How to Make Reason Sound Great
Reason is a wonderful system that offers a lot of scope to the electronic musician from it's inbuilt synths and effects, ability to patch both audio and Control Voltages (CV) and particularly the overall workflow which is second to none.
Sadly Reason gets caught in a debate about how it “sounds” with accusations of “thin”, “weak” and “unprofessional” being tossed around weekly. Reason is used in many of the top production studios around the world for adverts, films, Rock and yes floor stomping Trance. So why does Reason cop more grief than the average and how do Pros get great results?
Reason 1 – Frequency
Firstly, the audio quality of Reason is superb so that it has highs all the way up to the ceiling which is un-natural in the world of real instruments. Sure everything has overtones up there but they are barely audible. Reason on the other hand has enough activity up there to be noticeable. Having all that activity going on up there draws the ear. As a result the lower, meatier frequencies sound diminished by comparison.
The fix here is high freq roll-off. The best tools for the job are the Scream Tape (Parameter 1 knob), the BV512 as an EQ and the MClass Equalizer. Other tools that can also work wonders are the ECF-42 Filter, Thor, Maelstrom and the PEQ-2 Parametric EQ. Each of these units operates as a filter to be able to attenuate the high frequencies and make the instruments sound more real and beefy.
Reason 2.5 - Quality
Reason's sound engine is very clean. Real world sounds are never very clean. A MiniMoog was a dirty, noisy beast and even a Virus has it's ways of sounding powerful as it outputs it's signal from digital to the real world which is part of the Virus “sound”. Reason does none of this by default so the sound can seem lifeless in comparison to hardware or even other DAWs that hardcode a character into their signal path.
The fix is to mess the sounds up at several points in the chain just as would happen in the real world. Main unit here is the Scream Tape unit with low to mid levels of Damage (not enough to sound like distortion). Thor's Filters can also be used here as they have Gain Boost that, particularly in the case of the 24db Type I with Self-Osc turned off, can be overdriven nicely. Another unit I like for this is the BV512 as an EQ using a low number of bands, typically 4 or 8. Sure the Vocoder EQ is not phase accurate but that doesn't matter for electronic sounds as they have no real world basis.
Reason 3 - Volume
The metering on the Reason mixers is not exactly studio quality in that it has no +0db segments. The top of the meter is clip. We are used to meters that have overs but these meters don't so we tend to assume the end of the yellow LEDs is 0db leaving the last few db unused. This is because in the early days Reason had no real Compressors or Limiters and was intended to be ReWired into Cubase (or similar) for better mixing. Clip in the digital world is generally nasty so we mix quiet. Quiet is never as inspiring as loud as we lose Sound Pressure Level (SPL). Also in the digital domain quiet is less bits and fewer bits is lower quality.
Fix this by running levels pretty hot and insert the super MClass Mastering units to tame levels and avoid clip. Again the synths can often be boosted in volume and presence by running them through Scream, BV512 and Thor/Maelstrom/ ECF-42 Filters.
Reason 4 - Modularity
Reason is a very modular system. Initially it doesn't seem so because the modules are complete synths and effects instead of Filters, LFOs and ADSRs. This assumption is a mistake. By the mid-80's every synthesist knew that getting huge sounds was not a case of using only one instrument but layering several. MIDI made that easy. Digital makes it even easier. VSTs tend to use a lot of CPU but Reason is very efficient so you can layer up silly numbers of Subtractors, Unisons and Choruses to make massive sounds. Coupled with Reason's CV patching (allowing you to use just an LFO from a Maelstrom) and the techniques above Reason can sound just as beefy (or perhaps more so) than any other DAW.
To make the most of Reason's modularity use Combinators as they help keep things tidy. If you didn't already know you can start a sound in the general Rack and then select all the units and choose to Combine them. Sometimes you have to re-patch but mostly it is all handled for you. You will generally want to move any sequences from the individual synth to the new Combinator Track. Of course you can keep the instrument track for automation purposes.
An Example
 Reason Boost.zip |
It is always great to have the work of others to dissect and learn from so I have made a simple (and rather cheezy) piece using all of the techniques in this article. Listen to the piece. Turn off the Master effects as a whole then per-unit. Listen to the difference in the sound, sometimes it is subtle but at others it is very noticeable.
Next do the same at every instrument to hear how the combination of instrument treatment and mix treatment combine to make a piece that feels far more “real” than when all the treatments are turned off. Compare the sound of the piece with no treatment (just raw instruments) compared to the final version.
Happy Reason using.
:-)
