Build a Master Reason Combinator for Your Drums

Here’s a great tip for all you Reason users out there: Build a Reason combinator for your drums.

Reason 3 and 4 are fabulous tools for the fast laying down of beats. If you know what you’re doing, you’ll discover techniques that can save you hours of messing around trying to find settings.

1/. Start a new song with an empty rack. Holding down shift, right click to add a 14:2 Mixer, this will serve as a ’sub’ mixer. (holding down shift as you add rack instruments / fx will bypass auto-routing and piling up loads of cables that really confuse things).

2/. Holding down shift, right click to add a Redrum (a cracking drum machine / sampler, rather like Roland’s TR909). Now beneath Redrum in the empty rack space,
hold down shift and right click to add a few Mclass compressors. Lets say you have Bass, Snare, Cl-hat, Op-hat and a TomTom sample. Add a compressor for each one.

3/. Hit TAB key on the keyboard to flip the Reason rack over,now on Redrum begin rewiring the kick drum. Take it’s outputs and run them into the L-R inputs on the first compressor. (tip: label each compressor after the sample it’s effecting) When that’s done, go to the compressor output and wire this into the L-R inputs of the mixer channel 1 (the 14:2 mixer you just added and not the master song mixer).
4/. Repeat this step for each instrument, outputting the individual sounds from the Redrum to each compressor, and back out to individual (sub) mixer channels on the 14:2 Mixer.
5/. When that’s all done, take the 14:2 (sub) mixer’s main outputs and link them up to the song’s Master mixer channel 1 L-R inputs.
6/. If you feel like really putting the cherry on the cake, right click on the (sub) 14:2 mixer and add an RV7000 reverb unit on send 1, a digital delay on send 2 etc.
7/. On Redrum, write a pattern using your favourite patch / sounds. Find a kick, snare, hats and anything else you like using to get a groove going. While running in Pattern sequencer mode, start tweaking the compression on each individual samples’ Mclass compressor, until it sounds bright and crunchy. (At this point you might prefer a bit of reverb ( sub mixer 14:2 send fx) on the snare - so try these settings to add more character.
8/. Once you’re happy (if not, just keep swapping samples over in the Redrum until you find the perfect match…also keep tuning the compression seetings on each sound), shift click to select ALL of the rack objects you just created (mixer 14:2, Redrum, RV7000, delays, all Mclass Compressors). When they all have a highlight edge around them, right click and select ‘Combine’ from the flighout menu.
9/. Finally, save this as a combinator patch, in a location you use frequently. This works like a dream from here onwards: when you start a new song from scratch all you need to do to set the (highly professional sounding) drums up is to create-Combinator and select this patch from your presets. If this pattern or the associated Redrum sounds don’t fit the song you’re working on, all you need to do is change those elements and maybe the individual compressors associated with them.

In conclusion:
What you’ve achieved: the successful building of a pro-drum machine template.
The results: because the template contains both individual dynamic processing (direct compression per sound) and auxillery effects (reverbs and delays that can be added in small or large quantities per sound) you’ll recognize the advantages of this when you hear it. The main advantage being the clarity and seperation of each drum hit, also how each sound finds its own space thanks to its dedicated compressor. It sounds like published song. Wow!

(and of course it’s a lazy programmer’s dream…just load the template up and swap the Redrum samples to suit your latest project).