Can we set extra bars in the sequencer to start before "bar 1"

[Mistro17]

Sometimes I want to do something special right before an intro or give myself room to start playing. Like in the case where I need to place a few notes right before the first beat. I saw a tutorial where in Logic there's a feature that allows you to add extra bars before the 1st one (0, -1, -2 etc.) Does Reason have this capability?

[antic604]

Use precount.

[chimp_spanner]

Sometimes I want to do something special right before an intro or give myself room to start playing. Like in the case where I need to place a few notes right before the first beat. I saw a tutorial where in Logic there's a feature that allows you to add extra bars before the 1st one (0, -1, -2 etc.) Does Reason have this capability?

If you need to actually record note data into the bar or two before the start of a section, the only way is to set the left locator there and record everything leading up to it.

You can use the "Pre" option on the transport to give yourself a count in, and you can go to Options -> Number of Precount Bars to set yourself more than 1 bar but nothing you play during it will be recorded. So yeah just have to actually set your record range to encompass the area you need to record.

[Mistro17]

Thanks. I always use pre-count for recording. But I'm talking about actually playing some notes before the first bar. If I already have a song going and want to add something to the beginning what I end up doing is shifting the entire song up just to add a few notes or something at the beginning which seems wasteful. I also find myself making sure not to shift things off beat when I do it. If we could just add negative bars it makes things much easier. I guess this would be a request of mine for future updates. For now maybe it's a good idea for me to just start the initial recordings further up just in case. I never knew adding negative bars was a thing before I saw that tutorial. It was a quick mention.

[1reasonable]

Set your left indicator to the start of your song, then the right indicator to as many bars you want to insert. Then right click and choose “Insert bars between locators”

[WarStar]

This is why my template starts at bar 12 or 16 just to give me room if I have an any ideas latter

[WarStar]

My template is more a production scratch pad.. I use a lot of samples so I give myself some room with extra space at the beginning as well as using 3 sets of 4 audio tracks each routed to their own bus, 12 tracks total. Let's say I have three samples I want to use from the same song, the bussing allows those samples to sound coherent compared to each other. So what ever eqs or comps or whatever effects I want on those samples are all uniform and all levels the same so all the samples sound the same post efx too. But sometimes I use that extra space at the beginning to, 12/16 bars, to experiment with sample arrangement.