39 – Kong Beat Repeater

This time, I’m going to work off my previous OctoKong device with a series of loopers and show you how to add Beat Repeat and LFO Panning ability inside Kong. The pads are used to trigger both of these effects on and off as a toggle. Hopefully this shows a little more of the capability you can achieve with Kong.

Welcome once again to another little trek down Reason lane. This time, I’m going to work off my previous OctoKong device with a series of loopers and show you how to add Beat Repeat and LFO Panning ability inside Kong. The pads are used to trigger both of these effects on and off as a toggle. Hopefully this shows a little more of the capability you can achieve with Kong.

Here’s the Beat Repeater project files. There are two Beat Repeater Combinators inside an RNS file (zip file). You can download it here: Kong-Beat-Repeaters. The first Beat Repeater under the mixer uses one pad to trigger the Beat Repeater (turning it off and on), and another pad to cycle through all 16 synced steps inside the DDL-1 Digital Delay Line. There’s also an LFO Pan Pad, which turns panning ability on or off. The second Combinator is a different way you can apply Beat Repeating inside the Kong device. It sets up 3 pads with 3 different Beat Repeat settings.

A big thank you to Peff at Peff.com and Hydlide at The Sound of Reason website. They got me thinking about Beat Repeating in general. Have a look at Hydlide’s Beat Repeater tutorial video and be sure to look up Peff’s great Beat Repeater Combinator which is included in the Record Factory Soundbank (in the Effects > Delay folder).

So here’s how you can create a Beat Repeater triggered from a Kong Pad. The Kong Pad is a velocity-sensitive toggle to turn the Beat Repeater on and Off. A second Pad acts as a correlated synced Step Time switch that cycles through all 16 Step units in the Digital Delay Line:

Next, this video shows you how to set up an LFO Pan trigger on another pad in Kong. In the same way, this is a velocity-sensitive toggle to turn the Panning on and off. The harder you press the pad (or key on your keyboard), the heavier the Panning becomes (the amount of Panning is increased the harder you hit the pad). What’s even nicer is that the panning affects both the dry signal and the Beat Repeat signal. Check it out here:

As you can see, the process can be very useful, especially when you set up a lot of loop devices or other synth devices and hook them up into the Mixer inside the Combinator.

The front of the Reason rack showing all the devices in the Kong Beat Repeater (minus the mixer)
The front of the Reason rack showing all the devices in the Kong Beat Repeater (minus the mixer)

The back of the Reason rack showing the Kong Beat Repeater-related connections.
The back of the Reason rack showing the Kong Beat Repeater-related connections.

A few notes about the Combinators

  • Both Beat Repeaters work by processing any audio that is connected to the Mixer inside the Combinator, so you can Beat Repeat any audio that is connected to the Kong or not. So don’t let this setup stop you from adding any audio, even that which is not triggered by Kong. Great flexibility here.
  • The Beat Repeater pads and LFO Panning Pad are all velocity sensitive. This means the amount of these effects can range from very low to very high, depending how hard you hit your keyboard or Pad controller.
  • Beat Repeater 2 provides 3 pads with 3 different Beat Repeaters (all with different settings). The cool thing about this Combinator is that you can use them in tandem by pressing 2 or all 3 of the pads together to apply a lot of variation to any of the sounds coming out of Kong.
  • In Beat Repeater 2, feel free to change any of the settings on the 3 different DDL-1 devices, to create custom effects that suit your own purposes. For example, change the step, unit, or resolution settings of any of these devices to come up with your own custom beat repeaters.
  • After all is said and done, you can still add any parameters to the Combinator knobs and buttons. Since all this CV trickery only uses the 4 new Combinator CV inputs, it leaves all the Combinator Rotaries and buttons free for you to program as you wish.

Feel free to post a comment if you find these useful or to make any suggestions on ways you can improve these Combinators or alternative ideas. I’d love to hear from you. Until next time, happy Reasoning!

DopeTank Free 2010 Refill

DopeTank Free 2010 Refill: A collection of 106 Thors and 15 Combinators made by Heikki Roots (aka Pirnikas or Deep’n’Dark). He was gracious enough to offer this out to the Reason community for free.

Download the Refill: DopeTank-Free-2010

A collection of 106 Thors and 15 Combinators made by Heikki Roots (aka Pirnikas or Deep’n’Dark). He was gracious enough to offer this out to the Reason community for free. Here’s what he has to say about his refill:

When making this refill I wanted to keep the sound phat, clean and musical. Another thing I wanted was making every sound different so there’s something for everyone.Every sound-designer has their own methods and their own taste of how it should sound. I like when there’s lot of edge but not too much. When playing the sound, it should make you wanna play your midi keyboard. Most of the time the modwheel has been assigned to some parameter, sometimes the other buttons & rotaries as well. When playing pads or other patches that you may play as chords, I’ve tried to keep the sound clean.

The Combinator patches:

There’s 15 combinators inside this refill. When layering sounds, you can make extremely rich and big sounds as you can add just as many layers as you want. Another thing are the effects which bring in lot of possibilities to shape the sounds.Sometimes you have an instrument that doesn’t sound that special, but when layering some sounds together, you can make some “killer” sounds. Some of these patches have tweaking possibilities, most don’t. These patches can be used for many genres, like hiphop, electronic but also for pop or film music etc. So get the refill and expand your rack as this refill is free.

The Thor patches:

The Thor patches have been categorized into different folders so it’s easy to find right sound every time. The categories are:

  • Bass
  • Fx
  • Keys
  • Leads
  • Mono synth
  • Modulated
  • Other
  • Pads
  • Poly synth
  • Sequenced
  • Voices

What I found great about these patches is the fact that the sound is indeed very clean and crisp. For the combinator patches, there’s a lot of interesting reverb going on in most cases, and the sound is very spacious. Also, what’s nice is that every mod wheel does affect a parameter, so you can vary the sound as you play. The only thing I would criticize is the fact that most of the other combinator parameters or Thor parameters don’t have any modulations assigned to them. I think this misses out on a great opportunity to enhance the patches even further. But putting that aside, the sounds in here are top notch!

Highlights for me were the Combinator and Thor Pads. I think this refill shows off a lot of reverb talent and that comes across best in those patches. I also thought the sequenced and voice Thor patches were really nice, and it’s too bad there weren’t more of these. Perhaps in some future patches or refills, since Heikki has promised more free patches to come in the Propellerhead User Forum.

Thanks for sharing Heikki!