Rewiring Reason in Reaper
In my last post about Reason, I professed my love for the program. In my opinion, when you ReWire it into your DAW of choice, its the greatest VSTi ever.
If you’re like me, your knowledge of DAWS (Pro Tools, Reaper) is a lot more expansive then your knowledge of Reason. Your familiarity and comfort level is also very different between the two programs. That being said, I prefer sequencing in a DAW rather than in a program like Reason (which is pretty much a DAW, sans recording). I’m more comfortable automating, recording, and drawing MIDI in Reaper or Pro Tools than I am in Reason. So its no wonder that I love ReWiring Reason into my DAW and working from there.
Reaper makes ReWiring child’s play in the scenario I’m talking about. So let’s get started!
1. Launch Reaper and create a new track. There should be nothing on the track.
2. On Track 1 (our ReWire track), we’ll click the “FX” button and be brought to this menu:
Your Reaper plug-ins
Chose the ReWire: Reason plug-in and click “OK.” Reason will open in Slave mode (you want this) and you will then see this menu:
Your ReWired Reason ins/outs
3. Like I said above, in this scenario we will be drawing all of our MIDI in Reaper and essentially using Reason as one big VSTi. That being said, we’ll focus our attention on the “MIDI Send To ReWire” tab.
Now go back to Reason. Create an instance of the Thor synth and load up a preset. Once you’ve done that, go back to Reaper and back to the menu above. Make sure you’re on the “MIDI Send To ReWire” tab and we can start assigning.
Right click on Channel 1. You’ll see a small drop-down menu. In that menu should be something like Thor (Bus 5 Chan 1). Choose that. Your menu should now look like this:
MIDI from Reaper on Ch1 going to Reason
4. The hard part is over. Now, in Reaper, create a four-bar MIDI loop (Insert -> New MIDI Item). Once you’ve drawn a few notes in Reaper, hit play. If you followed these steps, you should be able to hear Thor (or whatever synth you want). Repeat for everything else you want in your track!
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That’s it for this scenario. Feel free to comment or ask any questions you want!
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Yo this is bookmarked. Good Dope!
Thanks for the kind words, Stacks!
This is not a very comprehensive example at all. It doesn’t cover the hardware rack in Reason, nor recording MIDI or audio in Reaper nor does it even touch on IO routing.
This wasn’t meant to be the most comprehensive guide to ReWiring. It was meant to be a decent point to start from.
That being said, if you’re not satisfied, write your own tutorial. We’d be happy to post it. :)