Reason power user here learning Live and have questions

[thedreampolice]

First of, I love Reason. I am very excited for Reason 8, and think the program is a very creative songwriting environment. I LOVE some of the Rack Extensions ETC. That being said in some ways I am hitting a wall with it. My music/sound design career is taking off and I find myself needing great string sounds (reason lacks this) more creative sound design tools, like Live and Reaktor. And boy Komplete sure is tempting. Anyway, I have a license for Live 8 suite but I will upgrade to 9 in the next week or so. So any general words of wisdom for this workflow coming from Reason? ( I also know Pro tools pretty well) I don't plan on ditching Reason at all, just use Live when needed and Reason when it makes sense. I am going through the Sadowick Production tutorials on youtube right now so those are a big help.

So specifically, Reason does a great job of take lanes. For example I can load a drum kit in Reason and have a hi hat part, kick part, and snare part in their own lanes and groove quantize each one a bit different. Is there a way to do that in live? I really love that.

Any other advice? Thanks!

[jestermgee]

In regards to drum kits these are done just on a piano roll but each "note" is an element....

The good thing about Live is there are multiple ways to do the same thing depending on what you like to do. Thake drum kits, as I said a pattern will consist of all elements of a drum kit played and to edit is very easy. Each element has its own audio track for effects and sound routing, sends, returns etc. But you may decide you want completely separate hats, kick, tom patterns so you can easily copy/paste individual elements. This can also be done creating separate MIDI patterns and "Sending" midi data from another track to your main drum kit. This allows you to create multiple patterns sending their data to the kit.... You can then group all this together as a single kit... Hell you could have multiple kits all acting as a single kit.

Keep in mind though that all this is great but can also seem complex initially and can sometimes scare people off. Time is what you need initially to just figure these things out for yourself but from someone who dabbled in old Reason 5 for a while it was almost like going from a fenced in box of creative tools to an open world where you can build what you want.

[thedreampolice]

That's fantastic. I'm still figuring it all out. Can you point me to a tutorial on this. For example let's say I loop record a drum part, and lay down a kick, hat, snare in a four bar loop and I want to groove quantize the hat with the mpc 55% template and the snare with the sp1200 groove for example, what's the best way to do it? I really like working in reason this way, but I want to use lives drum racks to chop samples, it's so much easier in live then in reason. Thanks!

[thedreampolice]

Ok I have been playing with it and it seems I need to create a new midi track for each part and route them to the instrument to do what I want. Easy enough, is there a better way? I know I'm missing a thousand things along the way here. Ha

[jestermgee]

I think you are on the right track. As I said there are numerous ways to achieve the same kinds of things depending on how you want to work. I don't have any tutorials to think of off hand but there is a load of info around and nothing beats just getting in and doing stuff until it clicks. I'm only ever on the forums when i'm at work and have nothing better to do.

[Stromkraft]

Ok I have been playing with it and it seems I need to create a new midi track for each part and route them to the instrument to do what I want. Easy enough, is there a better way? I know I'm missing a thousand things along the way here. Ha

Yes, each part can have only one groove applied at a time. You can also make grooves permanent by committing them. If you then copy the committed MIDI events from this part, undo the commit to keep the original, and when in the main loop (also committed) you paste these events, retaining the groove per instrument as it's now fixed. In this way you can have one clip with multiple groove quantizing applied.

I'd investigate the possibility of fusing the groove files too, depending on the objectives. If 2 grooves work together they can probably be fused, except velocity most likely need to be tapered off to keep the profile of each voice.

Velocity is very interesting to play with in grooves.

[xbitz]

macpro was created an exceptionally good series

http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorials/Ab ... pplication ( including the drum racks http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/abl ... drum-racks ) the tnt one is brilliant http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/abl ... and-tricks one for sure