So you can picture what happens: As you hold down a note, first you hear the wave from Element 1, then the wave from Element 2, and so on for the four elements. To avoid an overly abrupt “switching” effect as the waves change from one to another, note on the screen shot that the Smooth control for each step sequencer is set to maximum (1000). This lets the waves “morph” into each other. Also note I set the sync to 8, so each wave plays for two beats. This seems like a good value for pads.

 

My next question was whether I’d be able to add an envelope to the overall sound, as I figured the step sequencer would take priority. I hoped there was an envelope option on the Global Effects page; no luck. However, I needn’t have worried. I set up a simple EG for each Element’s Amplitude parameter with a short decay, sustain, and release, and this was “superimposed” on whatever the step sequencer was doing. Cool.

 

For the final touch, I went to the Global page and added two effects: Chorus followed by Large Hall. I gotta say, considering that I put the sound together in under five minutes, it’s an evolving, lush pad that I like a lot…and shows that yes, Rapture does indeed to wave sequencing.

[Anderton]

...and then I thought hey, why not post an audio example? Click on the attachment to hear the wave sequenced sound. It's not very long, but it will give you an idea of what I mean by an evolving sound, where the waves morph into each other.

[Anderton]

I should also add that a Group Edit option would be really welcome here. When you're treating each Element as really one big Element, if you make changes in one you probably want to make changes in the others as well. It was really helpful to be able to copy envelopes among Elements, but when I made changes to the step sequencer, I had to make those changes to each one as copying would also copy the slider positions -- which I didn't want to do.

 

Speaking of which, there are up to 128 possible steps in the step sequencer, so you could create some really interesting amplitude variations for the various waveforms being used in the Elements. My sequential switching thing, while useful, just scratches the surface -- the waves could morph polyrhythmically, for example.

 

It just occurred to me that review-wise, I've gravitated toward programming cool sounds and getting into applications rather than describing features and offering opinions on them. So next, I'll step back a bit and give an overview of Rapture's capabilities.

[your fat mom]

IRT my earlier post regarding a demo, i have been asking on my own and have it from a cakewalk rep that a demo for rapture will be available within the next few weeks.

 

...ask and you shall receive!!!

[protues9]

So, can someone sum up the advantages or major differences between Z3+A and rapture?

 

I dont know much about either.. but I do know they are both wavetable based. So Im really curious what the differences between the two are!

 

thanks!

[Anderton]

One of the important point to remember about Rapture is that every Element (there are six of them) has the same basic structure. For example, each one has a DSP section, and that’s what we’ll investigate now. Click on the attachment to see the modules that make up the DSP section.

 

There are five DSP “modules”: Two filters with resonance, Bit Reduction (in case you miss the sound of your Mirage!), Decimator (lowers sample rate), and Drive (distortion).

 

We’ll get into those in the next post, but one of the interesting features is the ability to route these modules into one of four configurations (as well as bypass). These are:

 

* Decimation/Bit Reduction > Filter 1 > Drive > Filter 2

* Filter 1 > Decimation/Bit Reduction > Drive > Filter 2

* Filter 1 > Drive > Filter 2 > Decimation/Bit Reduction

* Filter 1 > Decimation/Bit Reduction > Filter 2 > Drive

 

Why is this useful? Well, every guitar player knows why sometimes you put the wa-wa before distortion and sometimes after, and it’s possible to get the same type of effect with Rapture. For example, if you throw Filter 2 in front of Drive, you get a nasty, hard sync type of sound. Put Filter 2 after Drive, and you can tame the Drive’s harmonic response.

 

Following Decimation/Bit Reduction with Filter 1 allows filtering the Decimation/Bit Reduction sound, but reversing the order produces strange, unpredictable noises, especially with lots of filter resonance. Any Drive, Decimation, or Bit Reduction effects become even more pronounced with chords instead of single note lines.

[Anderton]

The filters are definitely a strong point, especially because you have two of them with resonance and multiple response options. Click on the attachment to see the filter section responses.

 

As you can see toward the left portion of the screen shot, if you adjust the filter frequency knob, you get a readout of the frequency – nice. Toward, the right, the filter response is being selected for Filter 2. The 1-pole options are highpass, lowpass, bandpass, band reject (notch), and all pass. The bandpass and band reject filters are made up of 1 pole highpass and lowpass filters in series, which if you spent any time with old modular Moogs, should bring back some memories: Creating a bandpass response required “coupling” high and lowpass filters. All pass isn’t very spectacular but the manual says you can use it to “phase align samples between different Elements.

 

2-pole options are highpass, lowpass, bandpass, band reject, and “peak.” This is similar to bandpass, but boosts the resonant frequency by 6dB and brings up the skirts a bit. There are also 4-pole and 6-pole lowpass and highpass responses. You don’t run into a 6-pole filter response very often, but it’s excellent for making very dramatic filtering sweeps.

 

The Comb filter introduces multiple notches, whereas Pink simply tailors the response via lowpass filtering to create the type of response associated with Pink noise. With Pink selected, the controls are disabled as the characteristics are not adjustable.

[Anderton]

One of the reasons I really like having two filters in series is to use Filter 1 for “effects” (e.g., driving it with a tempo-synched sawtooth wave to create “dugga-dugga-dugga” synth lines, a la Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”), then tie Filter 2 to mod wheel so I can also sweep the overall filter sound.

 

But one of the weirdest uses I came up with was a sort of “pseudo-scratching” effect. Click on the attachment to download an MP3 example of the “scratching” effect. I did this by setting both filters to 4-pole lowpass with resonance about halfway up, then tying them to the mod wheel. However, they sweep oppositely so that as one sweeps from lowest to highest frequency, the other sweeps from highest to lowest. I used a sawtooth wave so you could hear how the pitched sound was being affected, but it sounds pretty cool with white noise, too.

 

And this is also a good time to remind you that one of the big deals about Rapture is being able to modulate all this stuff, and tie it to controllers!

[Anderton]

We've touched on this a bit, but it's time for some details. You can load individual samples that stretch across the entire keyboard, or .SFZ files of multisamples.

 

Click on the attachment to see the Oscillator page that we'll be talking about.

 

We'll cover parameters starting the left corner, then work our way down and across.

 

* Lo/Hi Key - When you're using multiple elements, you can restrict an element to play only over a certain key range.

* Lo/Hi Vel - When you're using multiple elements, you can restrict an element to play only over a certain velocity range.

* Bend Down/Up - Sets the pitch bend range.

* Sustain/Sostenuto - Turn either or both on or off

* Transpose - Transposes the oscillator up or down up to 96 semitones.

* Tune - Tunes the oscillator in cents.

* Keytrack - Adjusts whether the oscillator tracks the keyboard pitch. If you want to play a mean trick on someone, set it to -100: The keyboard plays backwards.

* Phase - Alters the oscillator phase. As with the Lo/Hi options, this is relevant only if multiple elements are playing back.

 

Those are the "normal" parameters, now it starts to get more interesting.

 

* Quality - When set to Hi, you can do wide range pitch sweeps without aliasing.

* Multi - This has four options, 3, 5, 7, or 9 voices and basically turns the waveform into the specified number of voices, spread evenly across the stereo field, and detuned according to the Detune parameter. However, this doesn't work when using multisamples, only with single stretched samples.

* Ring Mod - This is mutually exclusive with Multi; you can have one or the other, but not both. Again, this works only with single samples. It works by creating two oscillators out of one, and ring modulating them with detuning based on the Detune parameter. Slight amounts of detuning give a "chorusing with attitude" type of sound. If you need more detuning, you can add more by selecting Detune in the Matrix Modulation section. There's one other interesting ring modulation option: If you right-click on an Element, you can select a Ring Modulate Previous Elements option. This causes the Element to ring-modulate the output of all previous Elements, which makes some really messy sounds.

* Detune sets the Multi and Ring Mod detuning, up to plus or minus 100 cents.

* Porta Time - Sets the glide time from one note to another, but this works in conjunction with the Polyphony control (up next).

* Polyphony - Limits the polyphony for a given layer. When set to 1, the layer is essentially in mono mode; when set to 0, it's in mono mode and portamento is active.

* Layers - This is a read-only that shows how many layers are in being used in the program.

 

So what does all this mean? Basically, that's it's easy to get really fat, thick sounds even before you hit the DSP section. And also, that you can pitch/velocity limit each Element to create multisampled layers.

[murphy54]

man that long writing...

[Anderton]

>

 

Yeah, welll...there's a lot to say about this thing! Would you prefer that I broke the posts into smaller pieces? That's certainly possible to do.

[rasputin1963]

Hi Craig,

 

 

 

Thanks for de-mystifying a good deal of RAPTURE's capabilities. It truly seems like an amazing tool.

 

But you might think I'm an "amazing tool" after you read my questions:

 

 

1. What is the relationship-- or interrelationship-- between the EG envelope drawing window and the Steps window? Do these two commands BOTH address the currently illuminated parameter (e.g. AMP, PITCH, CUT, etc.)? And if so, don't they sort of "step on each other's toes?" Could you clarify a bit here between the two and the function of each?

 

2. Where it says LO/HI KEY, and then offers a choice between 0 and 127... is that referring to MIDI KEY NUMBER? In other words, is this the place you assign key regions to that particular element? Is this is the way it creates multisampled patches?

 

3. Also, on each Element's page, what is that small window to the right with a single horizontal line across it (under the LFO window).

 

 

Many thanks... Pardon if these are dumb questions...!