Getting Comfortable In Propellerhead’s Reason 4

A Brief Introduction

I first was introduced to Propellerhead's Reason 4 oddly enough at the conservatory I was attending in Miami for classical guitar performance. I was taking a creative writing class and my wonderful professor Dr. Joann Falco-Leshin challenged the class to create an interactive website for the poetic and literature content we would create in the class. Upon learning I was a musician, she insisted I write some music for the site. Well, I had never recorded anything, and I knew I couldnt use traditional microphones for my guitar because it would just sound too amateur. I remembered hearing about a MIDI class some of my peers were taking and that the main software they used was called "Reason". I knew this would be the best way to create semi professional quality music in a digital medium, so I asked a friend to show me the ropes and help me record a piano piece I had written.

We had agreed on several times we would meet and record the piece, but he always had something else to do and bailed. Out of frustration, I figured I would just learn the software and do it myself. So I bought Reason 4, an 88-key semi-weighted MIDI keyboard and went to town. At first I had absolutely no clue where to begin. All I knew were the few immediate goals I had;

• Select an instrument
• Record the track, preferably in real-time performance
• Make it "on the beat, and in time" (quantize)
• Save as an audio file people could listen to

So I set about this in the slowest freaking way possible: Google. I googled the HELL out of that list, scouring forums and peering through questions/answers. I even made some posts as to how to do each and every one of these things in the most specific way possible. Well,  hopefully you will have found this article, and not have to suffer this daunting task yourself. Trust me, it took me a while to "get comfortable" in Reason 4.

Select An Instrument

Open Reason. If it is the first time you will probably be met with the demo song, which is great and all but not what we need. Go to FILE > NEW in Windows, or in Mac hit +N (COMMAND+N) to create. If its a blank slate you should see something like this

Reason Blank Slate

See the light grey strip on the left side of the Mixer board? Right click that, and navigate to CREATE > CREATE INSTRUMENT > REASON FACTORY SOUND BANK > ALL INSTRUMENT PATCHES. There are several ways to create an instrument, but trust me this is going to be the fastest way, and also by right-clicking on the mixer to navigate here, it will automatically "wire" everything the right way so you wont get all confused when you create an instrument and it won't make any sound... Of course, you could go to the top menu and select create an instrument but yea it will screw you up eventually. Don't do it.

Now you are going to see something truly amazing; a plethora of instruments only the most craziest of composers would have in his/her house. I would want to meet the guy who had all this junk in his basement. But thats the beauty; with Propellerhead's Reason 4, we can ALL be that fabulously interesting person! Try to imagine the instrument you have in mind, navigate to it, and select it. You can audition it just by highlighting it - by the way, in case you haven't already, take a look at preferences and set up your MIDI controller/audio card.

Pretty straightforward. Go REASON > PREFERENCES and set your audio card to whatever you have, then click the MIDI tab and auto-detect what controller you've got. Should be ready to go after that.

OK! So you've got your instrument. I chose the very first instrument in the very first category, just for demonstration-sake. the AC bass. now you should see another element added to the windows, or "RACK". It should look something like this;

Now we've gotta bass!!!!!

If you hit TAB then the rack will flip around to the other side and you can see how these individual components wire into each other. Now, once you have a serious rack going, (lots of components, instruments) if you flip this bad-boy around its going to be extremely confusing and daunting to look at, so if you HAVE to, hit the L key to hide the wires. Anyway, flipped around it will look like this

Whoa!!! the bottom one goes into the first track of the top one! so THATS how they do it!

So cool. Anyway, hit TAB again to flip around to the front. Now your in action! See the TRANSPORT bar at the bottom? (fancy word for all your record/play/tempo/blah blah controls) should look like this

Sweet mother of mary... i have the controls...

Well now you can adjust your tempo (the number 120, make whatever tempo you want), time signature, and loop feature. Why not hit that big bad record button and rip it out! now your in business! At this point, I like to DETACH SEQUENCER WINDOW and work from a larger space. In the top menu bar hit WINDOW > DETACH SEQUENCER WINDOW to pull up a nice big space. once youve recorded multiple tracks as i have here

SNAP! thats a whole completed project! Though small!

You can go ahead and highlight EVERYTHING, right click a window, and select QUANTIZE. Now this can be tricky, and doesn't always apply to everything. What you are doing is putting everything exactly in time. You can manually adjust the setting of QUANTIZE by hitting F8 on PC, or in Mac, navigate to WINDOW > SHOW TOOL WINDOW and selecting the QUANTIZE tab. Here you may choose which note value to quantize to, be it 16ths or triplets, what-have you. You can highlight MIDI notes and apply that value of quantization specifically to them, or just blanket quantize your entire project if it's simple enough.

So now after playing around with stuff like pan, volume, effects, and automation, you are ready to "bounce to audio" as they say in production circles. Pretty easy actually, first, make sure you know where the end of your track is. if you move the slider in the above pictured detached sequencer window all the way to the right, you should see this

THE END.... OF YOUR TRAAACK....

Just grab it be the "E" and slide it all the way to the left, where you want to mark the end of your piece. Now, navigate to FILE > EXPORT SONG AS AUDIO FILE. Choose where in your computer you would like to save your *.Wav or *.AIFF audio file to. You should see this window;

Sample Rate, Bit depth.

Sample Rate and Bit Depth... these are topics for another day. Any way, you should be good with rendering the audio by the default 44,100 and 16 bit depth.

So there you have it, a nice shiny new piece! This was a very basic intro to Reason, extremely superficial. However, I will be periodically posting useful and advanced tips 'n tricks to help make you a master of Reason!!! (no pun intended lol)

-mooQuu