Once you’ve been bitten by the Eurorack bug, it’s notoriously easy to become addicted to buying new modules, which can end up costing you an awful lot of money. If you’re a user of NI’s Eurorack-inspired Reaktor Blocks platform, however, you can now have five new modules for free as part of the v1.3 update.
Going under the combined family name of Kodiak, these modules aren’t modelled on specific hardware, but are said to combine “analogue character with digital power”. NI describes the new modules as follows:
- Duality OSC is a dual oscillator that adds innovative wave-shaping to Blocks. It offers phase-, frequency-, amplitude-, and timbre-modulation, and is ideal for growling basses, vibrant leads, and rich percussion.
- Shift Sequencer is an unconventional step sequencer. It has independent sequence-length and direction controls for pitch, octave, velocity, hold, and gate, making polyrhythmic sequencing easy.
- Curve Sequencer takes a modern classic – MASSIVE’s stepped modulation sequencer – and places it in the Blocks rack. It enables complex stepped modulation, perfect for electronic music.
- Morph Filter delivers a triple-resonant filter bank designed to morph between settings for vowel sounds, chords, or percussion.
- Flip Gen is a versatile tone generator and experimental noise source. It is perfect for generating bleepy sequences, bell-like FM, morse, pitched noise, crackly textures, and for use as a creatively random modulator.
Blocks 1.3 also includes five new Ensembles, each of which showcases the new modules and can serve as a complete synthesizer in its own right. These come with a total of 195 presets between them.
Blocks 1.3 is part of Reaktor 6, and the update can be downloaded from the Native Instruments website.
