Reason Tutorial

eddyc

Righty then,

Ok so here is a tutorial on writing drum'n'bass in Reason 3.
I'll just preface this by saying that as good as Reason is you are probably better off using it as a rewire slave, mainly because the piano roll sucks balls, but also cos you cant use any 3rd party plug-ins with it or indeed record any audio.
You'll find attached to this post a .rns song file, its basically the intro and main part of a drum'n'bass song. As drum'n'bass has many genres there are many different production techniques that are specific to each, the one I'm more comfortable with 'neurofunk' or 'techstep' mainly consists of a pretty static drum beat with a funky bass-line accompanied by trancey style synths, so I wont be going into making heavier than hell distorted growling basses or getting those complex syncopated break-beats (although to be honest its very tedious doing that in reason),

D'n'b is quite fast in tempo usually between 150 and 180 BPM so be sure to set the tempo to somewhere along there, the tutorial file is at 175bpm

To start off you want to create a Mixer 14:2 , this is where all the instruments are going to be routed to before they are output to the soundcard, we will mainly be using the mixer to alter the volume of each part of the song.

Now we are going to start off with our drumkit,

First create a Line Mixer, this is going to be used as a submixer for each part of the drumkit before it is routed to the main mixer, next create a Scream distortion unit (it should be automatically routed to the send and return connectors on the back of the line mixer, press TAB to spin the rack around and make sure), we will be using the scream distortion effect on the drums to make them sound more gritty.

All the samples for the various drumkit pieces are from the xclusive drums sorted folder in the factory soundbank

The bass drum sound is actually 3 sounds played at the same time, first off load up a redrum drum-machine, for the first sample slot I used the Bd_Photek sample, this sample seemed to have a nice attack on it , the sample was too long so I tweaked the length of it quite a bit, in slot 2 I used the Bd_Boomer sample, this one had lots of body , the length was again too long so I cut it back a bit, ( in drum'n'bass its desirable to have short and sharp drum sounds as the tempo is quite fast and it can sound messy otherwise) , I tweaked the pitch so It blended better with the previous sample.
The last part of the bassdrum sound comes from a subtractor synth, I used the 88 kick patch, this will give the overall bass drum sound a nice solid lowend .
Because we want all the bassdrum parts to play simultaneously what I did was to take the Gate CV out from slot 1 on the redrum and connect it to the Gate CV in of slot 2 on the redrum, then to take the Gate Cv out of slot 2 on the redrum and connect it to the Gate CV in on the subtractor synth, with this routing arrangement anything programmed for slot 1 on the redrum will trigger the other 2.
Next I took the main output of the redrum and the subtractor and connected them to a new line mixer labelled 'Bassdrum', the output of this is then fed into an MClass EQ for some tweaking before it is finally added to the main drum submixer.
The drum pattern is programmed on slot one of the redrum , hits are placed on step 1.7 and 11, the pattern sequencer on the redrum was not used for the arrangement, it is just handy to have it looping in the redrum so you can apply EQ and generally sculpt the sound to your liking, to hear the pattern press 'Run' on the redrum and make sure that the 'Enable pattern section' button is on.

The snare drum is made up from 4 samples loaded into the redrum, SD_Ritehere, SD_One2, SD_Supafunk and Clp_Conga, the Gate CV's have been daisy-chained across the redrum so triggering the first sample will trigger them all, again the samples have had their lengths and pitches tweaked a bit .
The main out of the redrum is connected to an MClass EQ where I cut some of the mid frequencys and boosted some of the highs, this is in turn loaded into an RV7000 reverb with the DRM AMS SnrPlate patch, the Dry wet knob is at about 10% wet as we only want a hint of the reverb effect.
Next the main out of the reverb goes into an MClass compressor , the input gain is at maximum, the ratio is at maximum, the attack is at about a third and the release is at 0, this will boost the tail end of the reverb giving the snare a more snappy sound.
Finally the out of the compresser goes to the secound channel of our drum submixer.
The pattern for the snare is programmed on slot 1 of the redrum, a hit on step 5 and 13.

The Hi-hat is again on a redrum, the sample is Hh_Xfile2
The main out of the Redrum is put into an Mclass EQ where the high frequencies are boosted and then it goes in the main drum submixer, the pattern is hits on 1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15.
Finally there is a crash cymbal, another Redrum with the CYM1 10HSH sample, the pitch is highered a little and then the output of the redrum goes into the drum submixer.

Now with all the patterns playing you can go around the kit making finer adjustments to EQ and Pitch and whatnot, the Scream distortion unit was set to Overdrive with 50% Damage control, 66% tone and 0 presence, little bits of distortion where added to the Bassdrum, snare and hats using the AUX knobs on the main drum submixer.

Finally you can shift click all the different units that make up the drum kit and while they are all selected right click and select combine, this has nothing to do with the sound it just helps to keep things tidy as we add more parts to the tune.

Add 2 Dr. Rex units and route the outputs of each to a Line mixer , take the main out of the line mixer and send it to an MClass Compressor then out of the compressor to an MClass EQ, the out of the EQ can be routed to channel 2 of the main 14:2 Mixer, (You'll notice in the song file that there is a CF-101 and an ECF-42 in the chain before the signal goes to the main mixer but dont worry about that for now).
What we want are some loops that are similar to our original beat that was programmed on the redrum units, so I chose the Drb_Reprazent and Drb_Reeze loops which can be found in the Dr.Rex Drum and Bass loops folder on the factory soundbank.

For each Dr.Rex machine select the appropriate track in the arrangement pane and hit the To Track button on the Dr.Rex machine. This will write out on the piano roll the midi note sequence associated with each loop. Now as the loops arent exactly the same as the programmed one on the redrums the notes have to be altered a bit, select each track and switch to the piano roll, using the draw and erase tools alter the note sequences of each loop until they match the pattern programmed on the redrum, you can see what I did in the tutorial file.
Next adjust the EQ and the compression so the loops sit well with the programmed kit, I took most of the bottom end out of the loops and gave them some hefty compression
As with the redrum drum machines select the modules created for the loops and combine them to keep things tidy

The Percussion section is quite similar to the previous drum loops section, 2 Dr. Rex units are patched into a line mixer , the loops I chose were Congas_04a_085 and Tabla_05_G, these are located in the Dr. Rex Percussion loops folder in the factorysoundbank ,again I used the 'To Track' button to send the loops midi note sequences to the piano roll, to make the loops sound a little more interesting I turned on theLFO Sync on each rex unit , and set 2 different waves for each LFO, I set the destination to pan and the LFO rate to 2/4 and the amount to 100%, this gives a nice panning effect in sync to the track, out of the line mixer the loops are patched first to a delay then to a unison to thicken up the sound and finally to an RV7000 with theRollingfiltMultitap patch before connecting to the main mixer.
The units are again combined.

My intention was to make a bass patch next for the song but after some fiddling around I came up with a trippy lead patch instead, it just happens like that sometimes, the bass part came a little afterward,

The trippy lead part which came out of what was supposed to be a bass patch is made primarily of a Malstrom synth set to the MetalObjects Patch, I then added a Matrix pattern sequencer and made a little riff on it, its set to 32 steps and a resolution of 1/8, to add some movement to the riff, i tabbed the rack around and connected a wire from the Curve CV out of the matrix to the Filter CV in on theMalstrom, I switched the curve to Bipolar on the Matrix ,flipped the rack back around and switched to curve mode on the front of the matrix, there I just made a pattern which would higher and lower the filter frequencies on the Malstrom depending where on the line you drew.
The Malsrom then goes threw a delay, a unison and an RV-7 reverb before being patched to the main mixer

To be continued.......

Reason file http://edwardcostello.googlepages.com/Tutorial.rns

cornbb

Cool, that looks pretty sweet. I don't use Reason much but I wouldn't mind learning some D'n'B production techniques. Nice one.

Mick Shrimpton

Nice one!!

Keep it comin'...

Anima

Cool.

I might throw up a tutorial on breaks as well .

eddyc

Hey if anyone cant follow some parts of the tutorial or I seem a little vague please let us know, I'm tryin to add to it at least once a day anyway.

Oh and Anima good idea, defo throw one together