Reaktor Razor: Additive Synthesizer by Native Instruments

In additive synthesis, a sound is assembled from partials: single sine waves that play in parallel while their amplitude and frequency change over time. Native Instruments says the result stays clear and precise even under heavy modulation.

Razor's additive engine offers up to 320 partials, and the developer describes its sound as up-front and high-resolution. Its feature set includes creative filters with variable slopes and boosts, per-partial reverb whose tail follows pitch, partial panning across the frequency spectrum, and a 34-band vocoder.

The product is built for tense basses, bright leads and shifting, sci-fi textures, according to the developer's description.

Razor's interface is designed for musicians rather than specialists. It uses a compact layout with a straightforward internal modulation framework and a large graphical display that gives visual feedback while you edit.

A performance view provides eight macro controls, pre-mapped to filters, oscillators, modulation and effects in each preset. You can map these macros to any eight knobs on a controller. When used in Maschine, the macros map automatically to the eight knobs on the controller.