Tempo-synced beat repeating in Reason

I've seen some recipes floating around for creating beat repeaters in Reason, but none of them appears to do tempo synced triggering. Tempo sync is completely necessary if you're doing tight beat sequencing live. Just doing the triggering by ear tends to produce an awful, offbeat, kiltering racket of drums. I've been doing this with Ableton Live and clip triggers. So surely it should be possible to do this in Reason, and construct the ultimate live ragga-jungle combinator :D

The beat repeater

Doing the beat repeating is on the face of it simple; just use one of the built in delay units. It's tempting to use the simpler DDL-1 device, but I couldn't really get it to work without the delays overlaying each other building up a mush mess. Thankfully Reason has got a far more capable delay unit these days, the  "The Echo", which has built in support for beat repeat style delays through the roll triggering.

The Echo settings for 3/8 beat repeats.

So setting the mode to roll, feedback to 100% and the time setting appropriately (here I use 3/8 for that syncopated jungle feeling), and our beat repeater is ready to go. Just move the roll slider from 0 to full and back.

The beat repeater sounds like this when programmed in the Reason sequencer.

Synced triggering in Reason

To my knowledge there is only one way to trigger notes or CV in Reason synced to the sequencer timing, and that is with the RPG-8. When the sequencer is running the RPG-8 appears to time the arpeggiator output to the next interval indicated by the rate knob. We can use this to start our beat repeater on the next beat.

RPG-8 settings for triggering on the next 1/8 beat.

We set the rate to sync and 1/8 intervals. The exact interval used needs to be adjusted compared to the beat repeat interval. Shorter repeats are better triggered on 1/4 and 1/8 beats for many drum loops such that you end up repeating at least one drum hit. The velocity is also set to a fixed 127 in order to send a full strength CV signal regardless of the velocity of the key hit. The tie length is also set to max and single note repeat enabled in order to send a stable CV signal.

CV routing the RPG-8 gate out to the roll input on The Echo.

And off you go, you can now trigger synced repeats and drum rolls with your midi keyboard. You can check it out in the Reason song file here.

-a

Triggering glides with the RPG-8

I was playing with the arpeggiator in Reason and the gate length. As you may know, turning the gate length all the way makes RPG-8 send tied notes to your synth which is nice for legato sounds. So I thought it would be nice to trigger tied notes occasionally to get legatos in lead and base lines. This would make it easy to play stuff like proper acid base lines live from the keyboard.

Right, gate length has a cv modulation on the back. This should only be the case of hooking up a curve matrix with a suitable pattern. Apparently this doesn't work. It looks like the cv input doesn't modulate the gate length knob directly and maxing out the gate length in this manner does only that :( and no tied notes.

After asking around on the Propheads forum I found a workaround. Sending the cv signal through the programmer section of a combinator :D The combinator appears to modify the knob directly as regular automation which triggers tied notes when it is maxed out.

So here it is:

First set up the RPG-8 as you like it and set up a unipolar curve matrix with a pattern. Note that you set the gate length directly in the pattern so you need a suitable "rest" length for untied notes. Put these units in a combinator along with your synth.

Hook up the curve cv out from the matrix to a cv input on the combinator and move the cv trimpot to max.

In the combinator programmer connect your cv in to the RPG-8 gate length with a 0-127 range.

And off it goes :D If you take a look at the matrix unit I've set up a pattern with some uneven tie lengths with 1/8 triplets to give the triggering a bit of unpredictability and groove. With a bit of comp from the Reason factory bank it sounds like this. You can check out the project file here.

-a