This is a translated version of my article on delamar.de.

Yesterday I was attending Propellerheads Producers Conference in Berlin. On stage were Simon Grey, Heiner Kruse (aka The Green Man) and Philippe van Eecke.

Simon Grey

Simon started the Conference with an introduction to producing with Reason. He told us how he uses Reason (mostly) on Stage while playing. Being a Keyboarder he says Reason something like a big collection of many Keyboards he can dynamically choose from.
The wide range of Presets are helpful building a “Live Set” and Override Mapping is the Tool you have to use in order to make Reason playable while in a Live situation.

After his introduction Simon showed how to setup Reason to work with any extern MIDI Controller. The feature is called “Override Mapping”. Just right click on any parameter in any device and you can map an external Knob or Fader to eg. Filter Cutoff Frequency.
The advantage of mapping external devices to your Reason Rack is that you actually don’t have to look at the Software while playing. You are totally free and can completely get lost in you Performance.
The Keyboarder show s a demo track. While playing the Bass and some more instruments he uses his MIDI Keyboard to control Filter Cutoff, Delay times and such. Simon’s a good musician by the way. ;)

Something which for almost every track is a pretty basic Arpeggiator created sound using Thor.
Use a basic waveform like a sawtooth. Before Thor plug in an Arpeggiator (1/32 or 1/64, 4 Oct, Up and Down). Inside Thor activate Delay to smoothen up the sound. Now playing one note the sound goes up and down. Now you can use Filter Attack and Decay times to adjust your sound until you like it.

Some people are missing the fact that you can assign MIDI Controllers to Transport functions like Loop On/Off, Track Selections (in the Sequencer) and Record On/Off. Knowing that it’s quite easy to start your performance with a loop and then add other instruments and overdubs just by moving up and down and hitting record where it’s appropriate.

Working with a Rhodes sound in Reason is easy, too. But loading a Rhodes Preset is not the way to go. It needs some tweaking.
A quite good Rhodes Preset for Reason can be downloaded for free, he says.
To improve the Rhodes sound Simon uses a Reverb and an additional Pad sound which is coming from Thor. The Pad is mixed with a Reverb to make it wider and more subtle. Panning: Pad is sitting on the edges of your stereo triangle, while Rhodes is mixed to the middle. So Rhodes is surrounded by the (fat) Pad.

At the end of his speech Simon shows the importance of using Combinator. You can actually combine some devices by selecting them by holding down ⇧ and then right clicking on one of them and select “Combine” from the menu.
Reason tries to figure out how you would like to patch your devices together, when you don’t want Reason to auto-patch hold down ⇧ while creating a device.

Audiomagnet

After a short pause Timo from Audiomagnet is coming on Stage.
Audiomagnet is a new platform where musicians can sell their music and get some advanced features. Timos says that Audiomagnet is similar to MySpace but for “Pro-Musicians”.

On the website you can get a Pro-Account for about 99€. You get a player which you can put on their website and every listener can buy the tracks directly from their website.

But for 99€ you get even more. The Pro-Account allows you to put the player on your own website so can sell the music through their service on your site.
There’s Twitter integration, On-Demand CD selling (which will get you listed on Amazon!), a personal Blog and more.
Best of all. Audiomagnet take 10% of all the income. You can get a beta account on their website.

Heiner Kruse

Heiner is a Drum’n’Bass artist and producer. He owns a Label called Basswerk and has written a book about Reason (Musikproduktion mit Reason 4 — written in german language!).

Reason is an easy learnable tool. After a few weeks most people get what the software is all about.
But when Heiner started using Reason the sound was not very good.

Like in other Genres the Bass Sound ist created by layering Bass Sounds. Often you take one Sound which has more Bass in it and another one which fills up the High End.
Drums are also layered. When thinking about mixing a track it’s important to have every Drumsound as a single “layer” in your Mixer so each Drumsound can be adjusted seperately.

When mixing a track you have to have a look at the low end. Too much stuff in the Bass will weak your Bassdrum and Bass-Synth. In order to kee a clean low end open some Highpass Filters and treat every Sound, which is not part of the bottom of your track, with one.
But in Reason there is a limitation: No Highpass Filter!

You can work around that problem when using a quite easy Combinator (or Thor) Patch. Thor has an Audio In at the backside of the rack. So you can put every sound inside this input and send it through the device. Thor has a Highpass Filter!
Heiner goes even further and says that he actually uses Filters with a slew rate of 36dB/Octave. Just connect the output of the Highpass Thor to another Highpass Thor and another one. At the end you will get 12dB+12dB+12dB (=36dB/Oct) slew rate.

But filtering sounds bass frequencies has one disadvantage. The sound gets quieter. To work around this particular problem you can use Combinator to pull up Output Volume while pulling upwards Filter frequence. (Assign multiple parameters to one Combinator Knob)
…or use an ordinary Compressor…

To make it even easier for us, Heiner has put up some Combinator Patches at his website, which can be downloaded for free. (www.basswerk.de)

After talking about mixing The Green Man tells us something about working with Samples. He uses a pre-built NN-XT Patch. This one looks quite intersting. NN-XT is surround by one Combinator. Inside you have a 14:1 Mixer, Reverb, Delay, one of his custom Highpass Filters. Reverb and Delay are connected via Auxilary Outputs to the Mixer and feed back into some Channel Strips. Every stereo output of NN-XT has his own Channel Strip in the Mixer.
Now when you want to mix a Sample seperate from other Samples. Just assign a different stereo output and you’re ready.
Again he says that when working with many Drumsamples it’s important to have one track per Sample. He created multiple Automation Lanes in the Sequencer for one instance of his Drumsample Player.

Last but not least: Sidechaining. He shows how Sidechaining can be used to make more room for the Bassdrum. Feed the Bassdrum signal into the Sidechain input from a Mastering Compressor instance. In the Audio Input put the Bass Sound now tweak it that every time when the Bassdrum is actually sounding the Bass is being reduced in Volume.

One person in the audience asks:

Is there a problem when using many cascaded Thor Filters at the same time? (Phase shifting)

Heiner says that he didn’t had any problems with Phase shifting but he had some Problems when using parallel compression.

Philippe van Eecke

At the end Philippe van Eecke goes on stage and shows us his new studios.
He talks very detailed about the problems he had building it. It took 13 months of work until the Studio was ready.

The Gear Rack in his Rack: a MADI System, RME, some Octamics, couple of Vintage Synthesizers, UAudio Audio-Converters and a Pro Tools System.
But that’s not the end because by this time he didn’t mention Reason at all. Under his table are working 4 different computers. One old G4 Mac which runs OS 9, two newer G5 Macs and one PC running Windows.

The G4 guy is there because Philippe has some songs that were made on OS 9 that will be released soon. But the software he has on this machine can’t be updated so he sticks with an old system.
He is not a friend of Windows but some software is just not available on a Mac — like WaveLab or Sample Robot.

For his productions he uses mainly Reason, Nuendo and Logic but there is other software around on main computer. Ableton Live, Pro Tools and such but Reason is installed on every machine, he says.
Every machine is synchronized via a software called “MIDI over LAN”. Sending MIDI messages over a LAN network is faster than sending them through a MIDI cable, which means that he gets less latency.

After showing us his Gear and how Philippe uses it. He shows us some of his projects. Starting with one song he produced for Xavier Naidoo (called “Zeilen aus Gold”). Philippe used his number one tool, Reason, to make a Remix.

End of the Show

After the last lecturer one guy of Propellerheads Marketing Team stepped up on the Stage to say that what he is going to talk about must be kept secret.
Sorry, guys. I hope you understand that I really don’t like to violate Propellerheads Terms.

I hope that i can say one thing: Wait until Monday 2009-05-11! It’s really cool what Propellerhead will bring us!!!

Related posts:

1. [Musik] The Producers Conference Gerade eben hab ich mich doch noch sehr kurzfristig...
2. [Music] Record Beta Invites giveaway Since it’s first appearance Propellerhead Record made some big...
3. [Music] Ableton Live Tutorial: “Squeaky Distortion” with Auto-Filter + Sidechains Another Ableton Live Tutorial (I know the last one...
4. [Live Set] Zettt live @ ESL Radio von WC3L Finals Und dann schieb ich gleich mal das zweite Live...
5. [Live Set] Zettt live @ Barcamp Stuttgart 2 Am Samstag war ich auf dem Barcamp Stuttgart 2....