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

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

Ableton Live, Impulse and Drum Racks

As of 8.2.1 Impulse is apparently still a second class citizen in Ableton Lives drum racks :(

If you're like me and think that Simpler/Sampler doesn't really cut it for drums, you've most probably left drum racks gathering dust in the library. This will still be the case for me since Drum Racks doesn't support Impulse in the way it they do for Simpler/Sampler.

It is still impossible to create Slicer presets with Impulse. Ableton galantly ignores it and creates Simplers instead.

Even dragging and dropping multiple clips into the drum rack doesn't work as nothing happens. And dropping just one clip creates a Simpler. You have to drag directly onto the Impulse cell in the chain instead which is beyond annoying.

All of this still makes using Impulses in Drum Racks too much of a pain, so it'll still be chained Impulses in an Instrument Rack for me :(

Cheers

-andré