Using MIDI Hardware with Reason - Micro Tutorial Video Lecture - Reason

the reason Rack is bigger than ever and
offers nearly endless sonic capabilities
but sometimes you just want that sound
the sound of your favorite hardware
synth that you bought with your first
ever paycheck or that amazing little
drum machine you dug out of the basement
if you want to add these sounds to your
reason track the external MIDI
instrument is for you the external MIDI
instrument is exactly that an instrument
it's not meant for Middies advanced
specifications like system exclusive
messages it's meant to let you use your
hardware and make music happen so let's
do just that we'll start by creating an
external midi instrument the first thing
we need to do is make sure we select a
MIDI port that's where we send the MIDI
data this could be for example the MIDI
output port of your USB MIDI keyboard or
a dedicated interface
now we're capable of sending MIDI data
out to our MIDI interface but we still
need to connect our hardware instrument
to that interface so that all three
things can communicate I'm going to hook
up my Dave Smith instruments mofo for
some analog synth goodness there so now
that we're sending MIDI information to
my synth there's one thing left to do
and that's making sure we can actually
hear my synth - I've got the mofo
plugged into my audio interface so we
can just create an audio track and now
we can play or sequence our external
MIDI instrument just remember to turn on
monitoring on the audio track so you can
always hear it this sequence is pretty
nice but I want to adjust the filter on
my synth a bit sure I could just tweak
the synth in real time but we can also
do it in the reason rack on the external
midi instrument there's a rotary control
called the CC assign rotary we can
easily use this to control any CC value
for example the filter cutoff on most
sense a CC value of 74 is the filter
cutoff something worth remembering I'm
going to turn this on here and assign my
rotary to 74 now the filter cutoff is
ready to tweak directly from the reason
rack
we can also do something more advanced
like using a matrix and send the curve C
V to the assignable CCCP input
this opens up a whole world of modular
style tweaking enabling you to wire up
your Reason rack to your hardware in
fact you can go really deep and create
any number of external midi instrument
devices assign them to the same MIDI
port and create a massive web of
different CV connections to tweak
multiple parameters on your hardware or
if that's a bit too geeky for you we can
simply create multiple automation lanes
in the sequencer using the track
parameter automation and draw in
automation for the parameters we want to
control
then once we're ready to record just
select the audio track and hit record
our sequence will be recorded as audio
and is ready to be played back cut up
stretched or even bounce to a Rex file
so there you have it
how to use the external MIDI instrument
to expand your Reason rack and now if
you'll excuse me I have some music to
make