Making Beats in Reason
Reason is one of the best tools around for making all kinds of beats for all kinds of music. Hollin Jones feels the rhythm.
Drum machines have been around for years, and software beatboxes almost as long. If the hardware drum machine was liberating for a generation of musicians in the 1980s, then software alternatives have revolutionised life for many more producers and musicians over the last two decades. The only issue some have found has been one of integration – the fact that you had to run most software beatboxes as plug-ins inside a DAW. Reason was the first big music application that incorporated a drum machine as part of its new rack system, making beat-creation as well as other kinds of music programming much more intuitive, straightforward and flexible than it had been before.
This was largely thanks to the ReDrum, a multi-channel sample playback unit that could be triggered from a keyboard or other MIDI input device, programmed by hand or by using a more traditional step sequencer, and gave you control over the sound of each of its ten channels. To top it all off, you could load your own samples into it to make personalised kits.
In addition, the Dr.REX loop player opened up the world of super-flexible REX loops to Reason users, offering beats and other loops that could be time-stretched, manipulated and generally mangled with no adverse effect on the sound quality.
Multi skilled
What some people don’t realise about making beats in Reason is that, while many producers use the software to make electronic music, that’s only one of the things it’s really good at. The large number of kits and loops you get on the Factory Sound Bank CD are a good starting point, plus there are literally thousands more available commercially, usually quite inexpensive and even sometimes free. Reason is as good at rock drums or slow ballads as it is at pounding techno, and thanks to technologies like ReWire, it’s easy to make your beats in Reason and then export them or stream them live through to another DAW.
If you have Propellerhead’s Record installed, the two programs link together seamlessly to form one catch-all production and recording environment. The means by which you program and produce beats may differ slightly depending on your style of music, but with a copy of Reason and a little skill you can make all the loops you like.
Drumming up ideas
Since Reason is MIDI-based, its tempo is entirely flexible and you can change the speed of a track even if you are halfway into writing it, as well as use the tempo automation track to gradually speed up or slow down a project. Normally, though, you will pick a tempo at the start and activate a click track, set up a loop and load up a ReDrum to get started. Let’s say you’re working on a track and you need a conventional, electronic beat-style of rhythm. The ReDrum looks like it would probably be well suited to this kind of thing, and it is. Once you have loaded a kit, you can play it using your MIDI keyboard or MIDI pads and you will see the channels light up as they’re triggered.
You can program the ReDrum using the main sequencer (we will look at this a little later) but for now, let’s explore the onboard step sequencer. This can run independently of the main sequencer if you press the Run button on the drum machine and it will automatically sync to the project’s tempo. The Steps control enables you to set how long the pattern will be, from 16 to 64 steps, although 16 or 32 is an easier length to work with since it can display only 16 steps at once, even if the Edit Steps knob helps you to get around a little more easily. The Resolution knob controls the feel and timing of the pattern, and the Shuffle button makes the module follow the Global Shuffle amount as set in the ReGroove mixer.
To get started, hit Run and select the first drum channel by clicking its Select button. Click one of the 16 drum pads to activate it as it plays back, adding hits for each time you want the drum to sound. Then move on to the second drum channel and add further hits. You will see that when you select a drum channel, the display of 16 pads changes to show the pattern for that individual channel. Repeat this to build up a beat and layer up to ten channels of different sounds together into the pattern.
You will notice from the feel of your beat that this kind of programming is well suited to electronic beats because it encourages a repetitive, metronomic approach to pattern creation. But that’s not to say your beats need to lack variation. By default, when you click on a pad its velocity is entered as medium, so each hit will sound the same. This is a nod to early drum machines, which often had only one velocity setting, resulting in the mechanical feel of those early drum parts. Here, you can change the Dynamic knob before selecting a pad to change it to either soft or hard, or you can use the [Alt] or [Shift] keys while clicking to shortcut to them. Adding a quieter or louder beat now and again at key points, such as at the beginning of a pattern, can help to add interest.
Tweaking the sound
Each drum channel on a ReDrum can also be extensively tweaked to tailor the sound of the kit to your liking. As well as a couple of effects sends per channel there are also pan, level and velocity controls for submixing the kit before it is sent on to the main mixer. It’s handy, for example, to be able to quickly pull one or two elements up or down within a beat. Perhaps even more usefully, channels also have sample length and pitch controls. Length can be used to cut the tail off a sample, perhaps if you wanted to take a kick drum with lots of decay and make it shorter and snappier.
Pitch is handy when a sample isn’t quite right and needs moving up to make it punchier or down to make it weightier, and is a good trick to use to make kick drums more meaty or to make hi-hats less intrusive. This is simple pitch-shifting and so it does affect the length of the sample, although with drum hits this is rarely a problem because they are so short to begin with. Bear in mind that the ReDrum is able to load longer samples and if you pitch-shift those, there may be an adverse effect on synchronisation.
Channels 1, 2 and 10 on a ReDrum have Tone and Velocity knobs, which you can use to further tweak a sound. These are well suited to bass drum hits and it’s no coincidence that channels 1 and 2 are where these are most often loaded. Channels 6 and 7 also have a bend control attached to their pitch knob, which can be used to add a portamento effect to the hit.
Seeing patterns
Building up a beat and tweaking the parameters of the samples loaded into the ReDrum is the first part of the process, the next is building up a pattern. For electronic beats, you may want to use the Pattern mode in the main sequencer. The ReDrum has 32 pattern slots and you can copy and paste patterns between these slots, modifying each one as you go to build up more and more complex rhythms.
To place these into a project to form a song you have a couple of options. The first is to activate the Pattern lane in the sequencer, then use the Pen tool to draw in blocks of data, clicking on each one to choose which pattern slot it should play back. This is simple yet effective and lets you retain the editability of the patterns you’ve built. So, for example, if you’ve programmed an intro, build-up and a main section several times over in a project but then decide that one of your patterns needs a change, you simply go back to the ReDrum, make the change and it is automatically updated in every instance of that pattern in the sequencer, since it is being referenced rather than existing as MIDI notes.
The pattern method of sequencing is slightly limiting in that you get 32 slots per ReDrum, but you can always duplicate it and carry on tweaking to get another 32.
The second method is to place the pattern from any given ReDrum slot into the sequencer as notes. You can do this by choosing Edit>Copy Pattern To Track, at which point the pattern will exist as a regular MIDI clip in the sequencer. There are a few reasons why you might want to do this, such as exporting the pattern, moving it to another track to trigger a different instrument, or running it through the ReGroove mixer to change its feel substantially.
Hands-on beats
If you prefer a more organic approach to programming beats, you can simply play notes in to a click as normal, ignoring the pattern section altogether. This is particularly handy for more acoustic drum sounds, where you might want a human feel rather than a mechanical one. All the same sound-shaping tips apply within the ReDrum, but you would record and quantize your data in the sequencer just as with any other part.
One advantage of this is that you can easily route the track through the ReGroove mixer and in doing so achieve lots of different types of swing, with precise control over the feel. With rock or other kinds of acoustic beats you can think of the ReDrum simply as a container for the samples and the main sequencer as your palette. If you work with more conventional drums, check out the Flam control on the ReDrum, which adds a second hit very close to the first, replicating the roll effect that you get when playing real drums, which is perfect for snare hits.
Another interesting thing about the ReDrum is that if you spin it around, you’ll see that each of its ten channels has an independent stereo audio output as well as a variety of control voltage ports. The most useful application for these audio outs is to process different channels of a kit separately. Let’s say you had a cool dub drum beat, but needed the snare to occasionally go through a Space Echo-style effect. What you would do is create a delay unit, route the snare channel from the ReDrum into it and then on to the mixer, using automation to switch the delay on and off at the correct times.
This concept extends to any drum sound and any effect, and thanks to Reason’s modular design you can even gather together all the effected channels you have routed out using a Line Mixer so that they remain on a single fader on the main 14:2 mixer for convenience.
Call the Dr
The other main beats module in Reason is the Dr.REX loop player. Although this can’t be programmed in the same way as the ReDrum, it has other unique attributes. Load up any loop, drum or otherwise, and you can play its slices manually from a keyboard, which is great for cut-up and hip hop music. Placing a REX loop on a sequencer track and then double-clicking to view it in Edit mode reveals the slices as MIDI data, which can be moved, deleted, duplicated and otherwise messed around with to quickly and easily create new beats and loops from existing ones.
The clever part about this is that whereas drum hits in the ReDrum tend to be clean and short, slices in the Dr.REX can include one or two sounds (or sometimes one and a half sounds, depending on how the loop has been chopped when it was created). As a result you can make interesting beats by re-sequencing REX loops manually or by using the Alter Notes command in the Tool window, which has the effect of creating new patterns while maintaining the timing. Alternatively, you can manually re-order any ReDrum or REX parts then either use the quantize commands or route them through the ReGroove mixer to pull them back into time or give them a specific feel.
Reason is an excellent blank canvas when it comes to making beats and version 5 will expand its potential considerably. Even if you are working with version 4, it’s easy to create great-sounding, believable beats in any style. For electronic beats consider the ReDrum’s onboard sequencer and the pattern lane. For greater flexibility or a more human feel for rock and acoustic beats, play your beats as normal MIDI clip data into the sequencer then quantize, modify or ReGroove it to get the right feel. For more cut-up styles or for really fast beats, load up a Dr.REX and drop in some ready-made, auto-time stretching beats. Glue the whole thing together with some creative routing and mixing, use reverbs, compressors, delays and EQs to sweeten the sound and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a master of beats in Reason.
This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 90
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