Specifications

QUICK TUTORIAL
21
You may also want to add some effects to the music. In this song, there are two
effect devices connected: a delay and a chorus/flanger. These are connected as
send effects from the mixer, allowing you to specify how much of each mixer
channel signal should be sent to each effect.
13. Raise the Aux send level knobs at the top of a mixer channel.
Send 1 is connected to the delay, while send 2 goes to the chorus/flanger.
The Aux sends.
Finally, let’s try tweaking some controls on an actual instrument device, to
change the sound. In this example we will use the Subtractor synthesizer device,
but all devices have parameters that can be adjusted on the device panels in the
same way.
Unless you have a very large screen, the Subtractor device isn’t visible right
now. You could use the scrollbar to scroll the rack down, but here’s a quicker
way:
14. In the sequencer area (above the transport panel), click on the
name “Subtractor” in the track list to the left.
The rack is automatically scrolled to bring the Subtractor device into view.
15. Try adjusting some parameters while the song is playing.
You may for example want to tweak the “Filter 1 Freq” slider, to change the
brightness of the synth bass sound.
That concludes the first tutorial! Now, let’s move on to creating a Reason song
from scratch.
Creating a new song
In this tutorial we will start with an empty rack, to let you add your own devices
“from scratch”.
1. If you like, close the current song by selecting Close from the File
menu.
You can have several song documents open in Reason at the same time, but
each song uses some memory and computing power, so it’s good practice
to close songs you don’t need.
2. Pull down the File menu and select Open.
3. Navigate to the Reason program folder and open the Template Doc-
uments folder.
4. Select the file “Empty Rack.rns” and click Open.
A song document window appears. This consists of an (almost) empty rack
and there are no tracks in the sequencer.
! Normally when you create a new song, you would select “New”
from the File menu. This command opens the default song (see
page 105). The built-in default song contains a few devices, but if
you have set things up so that the default song is “Empty Rack.rns”,
you can just select “New” from the File menu, and ignore step 1 - 4
above. See page 105 for instructions on setting up the default song.
5. Pull down the Create menu and select Mixer 14:2.
A mixer device is created in the rack.
! The reason why you should start with a mixer device, is that all sub-
sequent devices you add will then automatically be connected to a
mixer channel.
6. Pull down the Create menu and select Subtractor Analog Synth,
and then Redrum Drum Computer.
You have now added two instrument devices to the rack. If you look in the
sequencer, you will note that two tracks have automatically been added, one
for the synthesizer and one for the drum machine.