Getting Started Guide

TUTORIAL 1 - PLAYING A SONG
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About this tutorial
This and the following chapters are written in tutorial form to introduce you to some of the basic operations
in the program. So if you are new to Reason and wish to get started quickly this is where you should start!
In this first tutorial we shall go over the following:
• How to open and play back a song
• Basic mixer operations.
! This tutorial assumes you have made the necessary setting up for audio. If not, please re-
fer to the “Setting Up” chapter before starting.
Playing a Song
1. If you haven’t launched Reason yet, do so.
2. Pull down the File menu and select Open.
The Song browser window opens were you can open Reason song documents. It shows the contents
of your hard drive as a standard folder structure much like Windows Explorer or the Finder in Mac OS
X, but only Reason Song document files can be shown/opened.
3. Navigate to the Reason program folder.
This can be found in the Locations and Favorites list in the upper left corner of the browser.
4. Select the song “Tutorial Song.rns”.
5. Click Open.
The document window for the song is displayed on screen. This consists of a “virtual rack” with devices
(this song contains four instrument devices and two effects), a sequencer section and a transport
panel.
6. Click the play button on the transport panel (at the bottom of the window).
Playback starts. If everything is properly connected, you should now hear Reason play!
7. Click the stop button to stop playback when you’ve heard enough.
Now, try out some real-time mixing:
8. Click the stop button again.
This moves the song position to where you last started playback. In this case, this will be the start of
the song, allowing you to play the song from the beginning again.
The stop button. The play button.