Tips and Tricks for Reason

Reason is an amazing music production tool, and is so customisable and expandable that it would take several large books to properly cover what it can do. Included in the Reason Rack are samplers, drum machines, synths, mastering modules, effects units – everything you need to create professional-grade electronic music. However, Reason isn’t just for electronica – using samples in the NN-XT you can create any style of music you like.

Automating the RV7000 Reverb Unit

In addition, pretty much every device and parameter can be automated. If you have an RV7000 Advanced Reverb module in your rack, you can create a sequencer track for it. If you select that track and begin recording, any knob-twiddling you perform on the RV7000 will be recorded – including delay time changes, gating or anything else you decide to mess with (except patch changes). This can create some interesting effects if you set loop points fairly close together and drastically change reverb parameters over and over.

Selective Velocity Modification

Another pointer that can be a real life-saver – if you have a drum loop in ReDrum which has a hi-hat pattern that you want to reduce in volume (for example) while leaving the kick, snares and toms at the same level, you can do it like this. Select the hi-hat notes in the sequencer window, then hold down the shift key and use the pencil in the velocity controller lane to draw in the new levels. With the shift key held down, only the selected notes will be affected – when you release shift, the changes are applied to all notes in range.

Learn More About Reason

For more Reason reading, try the following sites:

This Music Technology blog post was published on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
in the DAW category.