Ableton Forum

I've kind of had my eye on Reason for a while, and though I don't anticipate indulging myself anytime soon, I sort of had it in mind as a de facto VST plug-in through Rewire. I've done a little bit of Rewiring with Logic Pro, but that's a one way street into Logic.

Just curious what people's thoughts are, does it work well, etc.

Others will be better suited for blow/by/blow than I, but I had issues with them rewired. Nothing wrong as far as bugs or crashing or anything like that, but it was like "WTF, if I can't do thing a with them rewired then what is the point?"

Hopefully someone will chime in that is an expert and set things straight. But, I HIGHLY recommend an aggressive youtube/vimeo search and see for yourself.

I used to use it with Live and it does work quite well (better than other DAWs IMO because of the external instrument device).

What i used to do was set up a couple of templates, one for Live and one for Reason.

In the Reason template i would create 8 (an arbitrary number you can choose however many you want) empty Combinators and route the direct outputs of each mix channel to the individual audio outputs in the master section of the rack (also rename each of the mix channels to something different from the combinators).

In Live, i would create 8 external instruments devices and route each one to the combinators (the midi to the actual combinator and the audio to the mix channel, which is why you rename it).

With this basic setup, you can create instruments in Reason and control them in Live. If you want to automate reason then you will need to create a max for live patch that will have the combinators controls on it (or google it and find a pre-made one)

Thanks for the replies, did a not so aggressive (got lucky with the filters) YouTube search, found this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQcGir4-o4

Shows basic setup, and use of the External Instrument device in Live, which I've never used. Looks all good, the device can send MIDI and get return audio, just have to route the audio in Reason back to the proper channel in Live.

I did a bit, but then figured it was just easier to use VSTs.

I use Reason 7 with Live 9, and it works great. It is a little bit of a process to set up the channel but not much and it didn't take me long to be able to do it very quickly. A template using external instrument devices isn't a bad idea, especially just to get started. I have found that ReWire is a little more processor heavy than I would have anticipated, but not so much that it has interfered with it's usefulness to me. Other than a handful of free VSTs Reason is the only non native sound source I use -- it's what I started making electronic music on back in 2000/2001 (at least on a computer platform), so I'm very familiar with the workflow and it kind of feels like home to me.

That said, if I were looking for a new set of instruments right now and had never used Reason, I might lean towards spending the extra $200 or so and get Maschine MK2. In fact, I am considering that. With either Reason through Live or Maschine through live there does seem to be some redundancy (you can make full tracks in either without Live). Plus with Maschine you get the included hardware controller. Just a couple thoughts for you to consider.