In this interview, San Francisco producer/engineer Michael Winger explains how he is using Reason, Record and Pro Tools together. He talks about some of the creative options this setup gives him and also gives us a demonstration on how to set it up.

Download DigiMMEHelper.zip

Installation Instructions:

1. Extract the contents of the .zip file
2. Install the Setup.exe
3. Run the “Digi MME Helper”
4. Add more programs to the list that will work with it (if not already present).
5. Click update
6. Enjoy

In this week’s episode, James Bernard shows how to create a typical dub step wobble bass sound in Record and Reason.

Propellerhead Software’s product specialist James Bernard kicks off this series of tutorials with a demonstration on creative uses of the Record mixer’s dynamics section to create rhythmic gating effects, also known as ‘trance gate’.

hit the jump for the rest of the tutorial

The first thing you need to do is either have a loop ready to open up in Recycle or load your song in by clicking File > Open or pressing Ctrl + O on your keyboard. Find and highlight your song and click “Open”.

Once your sample is open in Recycle it should look like this:

You can now begin setting up your chop points. Once loaded into reason each section you chop will be assigned to a pad/key on your midi controller. Some choose to use the Sensitivity bar (the slider thingy with “Sens:” next to it), but I like to take extra time to do it myself using the pencil tool. If you set your own points it will be much more precise and you will have more control over your sample. Click the pencil and begin clicking on the wave file where you think would make a good slice.

The image above shows an example of what the Sensitivity bar would do. Recycle doesn’t have a brain and can’t tell what sounds good or not. It will just set a point wherever there is a peak in the wave file. This can be useful in looping, though.

You can see that I used the pencil to set my chops in this one. The locks above the lines mean that the line wont dissapear when you adjust the sensitivity. The next step is to load the .rx2 file into Reason’s Dr. Rex Loop Player or NN-XT. I will use the Dr. Rex this time because it is much simpler for sampling.

Now, the question I probably get asked the most is “how to use it like an MPC”. In my videos people see me pressing pads on my Akai MPD32 and wonder how the sample keeps playing after I let the pad go. They also ask how to get the next pad to “interupt” the first one if I press another pad while a sound is playing. The answer is in the polyphony and the release. Polyphony basically is how many sounds or chops can play at one time. The release is how long the sound will play for after you let go of the pad. You must set your Polyphony to 1 and Release to 127 if you want MPC style sample chopping. I will go more in depth with the Dr. Rex loop player and show you how to do this with the NN-XT in the next post.

Ski Beatz is a producer who’s worked with some of the biggest names in Hip Hop, including Jay Z, Mos Def, AZ, Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim and Camp Lo. Watch the movie to see him in action and visit http://www.ableton.com/skibeatz to get the Ski Beatz slicing preset.

First ever tutorial on Reason and Recycle. Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to stay updated. Instead of commenting here, comment on the videos page if you have any ideas for a tutorial and I will do them every week or so.