June 12, 2007
The Producers Conference, Nottingham, UK
The Producers Conference went into overdrive on June 12 as the Propellerhead Software crew along with the organizers of M-Audio presented two sessions at Confetti Studios in Nottingham, England.
Besides the evening conference for Reason Users, an afternoon session was organized for the students at Confetti.
The students, who have had training in audio engineering and music
production, were very receptive to James Bernard's innovative use of the
MCLass Devices to create multi-band compressors.
James showed the step-by-step process of building custom Combinator effects that can enhance sounds or completely destroy them. Students were also presented the Abbey Road Keyboard Refill, the principles of Propellerhead Software's Hypersampling technology and they ere showed how Reason Drum Kits can be used to quickly build up realistic drum tracks from MIDI files. The drum clinic progressed into a demonstration of loop techniques to create drum'n bass tracks.
UK Breaks pioneer, Danny McMillan kicked off the evening Producer
Conference. Attendees were in for a treat, having Danny show how he has used
Reason to foster his success as a producer. His presentation focused on
techniques of equalizing and processing drum sounds to create drum grooves.
Several synthesis tricks were also revealed, including the development of
lush textures by stacking synths in a Combinator, using duplicate combi
devices to generate massive sounds, and mapping samples in the NN-XT
sampler.
James Bernard introduced the Nottingham group to his concept of "Alternative ways of using Reason Devices." He explained that instead of looking at the
BV-512 as simply a vocoder, users could find a different function, namely a
frequency band isolator. This led to James' walkthrough of the Multiband
Toolbox Combinator patches. James continued his presentation with an
explanation of parallel compression techniques to create thick hip-hop drum
sounds.
Taken from the pages of his book, Power Tools for Reason 3.0, Kurt Kurasaki presented a primer on the synthesizer architecture in an effort to show users how to approach sound design. After a tutorial about control voltages and their applications applications, Kurt went deep into Reason and showed his granular-like Combinator synth patch, built using a dozen different devices interconnected to achieve a bizarre audio texture.
