User Manual

SYNCHRONIZATION AND ADVANCED MIDI
557
Advanced MIDI - The External Control Bus inputs
About the External Control Bus inputs
The External Control Bus inputs allow you to receive MIDI from external equipment/applications directly to Reason
devices.
• These MIDI inputs are for controlling Reason devices from an external sequencer.
This could be an external hardware sequencer or a sequencer application running on another computer.
• If you want to control Reason from another sequencer application on the same computer, the preferred
method is using ReWire (see “Routing MIDI via ReWire 2”).
However, if the other sequencer software doesn’t support ReWire 2, the External Control Bus inputs can be an al-
ternative. In that case, you may need to use a MIDI routing application to be able to route MIDI from one program
to the other.
You set up the External Control Bus inputs on the Sync tab in the Preferences dialog:
D Select a separate MIDI port for each bus you plan to use.
Each bus provides 16 MIDI channels, for a total of up to 64 MIDI input channels. For example, if you have an ex-
ternal sequencer with two MIDI outputs, you connect these to two MIDI inputs on your MIDI interface and select
these two inputs for the first two busses on the Advanced MIDI page. You will then be able to send MIDI on up to
32 channels from the external sequencer to Reason.
D Make sure you don’t select a MIDI port that is already selected on the Control surfaces tab (or in the MIDI
Clock Sync section).
q To control external MIDI equipment from Reason, you use the External MIDI Instrument device. Refer to “Ex-
ternal MIDI Instrument” for more details.