Inside the Advanced Reason Workshop

That morning, I loaded Reason 3.0 onto a borrowed laptop (Propellerhead thoughtfully permits Reason owners to install the program on two computers), packed up a Korg PadKontrol USB MIDI controller I'd just received for review, and headed up to San Francisco. (Hey, why not push my luck by bringing two unfamilar systems?)

The workshop was at Recombinant Media Labs, an intriguing performance space with a thumping sound system and wraparound projection screens. Peff and fellow Reason guru GW Childs (I'd seen his name on one of the demo songs I'd loaded that morning) were set up at one end. Childs was running a Windows laptop and M-Audio Radium keyboard controller, whereas Peff hauled in a quad-processor PowerMac G5 tower and a Korg Kontrol49 keyboard.

As the room filled with other students, I noticed many more USB keyboard and pad controllers—even a MIDI wind controller. It was obvious that advanced Reason users had learned to play the program like an instrument. Reassuringly, I overheard several students mention that they'd just purchased their controllers for the workshop, so I felt more confident about bringing the new PadKontrol. And, indeed, it turned out to be easy to use. For dedicated Reason wrangling, though, I would choose something with more knobs.

Almost all of the attendees brought laptops so they could follow along. Many brought MIDI controllers as well, such as this Korg PadKontrol I used. (Click to enlarge.)

As the class progressed, I was delighted to discover that I was able to follow everything, even duplicating the patches Peff and Childs assembled onscreen. In many ways, Reason incorporates the best aspects of hardware and software studios, presenting a familiar look while automatically connecting cables in the background as you add new devices to your rack. (I learned that holding down the Shift key while inserting a device prevents autohookup.)

Following a signal around the patchcord maze was still challenging, though. It might be helpful to have a third view of the studio, based on a two-dimensional flowchart, as in Max/MSP. Fortunately, each Reason module comes with a scribble strip, and Childs urged us to use it to label devices by function.

The class began with an introduction to Reason's vocoder, which I knew pretty well after editing Jim Aikin's tutorial, "How to Make Your Sound Sing with Vocoders." Some ear-catching techniques Childs and Peff demonstrated included "drumcoding" (using drums as a modulator, for a pulsing, pitched groove) and using an extremely warbly Malstrom patch as a carrier. Another advanced technique was triggering individual bands of the vocoder with MIDI notes, creating a playable bandpass filter that responds to velocity.

GW Childs (left) and Peff spice up a student's song by adding effects. (Click to enlarge.)

Tweaking and Polishing

One of the students from the beginning workshop then shared his first Reason song with us—recorded just hours before. While we watched and listened, Peff proceeded to remix it, explaining what he was doing to improve it.

Noting that the song had absolutely no signal-processing effects, Peff first added tempo-synchronized delay to the arpeggio part to stereoize it. Next, he applied a compressor to the bass, explaining, "Bass is one of those foundational sounds, so you get it right and make everything else work around it." Childs compared compression to squeezing a loaf of bread in a vice to make it evenly flat. Peff's analogy was the way shock absorbers on a car soak up the bumps.

As Childs looks on in amazement, Peff, moving too fast for the eye to see, shows the multiband compressor he made by combining eight MClass compressors. (Click to enlarge.)

Next, Peff used a RV7000 EQ to shape the echoes he'd just created, keeping them from cluttering the mix. He showed the classic technique of first boosting the EQ and sweeping it across the frequency spectrum to find the ugly bits,and then reducing the level at those problem frequencies to tame them. Looping a few bars of the sequence and soloing the track made it easier to concentrate on specific parts.

Peff then fired up a Matrix step sequencer, drew a bipolar curve, and mapped the output to a mixer panpot to bounce a sound effect between the left and right speakers. He also wired a Matrix into a Subtractor amp-level input to create stuttering pad sounds.

Other tweaks were more conventional:

• Tightening up drum sounds by shortening the decay envelopes on a ReDrum;
• Using effect sends to add reverb to individual ReDrum hits;
• Reducing the mud in a conga part by applying a highpass filter;
• Adding a touch of chorus to drums to stereoize them;
• Swapping out a cymbal sample to make the part fit better.

Mastering with the Masters

After Childs led a section on synthesizer sound design, the workshop moved into the mastering phase. "The trick with compression for mastering is just to do a little bit—don't let the gain meter drop below –6dB," Peff advised. He also cautioned against maximizing the level, pointing out that dynamics are one of the main tools a composer has to work with. Childs recommended waiting a week between doing your final mix and starting to master it, just to cleanse your aural palate.

Reason's Combinator has a lot to offer the mastering process, it turns out. (To aggregate devices into a combi, simply shift-click them, then right-click. You can even apply a custom graphic to the resulting Combinator module to help you remember what it does.) Peff demonstrated ganging multiple compressors to make a super-multiband compressor, as you can see in the photo above.

Line 6's Hayden Bursk shows how to use Reason as a sound module by ReWiring it to Ableton Live. (Click to enlarge.) Here's a movie clip of the demo.

Seeing Reason

In the end, not only was I jazzed to dive into Reason at last, I began to see the program as more than just a pixellated recording studio. It's really an instrument in itself, or more abstractly, an object-oriented programming language. The ability to connect endless numbers of devices in endless ways makes it extraordinarily fertile ground for sonic exploration.

For more tips from the Reason Workshops, see Peff's report or his new book, Power Tools for Reason 3.0. His site is full of elaborate Reason files you can download and deconstruct to get a sense what's possible with the program. One that wowed me was a "sweepstakes" patch he played at the end of the workshop. It spewed old-school video-game sounds for a few seconds, then kicked out a random number based on the number of students in the room. Lucky (?) student #13 won a copy of my book.