Using the Reason Rack Plugin in Pro Tools

• 00:00 – Intro
• 00:34 – Creating a track and loading Reason
• 01:01 – Loading an instrument into the rack
• 01:21 – Adding effects to the chain
• 01:36 – Warping the sound with Synchronous
• 01:45 – Player MIDI effects: Scales and Chords, and Dual Arpeggio
• 02:26 – Flipping the rack for custom routing
• 02:50 – Using Reason on audio inserts for mixing
• 03:31 – Closing thoughts

Intro

If you’re a Pro Tools user, there is probably one thing that you never want to do, and that is to go outside of Pro Tools for your instruments or your music-making workflow. That’s why Reason, running inside Pro Tools as an AAX plugin, brings the best of both worlds together for you. Your Pro Tools workflow doesn’t change at all, but now you can tap into Reason’s experimental, fun, powerful, creative — I mean, use whatever adjective you want, it probably applies to Reason’s Rack.

Creating a track and loading Reason

Getting the Reason Rack going in Pro Tools is just like any other AAX plugin you’re surely used to. Let’s create a new track in Pro Tools, we’ll make it stereo, and it’s an instrument track. Maybe the easiest way to load Reason onto this track is to click our track’s first insert, click search, and start typing “Reason” — there it is. The Reason Rack loads as a blank canvas, a virtual studio rack inside Pro Tools that is ready for you to create any instrument and effects combination you can dream up.

Loading an instrument into the rack

To start out, let’s click Browse Instruments, and we could do something as simple as loading one instrument into the rack, like the Europa wave-shaping synthesizer. If we record-enable our track in Pro Tools, our Reason instrument is ready to go.

Adding effects to the chain

Adding effects below Europa automatically patches them into the signal chain. Let’s put a Stereo Echo delay on our synth.

Warping the sound with Synchronous

And if we wanted to try something that warps and transforms our sound even more, we could add a Synchronous.

Player MIDI effects: Scales and Chords, and Dual Arpeggio

Now let’s put some of Reason’s Player MIDI effects atop our instrument, to change the notes that we’re sending into our synth. I’ll put a Scales and Chords player above Europa to play big, full chords across the keyboard, and then I’ll send those chords into a Dual Arpeggio player, to give my chords a pulse and rhythm. That is the “see-what-happens” nature of building Reason Rack device chains.

Flipping the rack for custom routing

Of course, there’s a whole other dimension to experimenting in the rack. If we click the Flip Rack button, it does exactly that — now we’re looking at the back side of our devices, and the cables that route signals around from device to device. We could dive further into custom routing here, by sending the left and right signal paths into different effects, or using control voltage LFO devices to modulate our synth, through some advanced and experimental results.

Using Reason on audio inserts for mixing

And when it comes to mixing in Pro Tools, Reason isn’t only for instruments. Sure, you can build modulating, dreamy synth textures, but you can also use Reason’s Rack on audio inserts to apply staple mixing effects like convolution reverb, or filters and chorus, or instant vibe and coloration through Pulveriser or the Audiomatic Retro Transformer. Reason’s channel dynamics, channel EQ, and master bus compressor will give you the professional console treatment in the laptop form factor. There really isn’t a place in your Pro Tools session that wouldn’t benefit from adding the Reason Rack, and the more you experiment with it, the deeper it gets, and the more fun it gets.

Closing thoughts

As crazy as it sounds, Pro Tools was a DAW designed over 25 years ago to bring computers into the professional studio — a place they hadn’t gone yet. And with Reason’s virtual rack of instruments and cables in Pro Tools, we’re bringing the professional studio back to the DAW.