Mini Tutorial: Automatic creation of alternative lanes while recording (workaround)

[Olivier]

Automatic creation of alternative lanes while recording (midi) is something that gets requested from time to time. At this time it is not natively possible in Reason (V8.3). But there is a workaround that can be set up quite easily.
Be aware that this workaround always creates an alternate track for those lanes you have selected for recording. Even if you are just playing and not recording! There is currently no way around that.

There's 2 things you need for this to work:

1. The External Midi Instrument or EMI (Reason version V7 and above).
2. Some kind of Midi Loopback. I'm on windows so i use LoopMidi.

First setup your midi loopback of choice. In case of loopMidi don't forget to create a midi channel after installing it.

We now have to setup a control surface that can operate the ALT button. To do this open the preferences and go to the Control Surfaces tab.
Click Add to add a new control surface. (more info on this in the manual here)

In my case it would look like this:

loopback controller.png

Press OK and close the preferences.

Now create an EMI, and make sure that its set to send out over the loop port you created earlier.

EMI Setup.png

Now go to your ALT Button on the transport bar, left click on it and choose Edit Remote Override Mapping.

Edit Remote override.png

Set it up like this:

Remote Override.png

Effectively this means that whenever C0 note is sent from the EMI, the ALT button will be pressed. Reason will then create alternate lanes on the channels you have selected for recording. This works for both note lanes AND audio lanes.

So to finish this we have to actually send the C0 we selected in the previous step as the event to press the ALT button.
So create a note clip on the EMI Lane, open it up, and add a C0 at the start of your loop.

C0.png

You are done. Exit the clip.

When you press play you will see that whenever the loop starts again, the channel you have currently selected will get an alternate track.
To disable this just disable the entire EMI lane by pressing the Mute Track Button for the EMI channel.

There is also a bit more advanced version explained here : https://ozdyx.wordpress.com/patches/autolaner/. It works through the same method.

The solution in this tutorial works on just your current project. Unless you save this to a template you have to setup the EMI with the note clip and the remote override on the ALT button every time you start a new project. The only thing you have to setup once is the control surface and the midi loopback.

[nooomy]

wow! super cool tip will try it when i come home!

[ljekio]

One question all of this years with my Autolaners I can't answer what is better?
First note automation or last note?
When first note using I frequently loose first note of record.
What say your experience about it?