Fun With Pulsar

Rack Extensions are Here!

Rack Extensions are here and if you upgrade to Reason 6.5 you can get the Pulsar RE for free! To be honest I really had no idea what I would use Pulsar for, but I thought I would download it anyway. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is a pretty cool monophonic synth as well as a crazy dual LFO, and it sounds great. I thought I would add breath control to some of the Synth combinators included with the Rack Extension..

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I thought the 'Double Saw' combinator sounded pretty good, so I thought it would be fun to play with the EWI. Let's take it apart by device.

• Pulsar - obviously this provides the waveform - and that's it
  
• Thor - the Thor is only there to provide some vibrato and pitch bend to the Pulsar. CV outs 1 and 2 and wired to the Rate knobs in the back of the Pulsar.
  
• Subtractor - the Subtractor's Filter envelope is triggered with every note, and this envelope is sent to the Pulveriser envelope follower which is then set to control the Pulveriser Low Pass Filter. This setup gives us the little burst to brightness at the beginning of the tone and makes it sound 'horn like'
  

Follower controls filter frequency

• The Pulveriser - the pulverizer is the heart of the patch giving us control over the filter frequency and volume.
  
• The Echo - the echo just gives us some chorus and delay, fattening the sound.
  

Adding Breath Control

The absolute easiest way to add breath control to this patch is via the combinator programmer. All we need to do is control the Volume and Filter Frequency of the Pulveriser like this:

Easy. You can mess around with the min and max settings until you get something you are comfortable with. You can have a lot of fun just trying out different combinations of waveforms in the Pulsar.

You could also use CV to control these parameters, but this is probably the quickest way. Have fun and be musical playing with the new Pulsar mono-synth!