Ask A Sound Guy

Yeah! Reason! Everyone uses it and there’s probably a million tutorials on how to do this or that in Reason, but there hasn’t been one on our site yet. So while most of my tutorials/Q&As are on the subject of production in electronic music (and sidechain compression is a fundamental technique in genres like House), I figured I’d write a quick how-to on how to achieve that breathing synth effect we all love so much (seriously, you do)!

Note: This tutorial is being done in Reason 4. I really doubt if things are much different in 3, 2.5, or even earlier versions.

1. First thing you want to do is create a 16:2 (which means 16 inputs, 2 outputs) mixer and an instance of ReDrum. Create a very basic four-to-the-floor kick pattern in ReDrum. Don’t route your ReDrum to anything, we’ll do this in the next step.

2. Next, create a 6:2 Line Mixer. Route your ReDrum into input 1. Do not route the master outputs of the 6:2 into your 16:2 (now refered to as your Main) mixer. Route Aux Send 1 of your Main Mixer into input 2 of your 6:2 mixer.

Routing ReDrum to the 6:2

Routing your Aux send to the 6:2

3. You need something to sidechain, right? What you can do now is create an 8-bar loop and create a few sustained synth notes. I loaded up an instance of Subtractor and created an 8-bar synth part in the Sequencer window with the Pencil tool.

8-bar loop in the Sequencer Window

Next, double click the empty 8-bar loop with the Selection Tool (the arrow) and your Sequencer should look something like this:

Piano roll in the Sequencer Window

You’ll next want to create a series of 1-bar notes to fill up your loop. The default is 1/16 note, so change that setting to Bar. Also, for this exercise, make sure Snap to Grid (the magnet next to the note values) is on.

Now just draw some notes with the Pencil Tool.

8-bar loop

4. So far, so good. Now create an MClass Compressor. Route the outpute of your 6:2 mixer into the Sidechain In on the MClass.

Routing your 6:2 Mixer to your MClass Comp

Make sure to route the output of your synth to the input of your MClass and then route the output of the MClass into your Main Mixer. Now, anytime you want sidechain something, you simply send the signal from Send 1 on your 6:2 Mixer.

Make sure you experiment with the controls on the MClass. With some tweaking you can get the perfect sidcechain synth sound in no time at all.

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So thats that. Reason is an amazing program…it sounds good, its totally modular (for the most part), and you can use it inside your favorite DAW. That being said, I think it takes far too long and far too many steps to successfully sidechain something inside the program itself. But, hey, its just my opinion.