How to program redrum in reason

If the song starts with no drums, you will need to enable the metronome click so that you can hear when to bring the first pattern in. Click Record and Play, and you're off. As you play through the song, change the patterns on Redrum by clicking the pattern-selector buttons. The trick is to change the pattern during the bar before you need it to change. The change will not occur until the beginning of the next bar. Remember to take into account how long your patterns are.

The pattern list is used in conjunction with the pencil tool to draw in pattern-change data. Making some fine adjustments with the pencil tool. Eventually, you'll make a mistake, especially when changing between banks which requires two button presses. Stop recording and have a look at the pattern track you've created. To do this, click the button at the top left of the sequencer pane to switch between Arrange view and Edit view. You should see something like the top screen on the previous page.

If you can't see the beige pattern track, click the sixth icon in the sequencer toolbar to display it. To correct your mistake, simply rewind a bit, and drop back into record to overwrite and continue. When you've finished, you're ready to try editing the pattern track.

The pattern track displays which pattern is active at any point during the song, using yellow 'bars'. When you've recorded pattern changes on the fly, the pattern bars will not show the exact time you changed pattern, but instead are quantised to the bar where the change actually took effect another advantage over regular automation.

Each bar has a small tab displaying the bank and number of the pattern. At first glance it might appear that you can click on these to adjust the position of the pattern changes, but unfortunately this in not the case. The pattern change bars do not quite behave like objects or notes that can be picked up and moved.

Instead there are two other ways of editing in the pattern track. The first is to make a selection across a range of time with the cursor tool see second screen on previous page , the contents of which can then be moved, deleted, or copied and pasted.

The second is to draw data in over the top of what's there, using the pencil tool. Both these methods take a little getting used to. The first thing to be aware of is that you will almost certainly want to have the edit grid active, so that your edits snap to the nearest bar. The grid value is set from the first of the three pop-up menus at the right-hand end of the sequencer toolbar. Snap-to-grid mode is enabled by clicking the magnet icon to the right of this menu. Next, try experimenting with what happens when you move, cut or delete sections from the pattern track.

There can be no gaps in automation tracks, so when something is moved or removed the previous pattern is extended to fill the space. Your entire sequence of patterns can be converted to notes for conventional MIDI editing. To select the pencil tool, either click its icon in the toolbar or temporarily switch to it from the cursor tool by holding Command Mac or Alt Windows.

If you look again at the screenshots you'll see a small drop-down menu, to the left of the pattern track display, that has a pattern number next to it. This displays the pattern that will be written by the pencil tool. Clicking on this menu lets you select from all the 32 patterns see top screen on previous page. Drawing into the pattern track with the pencil tool will overwrite whatever is there with the selected pattern, snapping to the grid. For example, if I wanted to start pattern B4 earlier, at bar 21 instead of 23, I'd select B4 from the menu, choose the pencil tool, then click at bar 23 and drag to the left until the B4 bar was extended to bar 21 see second screen on previous page.

If you wanted to go the other way, and extend B3 later, you would need to select that pattern and draw it in. In other words, you can't simply trim the boundaries, you have to overwrite with the pencil tool. Pattern sequencing in Reason is a very fast way of programming drums, but there are certainly times when you will want to use note-by-note recording and editing. Next time, we'll explore the best ways of doing this in Reason. For now, there's one last method that shows you how to move between these two worlds.

In the sequencer, right-click on the Redrum track or select it and go to the Edit menu and choose Convert Pattern Track to Notes. Your entire drum arrangement will be converted into individual notes in the Key and Drum lanes, ready for individual editing and groove quantising. Redrum 's step sequencer offers many benefits of both hardware and software drum-programming techniques.

There's the immediacy of a hardware drum machine and the fun of achieving unexpected results, but you can also manipulate the patterns in more ways than you can with most hardware devices. You can have patterns up to 64 steps in length, but can only view the pattern 16 steps at a time. The steps you are currently viewing , , and so on are selected with the Edit Steps switch. Resolution sets the playback speed with respect to the main tempo.

You would mainly use this control when programming intricate beats that require 32nd notes, but you can go right up to ths, at which point a step sequence would last only half a bar! The Dynamic switch lets you add more subtlety and feel to your patterns, by allowing you to set how hard each hit is played soft, medium or hard. Start by alternating between 16th note triplets, 32nd notes and 64th notes, and then punctuate the end of each phrase with a burst or two of th notes.

Select a punchy sample with a healthy attack from your library and drag it into a new track in the sequencer. Emphasize the downbeat by punctuating the first beat of each measure and leaving a space on the 3rd beat. Now duplicate this pattern to a new instance of Redrum, but find a different kick sample that features less attack but a lot more sustain.

Experiment with the length of sustain to dramatically emphasize the booming effect. Additionally, you can create a bassline out of this kick sustain by adjusting the pitch each time the kick sample is sounded.

Instead of its usual placement on the backbeat the 2 and the 4 , program the snare to hit on the syncopated 16th notes between the 8th notes. The channels control the flavour of the drum.

What kind of drum it is, how loud it is, what the pitch is. There are 10 different channels inside one single Redrum computer. While most of the upper controls are the same Send, Pan, Level, Length, Pitch there are additional settings different per channel.

As you can see in the following image where it is highlighted. While the other settings are Sample start point to Velocity. Some hit types might need different tone treble on certain sounds while a samples is hit harder that is velocity. Take for instance a snare that needs to brighten up while the snare is triggered "faster". This can be done using the Velocity to Tone on channel 1, 2 and Other hit types might require a different pitch bend change.

Toms would be one of those, same goes for certain effects. There are different controls to make the pitch bend effect work. This is why channel 6 and 7 are different then the rest.

In the left lower corner there is an option to load up and save a complete Redrum patch. Propellerhead Reason comes with a couple of nice standard Redrum patches with different styles. From techno to house, to chemical beats to acoustic drums. When you have a lot of stuff inside your rack and the Computer itself is having problems playing them back it starts to stutter you might want to turn high quality interpolation of when that happens.

Otherwise, keep it on. As soon as channel 8 is triggered when channel 9 is still playing, the 9th channel of the Redrum will then stop and channel 8 takes over. With this you can trigger the drums to play. There is however another method to control the Redrum computer using the sequencer itself.

Both methods have its advantages and disadvantages and it is probably up the music composer to decide which is the preferred method. But as I want to make everything more complete, I will present both techniques. First of all, you might want to start by loading up a single patch. In the next couple of example files I will start using the dublab Heavy Kit 1 which is located in the heavy kits section of the default Reason Factory sound bank. To start making the bass drum to play, you will need to select the 1st channel first before entering the notes.

Default the 1st channel is selected. By pressing on the steps knobs the knobs will be turned orange. This will mean that at that specific moment the drum will play. With the the first example I have added the bass drum and parked that on each 4th note using the pattern editor.

Propellerhead Reason redrum example file 1. Also keep in mind that initially the redrum will start to play when the 'RUN' button is pressed. When the patterns are being placed in the sequencer, the redrum will then automatically start to play as well.

To start adding the snare drum we can select the second channel, and park a snare drum on step 5 and step