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One of the main things that makes Reason stand out to any other music creation tool is the way the Rack devices can interact. Add movement and create unexpected effects by setting up devices to modulate one another.

Complicated? Not at all — let INFEKT show you how easy it is to unleash the power of the Reason Rack. He also shows you how you can set the Rack up to create parallel effects processes.

Transcript

Intro

Hello, it is INFEKT, and today I wanted to talk about the modulation and routing capabilities of the Reason Rack.

The rack view: front and back

This all takes place within the rack view, so you can do it either in the Reason DAW itself, or in your DAW of choice with the Reason Rack Plugin. Since the Reason Rack is built like analog gear, it also has some of the advantages of an actual analog rack — so you have the front view, where you can see your devices and how they’re mounted into this virtual rack, but then you can also turn the whole thing around to view the cables that connect them.

Audio cables vs. CV cables

Here you’ll notice that you have two different kinds of cables: one is the thicker ones, and then the thinner ones. The thicker ones are for audio signals, and the thin ones are for CV, or control voltage, signals, so you can use those to modulate things, as I will show you in a bit.

Pressing K to fade unselected cables

One trick here is that if the cables get overwhelming, you can press K on your keyboard to visually fade out the cables of all the devices that aren’t selected, which makes it easier to keep track of what’s connected to what.

Following the audio signal flow

So first of all, let’s start taking a look at what we can do with the audio signals, so the thick cables. You can follow the signal flow by first looking at what’s connected to what, obviously. So if we look at this example here, at first glance it looks pretty messy, but then I can press “Hide Cables,” and then I can just click device per device and follow the connections.

So here we have the main output from Malström, the left and right audio output, going into RV7000. Then we have — click on RV7000, the reverb, and we can see the audio output here is connected to the Chorus/Flanger, and if we click on that, the audio output here is connected to the delay line, and if we click that, then we can see that the output of that goes back to our host — back to Ableton, in this case.

Usually you have separate cables for left and right signals, and if only the left cable is connected, the signal will come out in mono, rather than just coming out on the left.

Automatic wiring vs. Shift-drop

By default, effects will be wired automatically, so they take effect wherever you drop them in the rack, in that position. However, if you want to add a device without any automatic wiring, you can hold Shift as you drop it in.

Reordering devices vs. reordering cables with Shift

Now, if you just change the order of your devices by dragging them around, the routing will stay untouched. But if you hold Shift while dragging, the cables will automatically be changed, so the signal is routed in the correct order. This is super important, because you don’t actually need to manually change the cables every time you want to change the order of your effects — and it took me way too long to realize that you can just hold Shift and it’ll automatically rewire it.

Intro to parallel processing

So if you want to dive deeper into what you can do with the cables, I think a good place to look at is parallel processing. It’s a powerful technique for sound design, where you use an audio splitter to basically duplicate your signal, and then process one of the instances with one or more effects and leave the other one dry, and then you bring the two back together using either a mixer or an audio merger.

For example, I want to add some spice to this drum loop here.

Setting up parallel distortion with Scream

And to set up a parallel distortion setup, in this case I go to Scream 4, open it up — now, it’s just a regular scream, which can be way too extreme, so we want to add a flavor of this extreme distortion in parallel. And so, the way to set this up is: we need an Audio Merger & Splitter, and we want to put that before the Scream 4 here, before the effect. And then the second thing we also need is a Line Mixer, to bring the sounds back together. So I’m going to drop that in while holding Shift, so that nothing gets wired automatically.

And then we can look at the back of the rack, and first of all we need to basically disconnect everything, just so that we have a clear view. Then we grab our audio-in from host, ’cause this is the Reason effect plugin, so we’re sending all the drums into this — we get the audio-in connected to the splitter, and that basically takes this signal, whatever goes in here, and splits it into all these outputs, so we have the same signal duplicated to all these outputs.

And then one instance goes to the Scream 4, and then into the mixer, and I’ll just click “Hide Cables” up here, so that we have a clearer view of what’s going on. So now we get the Scream 4 distorted signal into the mixer, and then we can also take the dry signal, so the unprocessed signal, and also send it into channel 2. And now we’re getting a distorted signal and a clear signal both sent into this mixer, and we can mix them — because now we can call this our “Distorted” and the other one would be the “Dry,” just so we see it down here in the mixer.

Now we can mix it, and one more thing we need to do is to go from the master out also back to the main audio, to the host. And so now we have that freedom to basically make a super crushed version, and just mix it in with that mixer, by controlling the amount of the distorted signal we want in here, but we still also have our dry signal.

Parallel reverb processing

So you could, for example, do parallel distortion, parallel reverb, where you can process specifically just the reverb chain with other effects. And to demonstrate that, basically I’m just going to replace the Scream 4 with a reverb unit, and then if we look at the back, everything is still wired the same way. And then I can add other effects after the reverb — make sure the effect is on 100% dry/wet here, ’cause we only want the reverb, and we still have the dry signal.

And so now we can add in something like an EQ also, and we just want to make sure that this is wired so that it’s after the reverb in the chain. So I dropped it in with Shift, so that it doesn’t get connected, so now I can disconnect the reverb from the wet chain and make it go into the EQ first, and then take the output and put it into the wet chain. So now this is our wet signal — that’s the reverb plus EQ, and this is our dry signal.

So if we listen to solo just a reverb, and dry — still dry. So now what we can do is we can, for example, low-cut that reverb, or we could even do something really crazy, like instead of an EQ, we could add distortion to the reverb, make a super crushed version of that reverb in parallel. So that’s pretty cool.

Parallel frequency shifting

You could do parallel frequency shifting, which creates this really crazy phasing sound, or any number of effects, really. And for this, all we have to do is to replace our reverb again with, for example, a Kilohertz Frequency Shifter. We can remove that distortion as well, make sure it’s still wired correctly, and then…

And again, the goal is to have basically two duplicates of the sound, and one of them is processed with, for example, distortion, and then they’re brought back with a dry signal.

Intro to CV and modulation signals

So then the thin cables, the CV or control voltage signals, can be used to modulate different parameters and synthesizers or effects, which essentially allows you to make devices communicate with each other. So these aren’t signals that you can hear, but they’re just used to control values of knobs, etc. And if you just look at the back of some of the synths and effects in Reason, you’ll find that many of them have lots of these little CV connectors that can be used to send or receive modulation signals, so they’ll be called ins or outs — ins are the ones that can receive, and outs are the ones that send.

And this is something that’s pretty powerful in Reason, and that I often miss in other DAWs actually, because you can, for example, use an LFO from Malström and modulate other things and other effects with it, like a phaser effect that’s placed literally anywhere in the rack, and you can just grab that signal and modulate something with it.

Linking an LFO to a phaser

So check this out — I have this acid bassline over here, sounds like this. So this has modulation on the filter frequency, so that it slowly opens and closes with that Mod B, and now I want to actually use that Mod B and link it to a phaser.

First of all, I’ll turn that phaser on, and all the internal modulation of this is off, so it just sounds like a static phaser right now. So now I can look at the back of the rack, and I can take the Mod B CV output here, and link it to the frequency. Then I can set the intensity of that modulation, but I’ll leave it all the way up in this case — let’s just see how it sounds.

And now what should happen is that this curve that goes at a bar speed affects also the frequency here. And then I can decrease the intensity — super cool for giving stuff movement. And now, if I change the LFO speed, for example, it’ll affect both the filter cutoff and also the phaser, of course, because it’s linked to that.

Visualizing CV signals with a CV Analyzer

Amazing. And a cool tool that you can use, if you want to actually visualize your CV curve, is a CV Analyzer that you can get on the Rack Extension Shop, to analyze a signal — here we need to send it in. So if we still want the CV signal to affect our sound, we need to first of all split the signal, so that we can send one instance into the analyzer. So we put that merger/splitter here — very handy tool.

Now we can grab our mod output that we linked to the phaser before, connect it to the splitter, and now we connect one instance to the CV-in of the analyzer, and then just one instance to the phaser. And so now, if we take a look at this, we can already see here our CV being visualized. We can zoom, and we can see — when I slow this down, it’s reflected here; if I speed it up, we can see it here. So that’s perfect for analyzing your CV signals.

Wrap-up

And yeah, thank you for watching. I hope you took something away from this, hope you got some inspiration or some useful tips for working with modulation and routing in Reason. And don’t forget to eat your veggies, as always. Peace.