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Reason in Class By Mark Vail Mar 1, 2004 12:00 PM In 2002, I was invited to develop and teach a Digital Music class at the Harker School in San Jose, California (see opening photo). Harker's administration allowed me to choose the components for a one-semester elective for as many as 16 middle-school students. After considering numerous alternatives, I decided Propellerhead Software's Reason was an excellent application on which to base my class. Reason provides a virtual rack of music-making gear, including mixers, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, and effects processors. Reason, developed as a system for almost anyone to make music, is also a superb choice for education because it's far less expensive than hardware equivalents. It's also cross-platform for Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, or later and Mac OS X and 9. To top it off, Reason is probably the most popular music application on the market, so it has a huge user base and offers the potential for Reason composers to share files and collaborate over the Internet regardless of their locations. As the hardware interface for Reason, each Digital Music student is equipped with an M-Audio Oxygen 8 keyboard. The Oxygen 8 has 25 keys, its knobs are assignable for real-time control of Reason parameters (see the sidebar “Programming the M-Audio Oxygen 8”), and it's small enough to fit between the workstations in Harker's computer lab. Two octaves of notes may not be the best choice for playing two-fisted piano music, but it works great for entering musical lines and chords into Reason's sequencer. Two more elements help the Digital Music class succeed: an LCD projector so everyone can see what I'm doing on my computer, and a music-lab controller. With a music lab controller, everyone in the class wears a headset with a microphone, allowing verbal communication between the teacher and individual students or the entire class. In addition, the lab controller lets the teacher hear any instrument in the lab and route its audio to everyone who's wearing a headset. Thus, the teacher can remain in one spot while conducting the class, alleviating the need to move around to find out how each student is doing. My research identified the Korg GEC3 as the most advanced and flexible system available. Thanks to the GEC3, Digital Music classes flow smoothly, students learn quickly, and the experience is enjoyable for all concerned. During each semester, Digital Music students create music in the styles of their choice. Instead of teaching composition, I introduce Reason's components, demonstrate how to work with them, and assign projects for the students to work on. I always encourage interaction and collaboration among students, and I schedule class time for the group to listen to student works and to music from other sources. The best student pieces are posted on Harker's Web site and are compiled on CD, so students can play their music for family members and friends outside the lab. GO FROM HERE The first Reason component I introduce to students is Dr. Rex, into which a rhythmic loop consisting of drums or pitched instruments can be loaded (see Fig. 1). One or more loops will hopefully inspire students to compose a new piece. Reason's loops are in Propellerhead's Rex format, which means the entire loop sample, or recording, has been divided into individual slices. A slice represents a drum hit or note event. One of the benefits of working with Rex files is that you can vary playback tempo without changing the pitch of the sounds that make up the loop. Many of Reason's factory loops sync and sound excellent together. Due to the program's popularity, however, many of its loops have been heard by lots of people. I therefore encourage students to customize the loops so that their source isn't so easily recognizable. When you load a loop into a Dr. Rex module, you can adjust parameters such as pitch, pan location, and volume level for each slice. By raising or lowering the pitch of, say, a snare hit, you can make it sound like a little click or a kicked trash can. If the loop is a chord pattern played on electric piano or guitar, you can transpose slice pitches to create an entirely different chord progression (see Fig. 2). Place a string of subsequent events on opposite sides of the stereo mix, and the loop pattern comes alive with shifting positions. You can emphasize certain events by increasing their levels. Tweak enough of a loop's slices, and few listeners will know where it came from. Once Dr. Rex events are pasted into a sequencer track using the To Track function, the order of slice playback can be changed. For instance, you can drop some events by deleting them, manually rearrange the order of events, and use the Alter Notes function in Reason's Change Events menu to randomly shuffle events around by a percentage of your choice. While you obviously want to maintain a sensible rhythm pattern, making effective changes here and there can make the loop sound as if it were played by a human rather than by a machine. MASTERING THE MATRIX Many students consider the Matrix step sequencer to be the most challenging of Reason's modules, but a few enjoy working with it. The Matrix is actually quite powerful and, when used effectively, can stimulate the composition process. It also allows you to program superfast lines that would be impossible to play by hand. Since the Matrix doesn't make a sound on its own, it must be used with a sound-generating module. You might start with a Subtractor synth and load it with a factory bass patch. Create the Matrix after the Subtractor, and they'll automatically be connected. The Matrix interface is like a sequencer's piano-roll display, but oriented horizontally instead of vertically. To create a pattern, you click on rectangles corresponding to the notes on the virtual keyboard to the left. Only one note can be entered per step. Notes are determined by the horizontal bars across to the right from the virtual keyboard (see Fig. 3). Each note's velocity, which usually equates to volume, and duration are set by the vertical bar at the bottom of the note's step. Notes that don't appear within a step are either above or below the current octave range. You'll see only one octave of notes at a time, so you may have to scroll up or down to enter and view notes outside the current range. Before the Matrix will trigger any notes, you have to draw velocity bars at the bottom of the sequencer steps. A velocity of zero will result in silence, or a rest, for that step. If you hold the Shift key while entering Velocities, you can selectively double the duration of a note. You can create and store 32 different patterns in a Matrix, each ranging from one to 32 steps. Automating pattern changes requires that you enter different pattern numbers in the Matrix's sequencer track, which is not a real-time process. A Matrix-driven track can be silenced by selecting an unprogrammed pattern. Have you created a bass line that you'd like to modulate into another key elsewhere in your song? There's no need to painstakingly reinput all the notes into a different pattern location. You can simply copy the pattern, paste it into another pattern location, and use Reason's Shift Pattern Up/Down operation to transpose the copied pattern one half step at a time. This is one instance in which learning Reason's key commands (Command + U for up, Command + D for down) will save you lots of time. For those who are intimidated by the Matrix's interface or who want a quick way to create an outlandish pattern, Reason provides the Randomize Pattern command. It will fill sequence steps with notes and velocities ranging all over the map. If the results aren't something you find useful, manually edit the notes and velocities as you see fit or try the Alter Pattern command to create another random sequence. SMFS, NOT SMURFS While my students mostly compose original music, they also orchestrate music created by others. The easiest way to do this is using Standard MIDI Files (SMFs), hundreds of which are available for free on the Internet (see the sidebar “Product Contacts”). After you've found and downloaded some SMFs of familiar music, open an Empty Rack file in Reason, create a Mixer module, and use Reason's Import MIDI File command in the File menu to get the MIDI data into your Reason file. As you create modules to be assigned to sequencer tracks, hold the Option key so that Reason won't automatically create a new track for each module. Many SMFs helpfully identify what instrument should be played by each track. If you find an SMF that doesn't, you'll have to experiment with different modules and patches to see what works. If the SMF contains a drum track and you want to assign a Redrum to that track, you'll likely need to rearrange notes within the track to coincide with sounds loaded into the Redrum. The Redrum is limited to containing ten different samples triggered by notes C1 to A1. If more than ten percussion instruments are required by an SMF, you'll have to create additional Redrum modules and move excessive notes to their sequencer tracks in order to cover all the parts. THAT AIN'T ALL I've only skimmed the surface of what I teach in Harker's Digital Music class in this article. Reason is a truly remarkable music program and can be an invaluable resource in your school. Mark Vail holds an MFA in electronic music (Mills College, 1983). He's the author of Vintage Synthesizers and The Hammond Organ: Beauty in the B. Visit his Web site at http://faculty.harker.org/ms/MarkV. Programming the M-Audio Oxygen 8 Not only are the Oxygen 8's knobs programmable, but there are five banks to store different knob assignments. You can assign parameters to the Oxygen 8's knobs in six simple steps:
The following table illustrates how my students have programmed their Oxygen 8s to work in Harker's Digital Music class.
Product Contacts M-Audio tel. (800) 969-6434 or (626) 445-2842; e-mail info@m-audio.com; Web www.m-audio.com Propellerhead Software/M-Audio (distributor) tel. (800) 969-6434 or (626) 445-2842; e-mail info@propellerheads.se; Web www.propellerheads.se SoundTree tel. (800) 963-8733 or (631) 393-8535; Web www.soundtree.com Sources of SMFs: |
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