siriussounds wrote: ↑13 May 2019
Could you please say something more about the different ways to use Reason live?
Well you could put everything into a single Reason hour long Song file and play it this way. This way your MIDI controllers stay locked to the same Song and you don't have to worry about opening and closing files and the confusion that goes with that. To minimise how many devices you are using, you could use automation to morph between sounds. This method limits what you can do though, but it is very similar to working with a hardware setup where your options are also limited.
One way of working in a single Song file would be to paste each song into a Block. This makes it very easy to rearrange Songs in the timeline, moving them back and forward. If you want smooth transitions you'll also need a Block for the transition between two Songs.
Other things to consider: if you will be touching the QWERTY keyboard there are a couple of things to watch. The B button will put you into Block edit mode. The C button will activate the metronome – so I always turn the volume down. In the past I have used Keyboard Edit Mode to map the B and C keys to something harmless.
If you will syncing two computers, or attempting to mix into a CDJ or turntable, you will need to look at the Delay Compensation in Reason. Some devices have a lot of delay (eg Ozone Maximizer), so will need to be removed or replaced with low latency alternatives.
My favourite method of working at the moment is having empty automation lanes in the Song (alt click on the parameter to create the lane) and I can then use my MIDI controller to rework the sound entirely, mute drums, repitch things. Then when I want to snap back to the original, I have mapped the Reset Automation Override to my MIDI controller, so I press this button and everything snaps back to how it was originally. There is always some amount of autopilot in the original Song, but this allows me to completely change the track but then snap back to something that I know works, while I do something else, like cueing up the next track or using the DJ mixer.
As I say I use two laptops at the moment, synced via Ableton Link (using a cable with Wifi disabled just to be safe). I work with a Song on each laptop, and mix on a DJ mixer. When starting a Song in Reason using Link, the tempo takes a couple of bars to stabilise, so you need to have the volume on the new Song turned down until the tempo is in the sync.
If you have two laptops and want to work in a different way, or perhaps one is older and slower than the other, you could split it into drums and music. So one laptop could run drum sequencing and all the music could come from the faster laptop.
There's always a certain amount of planning to try and minimise what could go wrong. Every link in the chain could potentially fail. An advantage to having two laptops is that if one crashes, the other keeps going buying you time to fix things. Reason is very stable generally but computers can act strange when you put them in a club environment or flood them with MIDI CCs.
Hopefully this would have got you thinking. If you've got any questions, just ask.