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Producer Justen Williams shares his beat making process with his full-size AKAI controllers, a keyboard and a pad controller, and how they let him work in Reason with no limitations. He uses MIDI mapping to control tap tempo from a pad and a filter from a knob, chops an acapella onto Kong pads, searches his VST presets with AKAI’s VIP plugin, and plays trap hi-hats with Note Repeat. If you make music by clicking with your mouse and wonder what a switch to a controller-based workflow could do for you, you’ll definitely want to check this out.

Download Justen Williams’ 808 bass patch for Europa.

Europa is included in both Reason+ and Reason Free.

More from Justen Williams: see his portable controller setup in Beatmaking on the go with Reason and AKAI controllers, the first video in this series, or hear how Justen Williams got started making beats in Reason.

For more information on AKAI controllers, visit akaipro.com.

Transcript

Intro: full-size controllers in Reason

Hey, what’s up? My name is Justen Williams. I am a Reason user, New Orleans native, and part-time background dancer. One of those two things is a lie, but I’ll let y’all decide. In my last video about how I use portable controllers, hopefully some of you had some aha moments about how controllers can help enhance your musical feel and creativity. If you haven’t seen it, click the link in the description.

I wanted to take things one step further today by not just showing you how you can maximize the use of a portable controller, but how the full-size controllers I use when I’m working at the house help me to work in Reason with no limitations. Just like my portable rig, I got a pad controller and a keyboard, and they serve similar roles as before, but because they’re more full-featured, we can make some things happen.

The word of the day: mood

The word of the day: mood. To get excited about making music, I have to create a mood, and it’s that same mood that’ll catch a listener’s ear. Now, moods can come from an interesting chord progression, a dope lyric, or even just a sound. But if I can create a mood, then the music itself will flow naturally from that mood.

Starting with a rhythmic sample

I tend to like slightly weird rhythmic samples because they evoke a mood right away. For example, let’s drag in one of Reason’s drum machines, the Redrum. Reset it and load this shaker sample I have on channel one. It’s a bit fast, so let’s lower the pitch to slow down our sample.

MIDI mapping a pad to tap tempo

To get the tempo of the song and the shaker to match, I’ll use Reason’s Tap Tempo. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never really found clicking my mouse on a beat to be very musical. So instead, I’ve mapped pad one of my MPK249 to Reason’s tap tempo. If I trigger my sample using the MPD, I can tap along and set the tempo of my song. All right, looks like we’re at 147.

Recording the shaker

I’ve got transport controls on my MPD226. Let’s hit record and lay down some shaker.

MIDI mapping a knob to a filter

To make our shaker a little darker, let’s add a filter underneath it. Now, what would be great is if we had that filter opening and closing over time. So I just right-click the filter’s frequency knob, then click Edit Automation. And now knob one on my MPD controls my filter frequency. So we’re ready to record some automation.

When it comes to filters especially, I always find using a controller is way more musical than just drawing in automation by hand.

Slicing an acapella into clips

My goal now: take this shaker, pair it with something interesting, and support the mood. So, watch. I went on Allihoopa and found this dry acapella vocal. I’ll open it in Reason and give it a listen. Anytime something jumps out to my ear as interesting, I’ll slice it into its own clip. Oh, that’s one. Oh, that’s one, too. When doing this, your taste may be a little different, and that’s a good thing. Ooh, this little thing is cool, too.

Tuning and bouncing the vocal clips

Now that we’ve got a few clips, let’s delete all the unused audio. I can also go into Reason’s pitch edit to make sure our singer is in tune, which she’s a little sharp, but let’s correct that. I can even do things like duplicating this clip and maybe making a note variation here or there. But ultimately, I’m going to copy these chopped-up clips, go back to my main song, create an audio track, and paste them in. Now that they’re in my song, I can right-click them and bounce to new samples.

Loading the clips onto Kong pads

And here’s where the good stuff happens. Using a Kong drum machine, which is Reason’s obvious partner for this style of pads, one by one, I’ll drag my four samples onto the pads of Kong. Since the vocal was dry, let’s activate the compressor in Reason’s mixer and add a little reverb on send one. Now we’ve got some samples to play with.

[Justen plays the chopped vocal clips from the pads.]

Finger drumming a beat on the pads

All right, we got a mood. And that mood tells me where I want to go next. So I load up one of my drum kits and we can get to work. Now, there’s a reason I said mood is the word of the day. Mood isn’t just the sounds that inspire us. It’s the feeling of making music, the mechanics of making music. So even though I could play drums on the keys or even click them in on the screen, for me, mood comes from these pads, this configuration, even this size square. And when I’m hunched over them, I’m part of a decades-old tradition of beat makers and innovators, and you better believe that puts me in the mood. So let’s hit record and capitalize on that mood.

Searching VST presets with AKAI VIP

Love it. Our song’s starting to come into focus. Since we’ve got a lot going on down low with the drum samples, let’s add some synth elements up high. If I wanted to search Reason for built-in sounds or Rack Extension presets, I could do that from the browser. But when it comes to searching my VST collection, I head to AKAI’s VIP plugin. VIP has cataloged my thousands of VST presets, and it presents me with a browser that I can search and load them all from one central hub.

So right now I’ve got a daunting 7,337 patches to wade through just to find a sound that’s in my head. But if I make some basic choices, like I can decide I want it to be a dance-style synth rather than an orchestral sound, and I can say I want it to be a pluck for something short and staccato, suddenly my 7,337 presets are down to seven. I can live with that.

Since my MPK249 maps to the VIP plugin, the parameters on the synth preset that I’ve selected are ready to go on my controller. I’ve got knobs for volume, filter frequency, LFO settings, and many more that I could tweak if I wanted to make the sound my own.

Layering two presets in VIP’s multi panel

But I can also go into VIP’s multi panel and drag another one of my pluck presets onto an additional slot. So now I’ve got two VST synth presets layered, where one is providing a nice note fundamental and the other some transient attack. All right, let’s record these synths.

Dark brass and an 808

Let’s go into Reason’s Factory Sounds and bring in some dark brass to keep the heavy mood going. All right, we got to add some 808.

Trap hi-hats with Note Repeat and MIDI clock sync

Now, at this point, I’d like to add some trap-style pitched hi-hats to my track. I’ve dropped a sample from Reason’s Drum Supply onto another NN-19 sampler, which spreads the sample across my pads at different pitches.

Trap hi-hats: they’re a style born from experimenting with controllers like this MPD. And the concept and setup is actually pretty easy. I’ve set my MPD to sync to an external MIDI clock. I’ve told Reason to output its MIDI clock to the MPD, and I’ve turned it on inside Reason’s sync menu. Now my controller and Reason are locked in sync. So if I activate Note Repeat while holding down the pad, my hats play in time. And if I change my time division, I can get some really interesting results. Let’s solo the drums and record some trap hats.

A topline vocal and time stretching

At this point in the production, let’s bring in a topline vocal. I grabbed one off Allihoopa.

[Justen previews the acapella.]

Now, you might have caught on to something right away: this song is a lot slower than our song. I’m not even worried about it, because Reason’s time stretch is so transparent. I just speed this to 147, and let’s see how the vocal sits with our beat.

Arranging the build

I put together an arrangement that builds up intensity. Here’s how it sounds.

[Music]

The breakdown

But after this much energy, we break it down. Let’s carry across our original shaker and plucks from VIP. I’ll lead us in, and we can lay down some chords. Browsing patches in VIP, I found this vocal sample from Exhale that I can play on my pads. And finally, you know, I got to bring back the 808.

Wrap-up

I don’t know about y’all, but I think we got one. You’ve seen today how the right controllers, the right mood, and the right instruments come together to support each other. Hopefully, I’ve shown you that changing the way you make music using controllers changes the way that you make music. It’s about feel. It’s about experimentation, but ultimately it’s about being a little bit better today than you were yesterday.