Reason Micro Tutorial - Kong Basics Video Lecture | Reason Tutorials: The Ultimate Guide - Video & Sound Editing

Okay, so when we announced Reason 5
and the new Kong Drum Designer,
you saw this:
And you were like,
OMG!!! [strange vocal noise]
But today we thought we'd go a little deeper,
lift up the hood, kick the tires, and see exactly
what Kong is made of and what it can do.
Don't let its pads and its certain
hm, PC similarities fool you.
Kong is a self contained studio for sculpting
and creating new drum sounds.
Kong isn't called a "Drum DESIGNER" by accident.
It is as much Drum Machine as it is Sound Designer.
To take a tour of Kong, we'll break
it up into different sections.
The most obvious section is Kong's 16 drum pads
but just like on a real drum machine,
these pads are simply triggers.
It is actually everything ELSE that
goes on AROUND the pads
that makes Kong function and sound the way it does.
In fact the pads are more of a
visual metaphor than anything else,
But if you wield your mouse pointer
like a 21st century Keith Moon,
the on-screen pads are velocity and position sensitive.
Mostly, however, they are there to help you
visualize exactly what will correspond
to your physical controller
pads or sequencer note lanes.
The key to adjusting how these pads
function is the "PAD SETTINGS" area of Kong.
This is where you can create Mute groups
for open and closed hi-hat pads,
alt groups for snare drum variations,
or link pads for layered sounds.
You can also use the pad settings section
to do advanced hit type assignments
for rex loops, chunks of loops, or even individual slices.
For non-rex drum sounds, the hit
types available usually relate to
sound variations like open and closed hi hat types
or the physical location of a stick striking a snare drum,
for example its center vs. its edge.
Kong's drum control panel is where
you can set each drum's basic settings
like pitch, decay, pan, level, and tone.
If you've used the Redrum before, many
of these settings will be familiar to you.
This section is also where you
load patches, save patches,
or use Reason's new sampling feature
to make your own drum sounds.
So if the front of Kong gives you all the
power to rearrange pads, reassign pads,
and alter the basic sound of each pad,
it's what's going on beneath
Kong's surface that controls,
well pretty much everything else,
and that's a lot.
Let's click the "show drum and FX"
button to expand Kong.
Each pad has a corresponding "drum module."
That's basically what makes the sound you're hearing.
You can choose between synth modules, sampler modules, rex modules, or physical modeling modules.
We'll being going through each of these
later in their own micro-tutorials,
today I'll just show you that each drum
pad contains a module and two FXs slots.
Making a bass drum sound is as simple
as pulling up a synth bass drum module,
applying some compression, and
maybe adding a noise generator to it.
Perfect.
To the right of the FX 1 and FX 2 slots,
you'll see two more FX plates
but these aren't specific to just
the currently selected pad.
These are more global in nature.
The Master FX slot will effect every sound
that runs through Kong's master output
and the Bus FX slot can be applied
subtly or not so subtly to every pad
via the Bus FX knob in the drum control panel.
It's just like an AUX send on a mixing console.
So that's it for today.
Like I said, in upcoming tutorials we'll be
looking into Kong's various modules
and digging deeper into the pad settings section.
For now, I think I'm gonna just get back to my beats.