Reason tutorial.be

Intro/preparation
1. Fun with drumbeats
2. Bassline/melody
3. Automation
4. Synths and filters
5. Effects
6. Your own samples
7. Cables/vocoder
8. Finishing touch
9. Exporting to mp3
10. MIDI
What's next...

Notes & Chords
Tips & Tricks
About Wauter
Guestbook
The Liam Howlett Reason interview

Intro

This English version is still under construction! Please check back here in a week or 2 or learn Dutch ;)

So you want to give making electronic music with your PC a go. And you want to do that with Propellerhead's Reason, the coolest piece of software in existence for doing that.

Well, You've come to the right place!

I believe that Reason is the best program out there for learning about audiosoftware, and more generally about the process of creating electronic music. The biggest con is the price, but once you get your hands on Reason, you have all you need for years of music-making fun, and - what's more important - for creating great-sounding electronic music, whatever the subgenre.

A fine tutorial that really starts from scratch is surprisingly hard to find on the internet though. So after having to explain the umptheenth time to a friend how to work with Reason, I wrote this tutorial, which allows you to start getting creative with Reason right from the start, whithout having to work yourself entirely through the (rather big) manual. Now I - and you, in a while - can just say "first read reasontutorial.be and we'll talk after that, son". Easy!

No knowledge whatsoever is required in advance, however some basic musical knowledge (what's a note, octave, measure...) always comes in handy when making ANY type of music. I wrote a topic explaining those things here.

Unlike most other tutorials - like the Reason Tutorial CD-Rom - I will focus 100% on the practical side of working with Reason. The creativity has to come all from yourself!

Some further remarks before we get started: this tutorial is ment explicitly for the absolute beginner, so the answer to a question like "how to connect multiple velocity-dependent layered sample-maps at the same time at one vocoder?" wont be found here. I have a Tips & Tricks page for that, but it is still rather empty now.

The general rule for learning anything also holds for this tutorial: practice makes perfect! That meansyou should get comfortable with all the introduced terms as fast as possible. The lessons follow on to each other very closely, so be patient; don't proceed to a next lesson until you've really mastered the previous one.

My apologies if the English is a bit sloppy, I'm not a native English speaker. Special thanks goes to Koen 'DJ Feixar' De Bock for helping me make this tutorial as good as possible, and all to all my nagging friends who motivated me to write this in the first place. Allright, Here we go!

Preparation: default song and locations

I presume you've already installed Reason 2.x on your hard disc, with the Factory Soundbank (which is standard). Now start Reason, and go to the menu Edit -> Preferences... (this opens automatically the first time you run Reason). Go to the Audio page, and make sure the "Audio Card Driver" says Primary Driver or something like that. It differs from pc to pc what exact driver is best to select, as long as it's not no sound, because we do wanna make some sound here :)

Now proceed to the Sound Locations page, and mark the folder containing Reason (and the factory soundbank.rfl file) as location 1. This is a kind of bookmarks, so you can always go to that folder quickly whenever you wanna load sounds into reason. From now, when in this tutorial you need to open/save something, I'll always suppose you go to this folder first.

Now close the preferences, and go to the menu file -> Open... Than open Empty Rack.rns from the folder Template Songs. As the name gives away, you've now loaded a song that consists of nothing but an empty rack. This rack is the "working space" of Reason, on which virtual devices can be placed to make your music with.

Now place a mixing panel on the rack by right-clicking somewhere in the black area, and than selecting mixer 14:2 (1) from the pop-up menu. Scroll down a bit, and add a Redrum Drum Computer (2) the same way. Notice how the Redrum is automatically connected to the mixer's channel 1. (hit TAB to view the rear of the devices on the rack, with the cables that connect them) Now save this song as "mydefault.rns" in the templates folder using the menu file -> save.
Finally go to the Edit -> preferences menu once more, and in the "general"-page, indicate you want a custom default song, that is: the Mydefault.rns song you just saved. Now everytime you run Reason (or start a new song), this song will be loaded by default. Ok, you can close the preferences, time to get going now...

On to lesson 1: Redrum

If you want to contact me, send an e-mail to wauter@reasontutorial.be. I would love to here your stories/questions!

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