reason

final installment in today's post-apocalyptic photoshop adventures:

and as a bonus, a semi-transparent device skin:

an industrial skin i created for x-protocol; thought i would share with yall :)

reason in it's stock configuration is pretty aesthetically docile, so i 'shopped up some combinator skins to butch it up a bit. the 'zero' skin is fun :) enjoy!

this post describes how to build resonator effects in reason using delay units. here we will explore the comb filter approach. this demo song uses no synths or samples other than an (atonal) drum loop and a comb resonator. you will find this type of resonator makes it extremely easy to produce dissonant and spooky ambiences.

for you knob-tweaking pleasure, the .rns

’side-chain compression’. ‘bass-ducking’. if you’ve been paying any attention to music production in the last few years, especially dance production, you know that these concepts play a huge role in the modern sound. virtually every dance track, and increasingly many rock and pop tracks, feature these techniques - so what are they, and how do you incorporate them into your productions using reason?

view my tutorial on reasontutorials.net.

reason lacks any built-in resonator effects, but as usual, latent in those device racks lies the capability to build them. there are two general approaches to building resonators - using delay or comb units, and here is a prototype effects unit using the delay approach:

download :: boddicker-chord_ambience_prototype.rns

• listen to the demo song ::
  

some dudes were not satisfied with the potential my loopstation prototype for reason had for square-pusher-esque glitchiness - so to settle folks down, a working prototype and .rns demonstration of live psychotic glitching capability in reason:

download :: boddicker-glitchstation_demo.rns

• non-believers can listen to the demo song ::
  

some dudes were griping about reason's lack of a loopstation - so i thought "why not just build and release one and save the coders over there some time?" so here you have it - a working prototype and .rns demonstration of live looping capability in reason:

download :: boddicker-loopstation-demo.rns

it turns out all it takes is manually feeding back the signal of a delay unit into itself by means of some spiders, and cutting the signals appropriately using some mutes. for some reason i had to add an attenuator into the feedback loop even though no signals are being summed together - the number "79" shows up twice as a mysterious constant. if anyone can shed insight into this, i'd love to hear it!

anyway enjoy and get glitchy :)

i'm releasing my first pack of seven extremely hard-hitting stereo bass synth presets for Propellerhead's Reason. if you like the libraries that Vengeance puts out, you should love these sounds, which are especially suited to electro house, dubstep, drum'n'bass, and breaks. each combinator patch includes a matrix sequencer with a demo loop preprogrammed for your instrument-auditioning pleasure - just make sure to enable 'run pattern devices'. these require Reason 3.0, are compatible with 4.x.

• listen to the demo song
• download the combinator patches

my vote for 'most disgusting synthesizer of all time' is the robotic cat lead in The Prodigy's single 'Funky Shit'. i've spent some time wondering what the hell synth parameters could possibly produce this weird noise, and i sort of stumbled upon it by accident while screwing around with the subtractor in Propellerhead's Reason.

the secret appears to be running subtractive-phase-shifted saw waves through frequency modulation, with an appropriate modulation envelope to control the phase shifting. attached is the .RNS with a not-too-shabby reconstruction of the rest of the track.

download :: breathe.rns.zip