OBJECTIVE: Turn stiff MIDI parts into music that grooves and swings.
BACKGROUND: The ReGroove mixer is a powerful tool for adding humanization and expressiveness to MIDI parts. It has two
options: Global parameters and Channel parameters. We’ll cover basics of Channel parameters, which affect only note lanes
assigned to them. Note: The following also applies to Reason 4.
STEPS
1. Click on the ReGroove Mixer show/hide
button (lower right). The mixer has four
banks of eight channels; each channel can
have a different groove.
2. In the note lane you want to groovify,
click on the Select Groove pop-up menu,
and select a groove channel. Here,
ReGroove channel A1 is being selected.
3. Start playback, so you can hear the
results of applying grooves in subsequent
steps.
4. Click on the folder button to open the
Groove Patch Browser. Clicking on a groove
loads it almost instantly, so you can hear
how it affects the track. After choosing a
groove, click on OK.
5. The Amount slider adjusts how much the
Groove affects timing, from none to maximum.
You can also use the Slide control to
move notes forward or backward in time,
and the Shuffle control to add a 16th note
“swing” feel.
6. If needed, enable “Pre-Align” to quantize
all notes to a 16th-note grid prior to
adding Groove effects. This insures that
changes caused by the Groove template
will be predictable.
7. To edit the parameters that make up the
Groove, click on the Edit button.
TIPS
¦ Applying negative shuffle to a previously-shuffled track can
“unshuffle” it.
¦ You can divide a drum part over multiple lanes, so you could (for
example) slide the snare part in one lane a bit later to create a
more “laid-back” feel.
¦ The Select Groove pop-up lets you enable or disable the Groove
channel for individual lanes.
¦ The Amount slider (Step 5) is basically a “macro” that affects the
various editable groove parameters (Step 7).