What do you guys think about my new template/workflow?

[Seckin]

OK, this is going to be quite embarassing but after all these years, I found out today that you can actually add more than two rack columns in Reason! In fact you can keep adding them infinitely! Can you even believe that?!

So here's what I, as someone who hates messy racks and has always imagined a feature to have an exclusive "rack room" for every seperate element in his production, immediately did as a response to this wonderful newfound knowledge: I introduce to you the Rack Rooms!

So it's basically six rooms: A room for the master section which also includes the busses, a drums room, a bass room, a vocals room, a synths room and an effects room. Every room has a sign on top of it (TMA-1) that says what it is for. The rooms are pretty standard as I mainly compose children's music these days and this just about does the work, of course with modifications wherever needed. Also these are in the same order they are found in the mixer.

So that's about it. Sorry for my excitement lol. Maybe other people are doing this already and this is probably a bit over the top to some (most?!) of you guys but I really hate complicated racks to the extent that this is better. An apparent challenge in this would be the navigation aspect as it's kind of hard to do long-distance sideway-scrolling in the rack, but I don't need any of that since there is the "rack" button in the mixer and also one can simply double click the channel title in the sequencer to go the desired device.

Hope you enjoyed my rack rooms I'll even attach the .reason file in the unlikely scenario that anyone would like to use it! (beware: there's an instance of Selig Gain in every track so that will display as a missing device if you don't have it. I won't go through the hassle of deleting every single instance of it and re-saving it for a template file noone's ever gonna use lol)

Edit: Looks like I cannot attach a .reason file.

[jam-s]

To blow your mind: you can even add another Rack on the left of the Hardware Interface. I like to use this space for FX and monitoring that comes after the SSL and before the main audio outs.
EDIT: Also, to attach a .reason file: just zip it and then attach the .zip.

[aeox]

I always wondered if people made super long racks completely unorganized on purpose, or just didn't know you could do that.

[PhillipOrdonez]

Make the navigator bigger now, you're gonna need it to quickly jump between "rooms".

[joeyluck]

Haha! We all make discoveries at different times.

But surely you must've watched a Reason-related video produced in the past decade and thought, "Hey! That's more than one rack!"

One thing this video reminds me of is that there are still mouse users grabbing the rack rails. I've been using an Apple trackpad forever to freely swipe around to navigate the rack.

[joeyluck]

Make the navigator bigger now, you're gonna need it to quickly jump between "rooms".

Yeah and when the navigator is at full size, the view is confined to one rack at a time.

But what's cool is it snaps to that rack selected in the navigator perfectly. So, no partial view and no need to nudge the view. Which can be very handy for big projects and when using the navigator.

[WOO]

Geez i had no idea either. Thanks

[guitfnky]

nice! that’s how I’ve had my templates set up for a few years now, and it works great. always know where to find my drums, and bass. I just need to keep on top of things sometimes, when adding new stuff—sometimes I’m so into whatever it is I’m doing that I forget I’ve just put a new vocal track underneath my guitar rack.

[DaveyG]

An unexpected benefit of using the Rack Plugin is that it automatically avoids huge bloated and confusing racks, because each track gets its own rack in its own instance. What you cannot do with this setup is modulate/interconnect between instances but I never did much of that anyway.

I did used to do a similar thing to the OP where I'd try to put one "instrument" per rack column (or one column per track) but scrolling around could get a bit crazy if you had more than a handful of tracks.

[moggadeet]

I do the same thing with the drums / bass / synths / FX, and in the same order

I just use the rack left of the master section, like it was said above, for the master chain. Below the master section are just my FX. In the master inserts are my monitoring plugins (SPAN, correlation, meters).

[WarStar]

Dang.. never thought to use the racks that way. Great tip

[Dave Beep]

Haha well.. 15 years of using reason and I didn;t know this either. Has this always been possible or since what version?

Very useful!

[jam-s]

Haha well.. 15 years of using reason and I didn;t know this either. Has this always been possible or since what version?

I think this feature was added at around version 6.5 or 7. Should be in the release notes somewhere.

Edit: Reason 6 already had that feature: http://cdn.propellerheads.se/Reason6/Re ... Manual.pdf (see p.270)