Group buses in Record

There are no built in group buses in Record, a glaring oversight in my opinion. But it's easy to work around due to the modular nature of the program. An obvious way is to add submixers, either the 14:2 or the 6:2. But I think this approach is a bit messy and I never liked the 14:2 mixer. The eq's are just plain bad and it looks cheap. Nope, never liked it even back in 2001.

Instead I prefer to do groups by using a send bus. This done by sending the signal to a send while simultaneously removing it from the main mix. You can then add your processing right there in the send bus, connecting back to the send returns and using it's controls to mix. Or you can route your audio to an additional mix track to access the full Record mixer for your group.

This is actually the way you would do it on an analog mixer without groups. I guess it's one of those habits from the bad old days without an infinite amount of virtual mixers.

First enable the send for your track. Draw down the fader and select pre fader send to avoid sending the signal to the main mix.



Then you can hook up a regular send bus like this.



Or create a mix track with insert effects like this. Note that the routing to the main mix is automatic with the mix track.



Cheers!

-a

Phase inverter combi for Reason

For some reason (haha) there is no "utility" device in Reason, and if you need to do phase adjustments there's no obvious way to do it. Phase inversion comes in handy if you're doing routing with devices that introduces a delay in the audio processing. I don't experience this often in Reason, but doing fancy stuff with sends is one such case. Say you're compressing a sort of sidechain on a send (this happens :). To prove it I'll link you a track that needed some phase twiddling to get the bass and drum compression right ;)

If you're using record you can find a handy phase inversion button at the top of the mixer. But this is primarily useful if you've got crooked audio of some sort since you can't insert this into your processing chains.

As always with Reason the solution is in a surprising place. If you route audio through Thor it can be phase inverted by using a negative value in the mod matrix. This is very easy to setup, just make an audio processing Thor as usual but stick -100 instead of 100 in the Amount section. To add a bit of an extra touch I've added routings for the button to phase invert the left and right channel respectively. This takes a slight bit cleverness by routing the audio twice through Thor, both unaltered and inverted. The buttons in Thor scale the inverted signal up and the unaltered signal down, and those buttons are again connected to the Combinator buttons (note to Propellerhead: it would be cool if you could manipulate the mod matrix directly from the Combinator modulation routing).

You can get the combi here.

Cheers!

-andré