From the course: Reason 12 Essential Training

Exploring Reason's powerful audio effects - Reason Tutorial

From the course: Reason 12 Essential Training

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Exploring Reason's powerful audio effects

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- In this chapter, I want to dive into reasons effects both audio and MIDI, as well as some utility devices and tools that you can add to the reason rack to further sculpt your sound. So generally an audio effect is going to be applied after a sound source like a sampler or one of your synthesizer instruments. And it's going to process the incoming signal in a variety of ways. So an audio effect can be as simple as a delay or a reverb, or even an EQ because we are boosting or cutting certain frequencies, generally anything that's affecting the signal. And we have quite an extensive library effects in reason, some of them are amp modelers. So this could be used in your signal chain when you're recording your guitar or base, to kind of model an amp cabinet or something like a Neptune pitch adjuster, which is generally used on vocals all the way to various reverbs, a vocoder different distortion units, delay units and more. So generally again, you're going to apply these in the signal path after a synthesizer or sampler and reason, and let's see how this works. So I'm just going to play this track back. (upbeat music) So in this track, I want to focus on just this base for a second. So I'm going to solo it. (piano music) And the base in this track is generated from monotone base synthesizer. And you can kind of hear that we already have a little bit of a delay on this track from the synthesizer itself but if I wanted to add a different audio effect let's say a reverb, let's take this RV 7,000. And what we can do is drag it right into the rack after monotone. And when we do that, you can see that it was added, and if I flip the rack you can see reason automatically routed this up. So it took the output instead of going to the mixer, it took the output of monotone routed it to the reverb and then from the output of the reverb to the mixer. So now our effect is in the signal chain. And now when I flip the rack around by hitting tab and hit play (piano music) We can hear that reverb, but it is a lot of reverb. And one of the things I want to talk about that you'll see generally on a lot of effects just across the board, because we're not getting into each one of them in detail in this course is a dry and wet control. So that's essentially going to mix the wet or all the way process signal with the dry unaffected signal. And when it's set to completely wet here that's why we're seeing this and hearing this wash of reverb. But if I dial this back a little bit we can start to hear more of the dry signal. (piano music) Cool. So I think right around there works for me. And by the way, with this reverb, just like some of the others, if you hit the drop down arrow you can see the programmer and change some of the settings. A lot of the tools in the reason rack we'll have this kind of dropdown. And then another thing is that we can also stack effects. So if I wanted to add, let's say a different tool after that, like let's say this echo unit, I could put that in right after the reverb. And then if we flick the rack around reason understands that we're trying to add this right in the signal path of that instrument. So now we have a reverb going into this echo unit (piano music) and to the mixer. We do have to be careful with delay units like this. Sometimes if you adjust the feedback to a percentage that's too high it can clip and distort the output but that's the general idea of audio effects. And there's a turn to choose from. Again, we're not going to each one in depth in this course but I encourage you to experiment with them because that's really going to be where a lot of the unique character comes from in your music.

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