People Requesting a New Sequencer

[selig]

I hate to break it to you, but that feature has been there for years.

It's in the F8 Tools, "Note Lengths".

Now, ok, it's not especially intuitive to use, but it's there.

Uh, good point. But there's nothing I hate more in Reason than bringing up the Tools window (it breaks the whole Reason experience!). Every time you bring up the tools window, an angel loses its wings.

I think you're combining two features, Quantize and Note Length here. There is NO "quantize note length" in Reason.
Great suggestion - don't need it often but when I do, there's no way around it I've found. And no, setting all notes to "quarters" is not quantized the note length to the grid, it's forcing all notes to the same length.

[Creativemind]

Uh, good point. But there's nothing I hate more in Reason than bringing up the Tools window (it breaks the whole Reason experience!). Every time you bring up the tools window, an angel loses its wings.

I think you're combining two features, Quantize and Note Length here. There is NO "quantize note length" in Reason.
Great suggestion - don't need it often but when I do, there's no way around it I've found. And no, setting all notes to "quarters" is not quantized the note length to the grid, it's forcing all notes to the same length.

Good point actually. You're right.

What I will say though, you can select the note length to be the same as the grid and do it that way but a keyboard shortcut would be the most ideal.

[Creativemind]

I noticed you can't mute multiple clips on one track (in one go) earlier as well in the sequencer. I had like 20 Dr.Octo.Rex clips in the sequencer that I'd altered as the track progressed (so muting the track wasn't an option here) and had to click every individual clip. Right ball ache lol!

I suggest being able to click a clip with the mute tool and whilst holding the mouse button down you should be able to drag it along to mute the clips. Same with muting and solo'ing on the tracks to the left (inspector in most daws) and same dragging left or right to solo / unsolo / mute / un-mute on the main mixer too and possibly the rack if the rack is collapsed as it may be a bit hard to achieve otherwise.

[ShawnG]

you can lasso a bunch of clips with the pointer and then hit the m key on your keyboard to mute them all at once (or shift select, etc...) and you can do that across tracks etc...

You can manipulate multiple mix channels mute/solo/faders at once by selecting a mix channel and either shift-arrow to select multiple adjacent tracks or ctrl clicking on non-adjacent tracks and then making your adjustments (faders adjust incrementally, which is cool) You can't do this with the sequencer channels because of how Reason handles inputs, but as the seq channels and the mix channels are not overtly related in Reason, you may not want to get in the habit of muting stuff in the sequencer to save yourself a headscratcher moment later in the mix

[Vyckeil]

Here's a list :

• Curved automation. Please, for the love of God, curved automation.
• The ability to put comments and personal notes in the track sequencer, a proper dedicated feature. Maybe add that function to the Rack when making crazy patches with the combi. I know there's a RE that does that, but it takes up so much space. Again, I would appreciate a proper dedicated feature.
• The ability to vertical zoom a single track instead of the whole sequencer.
• The ability to minimize individual note lanes. I use a lot of note lanes for placing old note clips in a legacy lane as back-up, to mute/unmute different note sequenced on that part of the song, and also for "buffering" different settings on the Dual Apeggio player. I would appreciate all those note lanes not take up all the space in the sequencer.
• A separate Blocks or clip editing window that doesn't take over the sequencer when I want to edit Blocks or clips, i.e. editing Blocks on the fly. As it stands, the Blocks feature is clunky and I don't use it that much, really not a good workflow.
• Speaking of Blocks, could we have a pattern bank for each track? They did it with Redrum, I don't see why we couldn't have it with MIDI note lanes and automation. If you're going to do that, might as well be able to save those patterns and be allowed to load them up from the browser and drag-drop them in the appropriate tracks in the sequencer. I'd love to load up some automation that I created from the browser instead of opening up a whole song. I know some automation lanes use different values, just make it vector-based or math-based and "bake" the proper values when dragging the automation to the applied lane.
• An indicator in the track itself when the track is muted in the sequencer, maybe a red border 1 pixel thick at the top and bottom with the same faded-out diagonal lines when you mute a clip, but red instead. Perhaps transpose the effect a few pixels to see the gray diagonal from the muted clips behind it. Yes you can see the M button in red but it's not easily seen or to line up when your monitor is 1440p or 4K and you're working at the complete right end of the sequencer, especially when you have a dozen note lanes for the same instrument.

Those are features I'd like in a new sequencer, off the top of my head.

[JunctionArsonist]

My killer feature would be locking clips together and performing time stretch operations on them. Example would be 3 or 4 miced drum Channels, once locked together enable a "batch edit" toggle button for all the quantizing and time stretch operations.

[BadKelly]

It would be cool to have a DAW that let you switch out the sequencer for one from a third-party developer. Imagine a market of different sequencers and you can pick and choose one that fits into your workflow.

[ShawnG]

It would be cool to have a DAW that let you switch out the sequencer for one from a third-party developer. Imagine a market of different sequencers and you can pick and choose one that fits into your workflow.

er... The thing we call a "DAW" is essentially the sequencer, if you strip that out of most of them, there's not really all that much left. Reason, with a separate "rack" concept is a bit of an outlier here. and in any case, there are a few cases where you can do that now anyway, one of them being Rewire. there are also some DAWs which can be launched as a plugin (It would be nice if Reason would join them) and there are a few instruments with built in sequencers as well.

If you find a DAW which fits your workflow, use that. that's 90 percent of the deal.

[Oquasec]

Yeah that's what rewire is. You can pick any sequencer from any daw with rewire.
Reason will never have FL Studio's. Reason will never be exactly like Cubase.
Reason will be Reason.

[two shoes]

in addition to the deeper and more efficient editing for both audio and midi that many people have mentioned I'd appreciate some simple quality of life improvements like: continuous vertical zoom for individual tracks to any size, zoom buttons and scroll bars you don't need a magnifying glass to see (the irony of those tiny zoom buttons...), an option to have said larger zoom buttons and scroll bars permamently hidden or auto hide themselves until i mouse over them, an option to set momentary/toggle keyboard shortcuts for all editing tools regardless of which one i'm currently using, fullscreen zoom toggle shorcuts for the sequencer, rack and mixer - the amount of resizing you have to do to swap between them when working on a laptop on the go is absurd, while we're at it can we have actual fullscreen with default alt+enter/F11 shortcuts like every other windows app has had since 1998, show/hide shortcuts for the navigator and transport bars, etc, etc - i could go on but none of this stuff is anything someone at propellerhead hasn't thought of or encountered in another/every other daw before. the baffling thing is that none of it is "we have to rewrite the audio engine from the ground up" type development challenges - these are the types of features i've seem 1-3 person dev teams implement literally overnight in multiple other applications. what could possibly explain the abscence of such very simple ease of use features this long after the sequencer was built into reason? sometimes i think Props development challenges all boil down to priorities and appropriate direction of their creative energies - some of the stuff they have done while ignoring the calls for this kind of stuff year after year is hilarious. they're basically the corporate version of an autistic savant.

[BadKelly]

Maybe I’m not very familiar with the capabilities of rewire. Can I write automation from the sequencer of a rewired DAW to control Reason devices in the rack and also use the Reason mixer for mixing? Essentially just using the sequencer.

[zoidkirb]

Maybe I’m not very familiar with the capabilities of rewire. Can I write automation from the sequencer of a rewired DAW to control Reason devices in the rack and also use the Reason mixer for mixing? Essentially just using the sequencer.

Yes you can control automation. By default, ableton live will let you select each combinator you have rewired across, including the rotaries and buttons. Other midi automations are handled by selecting the relevant cc value. I can't remember about controlling the Reason ssl from another daw.

[Oquasec]

Yeah Propellerhead lets you rewire to something else if it realllllllllly changes your workflow that's not involved with sound design.

[Undistraction]

- Being able to use clips in a way that editing one edits all copies of that clip.
- curve automation
- remove blocks
- better integration of tools

[BadKelly]

Maybe I’m not very familiar with the capabilities of rewire. Can I write automation from the sequencer of a rewired DAW to control Reason devices in the rack and also use the Reason mixer for mixing? Essentially just using the sequencer.

Yes you can control automation. By default, ableton live will let you select each combinator you have rewired across, including the rotaries and buttons. Other midi automations are handled by selecting the relevant cc value. I can't remember about controlling the Reason ssl from another daw.

Nice. Now I have a reason to buy Cubase while they have a 50% off sale.

I would like to see Reason update their slice edit mode. Slice edit is pretty weak for a company that owns Recycle. I use slice edit to find the tempo of a loop, but my process for doing this is very tedious. I like to line up the slice marker of the down beat of the second bar with the bar 2 marker by disabling stretch and adjusting the tempo. I cannot disable stretch in slice edit mode so I have to exit slice edit to adjust the tempo and go back into slice edit to see how close the slice marker is to the down beat. This allows me to find the precise tempo of a loop down to the thousandths of a beat. What’s more annoying is that I have to disable stretch every time I exit slice edit mode, because I guess it automatically enables when I go into slice edit. With Recycle, I just have to tell it how many bar/beats my loop is and it will calculate the tempo.

[Oquasec]

Cubase has a built in version of recycle already.
Something propellerhead users have been asking for for years.

[djadalaide]

The most annoying thing for me about the sequencer is that its near-impossible to hit the first note of a sequence when hitting record, it doesn't take in to account which notes are already pressed before you start recording. I always have to go and edit it manually.

[two shoes]

The most annoying thing for me about the sequencer is that its near-impossible to hit the first note of a sequence when hitting record, it doesn't take in to account which notes are already pressed before you start recording. I always have to go and edit it manually.

yup, real punch-in punch-out is a must as I'm sure multiple people have already mentioned in this thread. it's on the list of stuff along with crossfades that anybody building a sequencer in this century knows to include from the get go, but not Propellerhead - it's almost like no one involved with the record project had ever worked with recorded audio before. they seem to be waking up to how this kind of stuff makes Reason look like a toy to many people though and it will all get done sooner or later, hopefully in v11. one day we'll have most of the stuff everyone else has had since forever and we'll still have the rack too.

[Oquasec]

Protools & FL Studio never have this issues because of wait for midi.
In other daws you need to find the precount feature (Still trying to find precount in Cubase)
& have input quantize on.
(Or you are using a footpedal to trigger the record function)

[Ostermilk]

- Being able to use clips in a way that editing one edits all copies of that clip.
- curve automation
- remove blocks
- better integration of tools

Instanced clips I believe it's called,

A big no from me for removing blocks. Why would you want to do that? If you don't use 'em that's fine but some of us do use them so how would removing this feature help anyone?

[jjrh]

Besides the usual curved CV editing, for me grouping tracks together with filter options (aka only show me Mixer channels, hide all mixer channels, only show stuff from this bus, or a grouping/tagging mechanism - nothing sucks more than having a big automation setup for a single part cluttering up the entire sequencer) Labels for what's being automated - I mean when I automate a comb knob, how about labeling it the same in the mixer?

Bouncing CV to track would be nice, a few times I have had to do midi loopback tricks to record some CV stuff and it's a big pain.

Big pipe dream requests would be a 'save' or 'remix' mechanism so you can take block one, try some stuff but keep the original in tact. Right now I just select all, then past into a new block which is annoying. Basically want blocks inside blocks. Other thing that would be great which will never happen is version control inside at least the sequencer (but inside the song would be even better) so I can leave messages/notes about what I did, revert changes, do diffs, etc. My process right now is whenever I begin to do something major - save as. It's the first thing I do when I open a song is save as so I have the state from the previous session. A bit of integration to make this less annoying (like a single file or container where I can add a little note for each version) would go a long way. It's especially annoying when you go save as and it puts you in the folder of the last place you were in instead of the folder of the current song.

Most of the stuff I want in Reason in general is quality of life type stuff that make keeping things clean easier/possible. I spend way too much time just decluttering songs.

[Creativemind]

- Being able to use clips in a way that editing one edits all copies of that clip.
- curve automation
- remove blocks
- better integration of tools

Instanced clips I believe it's called,

A big no from me for removing blocks. Why would you want to do that? If you don't use 'em that's fine but some of us do use them so how would removing this feature help anyone?

Depends what daw you using I suppose. I call it Cloning Clips or Aliased Clips but go with the first one.

Like Midi Chase, in FL Studio it's called Truncated Notes which I'd also love to see in Reason, in fact Midi Chase is quite essential be honest.

Also I would love to see Dump To Midi Editor (Dump to Piano Roll in FL Studio) and it's called Capture Last Recording in Logic.

[antic604]

• The ability to put comments and personal notes in the track sequencer, a proper dedicated feature. Maybe add that function to the Rack when making crazy patches with the combi. I know there's a RE that does that, but it takes up so much space. Again, I would appreciate a proper dedicated feature.
• The ability to vertical zoom a single track instead of the whole sequencer.

When you right-click on a clip, there's option to "add label" or something along the lines, which ...ads an editable label on top of the clip.

You can Alt+click on those small triangles next to track's header to collapse / expand all tracks at once. Simply collapse all, expand the one you want to edit and zoom in. Not perfect, but workable.

[antic604]

- remove blocks

Just don't use them. You can even disable visibility of Blocks track in the upper menus somewhere. Why remove something other people enjoy using??

- better integration of tools

What does that even mean?

[Magnus]

I think you're combining two features, Quantize and Note Length here. There is NO "quantize note length" in Reason.
Great suggestion - don't need it often but when I do, there's no way around it I've found. And no, setting all notes to "quarters" is not quantized the note length to the grid, it's forcing all notes to the same length.

Good point actually. You're right.

What I will say though, you can select the note length to be the same as the grid and do it that way but a keyboard shortcut would be the most ideal.

I've just looked into this today and found out that both Logic Pro 9 and Logic Pro X still have no easy way to quantize note off either. I know Pro Tools has this option:



Given Logic doesn't have it, it seems like Reason isn't too behind in not having this feature....yet.