Using reason with pro tools 7.4

Which is faster and can streamline your creativity? Reason has made a name for itself in the beat making world for sure. The idea behind this DAW was to give producers the confidence by providing loops to help kick start the imagination. It did just that and did it well. Our experience with reason has been quite the exciting one. Redrum is set up like a mixer where you can add addition instruments to the chain.

Like kick, snare, hat, cymbals. Basically you can create your own instrument. Now this was kinda a game changer really. You could scroll through a large library of prepared loops from which to choose from. This is where the Reason DAW shines. Those loops provide excellent inspiration for the modern producer.

We found some great bass lines as well as cool string lines and keyboard loops too. Additionally, there are plenty of third party loop and instrument libraries available in the market. These libraries are know as refills. These detected events then serve as control points for what Digidesign call 'warping' the audio.

Pro Tools can warp audio events either automatically, such as when conforming audio to the Session tempo or quantising audio events to a grid, or manually, using the standard editing tools in the new Warp track View. Elastic Audio analysis automatically detects transients and places Analysis Markers, which can be moved manually. Once analysed, the file comes back online and you can then swap to Analysis View to see where Pro Tools has put Event Markers. You can correct Pro Tools' automatic transient detection by manually moving, editing or deleting Event Markers, in much the same way as you can in Beat Detective.

When you're happy with the way the track is sliced up, you can have it automatically conformed to Session tempo or a groove see below , or switch it to Warp View if you want to edit its timing manually. Switching to Warp Mode allows you to place Warp Markers. This example shows what Digidesign call a 'range warp', where audio between two fixed points is stretched by clicking and dragging with the Grabber tool. The last are not editable, and only appear on tickbased tracks, indicating where Elastic Audio has been used automatically to conform the audio to events on the Tempo Track.

If no quantising has taken place see below , there will initially be no Warp Markers in Warp View, but the Event Markers will be there. Add a single Warp Marker somewhere in the Region before using the Grabber tool to drag an Event Marker, and the results are similar, except that the Warp Marker rather than the start or end of the Region is treated as the fixed point.

If you have two Warp Markers in your Region, clicking and grabbing affects only the audio between these markers; alternatively, you can make a selection that encompasses a number of Warp Markers, in which case the two outermost ones within the selection will be the fixed points. If you move a Warp Marker so far that the amount of time compression and expansion is deemed to be excessive, Pro Tools warns you by turning that section red. The screenshot below shows a realworld example where I used Elastic Audio to bring vocals into time.

The sync mark with the green arrow shows where the singer placed a syllable change, while the yellow line in the track above is the locator point, which shows where the instruments changed their chord.

The two should be in the same place, but aren't. So I switched the vocal track to Elastic Audio, went into Warp view, placed Warp Markers at the start and end of the word to act as anchors, and then placed another at the syllable change point. Then I simply dragged that point to the right to line up with to the locator point, and the singer was in time with the instruments — simple. All of this was in a Session with no click and no tempo grid to work to, and all tracks were samplebased rather than tickbased.

The Elastic Audio plugin window enables you to finetune the timestretching. If you need to change the tempo significantly — especially if a significant slowing down is involved — you may find the sound has been compromised, but Elastic Audio has another feature to help counteract this. Clicking on the Elastic Audio Mode button opens up the Elastic Audio plugin window for that track, and you can adjust the Decay control to bring the sound quality back into line. Sometimes you can also improve the results by switching to a different algorithm: for instance, if you are stretching kick-drum sounds to get a longer, richer thud, it is worth trying Polyphonic mode rather than the usual Rhythmic, and increasing the Decay value.

Here, Warp Markers are being used to move a syllable change within a word so that it coincides with a musical event. Prior to Elastic Audio, producing believable varispeed effects has been difficult. It could be done by adjusting the clock speed of Pro Tools and somehow recording the result; then came along a couple of Audiosuite plugins, including Wave Mechanics Speed, Waves Soundshifter and Serato's Pitch n' Time, which could render good varispeed effects, but none was especially cheap.

Now, however, Pro Tools can do it out of the box: simply make sure your tracks are set to use the Varispeed algorithm and draw your slowdowns and speedups on the Tempo track. You can use Elastic Audio on samplebased tracks, but if you want to automatically conform a Region to the Session tempo, you'll need to switch your track to the tickbased timebase. You can then rightclick the Region and select Conform to Tempo, and Pro Tools instantly moves all the events so they line up with the tempo of the track.

It seems so much more 'intelligent' than Beat Detective, which may well be down to the improved transient detection. You can also quantise audio to a groove, rather than the strict tempo of the Session.

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