Working with the Rack

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To begin making your own cool tune, you need to create a palette in which to place your "colors"; in Reason we call that the rack. The rack is modeled after a rack full of outboard gear that can be found in many professional recording studios . The rack is the core of Reason and is where you will manage all the devices you load.

Starting with an Empty Rack

First, begin with an empty rack.

NOTE

Mac OS X users can load this song from the folder Applications\Reason\Template Songs\Empty Rack.rns.

NOTE

Remember that you can set the Empty Rack as the default when creating a new song. Set this preference in the Sound Locations Preferences (as described in Chapter 1).

An empty rack contains only the hardware interface, the sequencer, and the transport bar.

The Rack, Front and Back

NOTE

You can also use the Tab key to quickly toggle between the front and rear views.

Hardware Interface

You will use the hardware interface to route the signal from any device in the rack to the outputs on your audio card.

NOTE

The MIDI In Channel assign button will display only devices that are loaded in your song. If you have no devices in your song, this menu will have an empty list.

NOTE

When viewing the front panel of the Audio Out device, no options are configurable. The front panel will display each output's volume level and whether it's in stand-alone mode, in which you are running the program on its own, or in ReWire mode (see Appendix A, "ReWire"), in which the program can be run from another application, such as Cubase SX. The rear panel view becomes the Audio In device where you connect Reason's devices.

The Transport Panel

The transport panel is where you will typically start and stop playback of your songs, but there's a lot more to the transport panel.

NOTE

For optimal performance, keep the CPU meter from getting too high. As a general rule, I try to keep the meter under 80%. This way there is room for the other portions of my system to remain responsive and keep the audio performance from suffering.

Adding and Removing Devices

Before you can begin to use Reason, you must load a device into the virtual rack. You can begin by adding a simple synthesizer.

NOTE

The parameters for each of Reason's devices will be covered in detail, beginning in Chapter 3.

If you wish to remove this or any other device that has been added to the rack:

NOTE

Simply right-clicking on the device you wish to remove and choosing Delete Device or Cut Device will remove the device; however, Cut Device puts the device on your clipboard and will allow you to paste it elsewhere in the rack.

Organizing Devices and the Rack

As mentioned, Reason can load as many devices as your computer's CPU can handle, so you might imagine that the rack, both front and back, can get fairly confusing. But the rack can be organized just about any way you like. You can move devices around the rack without have to worry about re-routing the cables (something I wish I could do with real hardware in a real rack).

Moving a Device

You can move the devices around the rack to place them to your liking.

NOTE

At this point you will have only one device loaded in the rack, so clicking and dragging on the device will give you the idea of how to move a device, but you will not be able to actually move it.

NOTE

Moving devices is a good way to keep similar components togetherfor example, you can categorize them by type of device or by the nature of the parts they are playing, such as percussion, bass, or pads.

Folding Devices

To conserve rack space, each Reason device can be folded, or collapsed , into a smaller version of itself.

NOTE

Folding is great for looping devices such as the Dr:rex Loop Player. More often than not, loops are tweaked then left to play. Once they're tweaked the way you like them, you can simply fold them out of your way.

Labeling Your Devices

You can label each of the Reason devices you have loaded. This can be particularly helpful if you have loaded more than one instance of the same device. The label is made to look like a piece of masking tape, which many real-world audio engineers use for labeling consoles and outboard gear.

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