Some features which would make me instantly switch to reason as my main DAW

Have any feature requests? No promise they'll get to Reason Studios, but you can still discuss them here.
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visheshl
Posts: 1235
Joined: 27 Sep 2019

24 Nov 2022

Long post Ahead :


Ok, first thing first, i absolutely love reason, i have loved it since it's early days, but then overtime better DAWs came along with much better workflow and advance features etc.
So then i finally jumped ship and switched to Ableton as my main DAW.
And RRP was a welcome change too.

However, after years and versions i opened up reason standalone today.
And i was just telling my mother how much i was enjoying working in reason.
Something about it makes you inspired to make music.

However, there are a few things that still stop me from using it as the main DAW coming from Ableton and RRP workflow.

I'll mention these things here :

1. The biggest difference between other daws and reason is that all other daws create seperate sequencer tracks and then allow you to put various plugins on these individual tracks. The upside is that plugins of various tracks are neatly organised inside the individual track containers. The Downside to this approach is that plugins inside different tracks cannot talk to each other.
However Reason is one big Rack where anything can be connected anywhere. And that is amazing.
However it makes the whole rack difficult to manage.
So i was suggesting that, just like the player stack has a 1 unit white container with the bypass all switch and the send to track buttons, each instrument stack can have such a container.
The point is to be able to organise things in a better way.
The player stack container has a minimise button right ? So you click that and and all the players are hidden, only 1unit player stack thing is visible.
Similarly for every stack of devices we could have this kind of container, which when minimised, hides all devices within that stack.

Now you might say that we have the Combinator, but see my point is that the purpose of the Combinator is to build complex patches and save it as one single instrument or effect, rack organising isn't it's primary purpose.

So everytime you load an instrument, a mix channel is created, the instrument stack container is also created and the instrument is created inside that stack container.
You could add more devices inside that container. You could even add combinators inside this stack.

2. Macros : it would be great if the instrument stack and also the player stack has 8 macros mappable to any device within the stack. The stack tops would have show macro-controls switch near the bypass all switch.

See Ableton allows a generic midi remote script, in which you define values as per your controller.
And every rack has macro controls, which your midi controller can map to. You just select the rack and your controller controls the macros.

If player stacks and instrument stacks have macros built in, and you configure your midi controller once you could control macros of any stack in the rack. And map any parameters of devices within the stack to the macros.
This way you really don't need seperate maps for all devices in reason.

How is it different from combinator?
See these stacks are not instrument or fx patches. These are just macros for ease of use.
Combis can be considered as in instrument type.



3. Macro control ranges.
I still haven't tried reason 12, so I'm not sure if this has been implemented, but Ableton allows you to set ranges for every macro control and the parameter.
As far as i know, in the Combinator, when you map an instrument button to a macro knob, by default if the knob is below halfway point, the mapped button switches off, above halfway point the button switches on.
You could map several buttons to the same macro knob, but the behaviour vis the same.
In live you can map several buttons to a macro and then set ranges. So for example if the macro knob is set between 0-10 values, button one switches on, and other buttons mapped to this macro are off, if the macro goes above ten, button 2 switches on and the other mapped buttons are switched off.
Basically like a solo button behaviour.

3. Sequencer Track folders and mixer track folders.

4. A seperate gui based midi controller map creator application. I know this goes agains the hush hush rules of the hardware controller manufacturing industry, but would make reason an extremely powerful beast.

I had a utility which allowed me to create a structure of my controller in gui and the use those knobs and buttons to create complex control behaviours for Ableton. I could at the switch of a button use the same controls to control mixer channel levels, another button would allow me to control pans with the same knobs etc etc. Another would allow to control macros. Another button for transport control.
Basically the same small controller could control almost all parameters.
This would definitely be disliked by midi controller manufacturers, because they do not want to allow too much DAW control with a small or cheap controller, and they want to sell better controllers basically controller with better maps at higher price points
However Reason as a software is suffering because of this. They could theoretically create a gui utility to create custom controller mappings, and hey I'm not saying they give it for free, they could sell it in the shop as a separate utility.

Yeah so basically these are some of the things that came to my mind with using reason standalone today instead of Ableton.
Last edited by visheshl on 24 Nov 2022, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
visheshl
Posts: 1235
Joined: 27 Sep 2019

24 Nov 2022

Btw, any way to turn on metronome preroll to everytime you hit play instead of only when hitting record ?
I was messing with recording in polystep.
But i had no metronome preroll when recording patterns.
The preroll only works when hitting the main record button on the transport, which made things a little difficult.

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