Navigational Aids In Reason

My single–window layout. With the Mixer view just big enough to show faders the Sequencer gets plenty of space. I can use the Mixer’s Navigator to jump to different channel sections. Tapping the F6 key toggles the whole view to the Rack.

As Reason has evolved from a compact synth rack into the incredibly powerful DAW it is today, its user interface has necessarily grown in size and complexity. Learn how to customise and navigate Reason’s user interface.

In the beginning there was the Rack, and the Rack was God. And then Propellerhead begat Mixer, and also delivered unto us Audio Tracks, and thereafter Browser. You get the picture... As Reason has evolved from a compact synth rack into the incredibly powerful DAW it is today, its user interface has necessarily grown in size and complexity. Reason’s main view is both unique and highly customisable. Mastering control and navigation of Reason’s layout can make a huge difference to your enjoyment and productivity when working in the software.

Holy Trinity

By default a Reason Song opens in a single window with the three main views stacked atop one another. At the top is the Main Mixer; below this is the Rack with your instruments and devices; at the bottom is the Sequencer with your Instrument and Audio tracks. A strip along the bottom of the window mostly contains Transport controls, while the Browser appears in a pane to the left. Although you can see all the important parts of the software at once, this arrangement is far from optimal for actually getting stuff done, as on a typical landscape monitor each section is rather vertically challenged. Luckily there are several ways you can dynamically allocate a lot more screen real estate to the views you are working with.

The first choice to make: do you want to work in a single window, or split off your views into more than one window? The Mixer and Rack are both ‘detachable’ as individual windows, so you can have all three views presented separately, or you can detach just the Rack or Mixer, leaving the other to share the main Song window with the Sequencer. The Transport and Browser sections can be shown in either the main window or the Rack, or both. The decision about how to work may depend on whether you have multiple monitors or a single screen, but there’s no rule.

That’s MRS To You

The three main views can be resized by dragging the dividers between them, and you can click the circle symbol in each divider to show/hide the section. Better still, most window and view management in Reason can be accessed from Function Key shortcuts. If you can memorise these non–mousey ways of working you’ll save an awful lot of time. The three to burn into your brain are F5, F6 and F7. These are associated with the Mixer, the Rack and the Sequencer respectively, so I remember the order acronymically as MRS. It’s worth marking these keys somehow. In single window mode these keys are toggles, so if you press F5, the whole window will fill up with the Mixer. Pressing F5 again will revert the view to where it was before. You can also hold down two of the F keys to split the window equally between two views.

When working with separate windows, the F5–7 keys will swap focus to the relevant window, and bring it to the front if hidden by another window. The F keys do not toggle when the views are detached. After the MRS keys I find F8 the most useful; this opens the Tool Window which I mainly use for quantising. The F3 key shows and hides the Browser but I normally leave this open all the time in the Song window and (now with 8.3) the Rack too.

An important note is that on many computers the F keys have other assignments at the system level, which must be disabled for best results in Reason. This is usually the case with all Macs, and with Windows laptops. On a Mac the default is for the F keys to control things like screen brightness, audio volume and Finder features like Exposé and Launchpad (seriously does anyone use this?). You can override these on a laptop by holding the Fn modifier, but this is a pain. Instead, on a Mac open System Preferences, go to the Keyboard tab, and tick the option ‘Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys’. In Windows go to System Settings, choose the Keyboard tab, and set Function Key Mode to ‘Standard F1–F12 Mode’.

Round Round Get Around

Now you’ve got ninja view selection skills, the next thing to master is getting around within the views. The Mixer and Rack views both have ‘Navigator’ columns at the right–hand side, which provide a visual way to scroll within the views. In the Mixer this shows a representation of a whole mixer channel, with a blue outline indicating the area that is currently visible on screen. You use the Navigator to scroll the mixer view vertically, either by dragging the blue outline, or clicking any point to move directly there. When there are more mixer channels than can fit in the mixer view at once, you also get a traditional horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the view. As you’d probably expect, scrolling in all directions is available (and generally faster) using your mouse scroll wheel or trackpad scroll gesture (usually two–finger drag). On mice that only support vertical scrolling, you can hold Shift while scrolling to move horizontally.If you like to see the big picture, try rotating one of your displays. Both the Rack and the Mixer work great in portrait mode.

In the Rack, the Navigator column shows a miniature overview of all devices, again with a blue outline showing the visible area. Unlike the Mixer Navigator, the Rack Navigator allows you to move the view both vertically and horizontally, and can be resized. Again the Navigator is useful for moving directly to a specific place, and is also an extra visual aid when scrolling with the mouse wheel or trackpad. The Rack can also be moved directly by clicking and dragging on any of the wooden divides, although this is rarely a useful option. In some cases, particularly if you are working on a small screen, you may wish to hide the Navigators and simply use mouse/trackpad scrolling. Navigators are disabled in the Options menu.

Songs In The Key Of Z

There are lots of different ways to navigate within the Sequencer and if you’re going to spend any significant time here it’s worth spending a few minutes experimenting and getting your strategy straight. Basic scrolling up and down works as expected with mouse wheels/trackpads. There’s also a small overview track at the bottom, much like the Navigators in the other views but horizontal. The other difference with this Navigator is that you can resize it to change the zoom level in the Sequencer view. This is a very intuitive way of navigating, although as it’s mouse–based it’s ultimately not the quickest option. You also have zoom in and out shortcuts (Cmd–’+’ and Cmd–‘–’ on Mac or Ctrl–’+’/Ctrl–‘–’ on Windows), but I find these awkwardly placed and the zoom steps frustratingly small. But there’s more! If you hold down Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Win) while mouse-wheeling over the main Sequencer view you get a vertical track height zoom. Add Shift as well and you get horizontal zoom, and this is a much faster and more usable zoom method. However, if you’re using a trackpad or Apple mouse with two-way scrolling, you can’t get horizontal–only zooming, and it’s super annoying. There’s one more option for continuous control that probably works best, and will feel very comfortable to Ableton Live users. When clicking in the Navigator lane, hold shift and drag up/down to zoom around the pointer position. This allows you to very quickly zoom and move at once.

Despite all these options I’ve found zooming and navigating the Sequencer in Reason frustrating for a long time. However, a little update in Reason 8.3 has answered my prayers with a new Zoom Toggle feature similar to the way I work in Pro Tools where most of my muscle memory is. Simply pressing the Z key zooms to fill the view with whatever is selected in the Sequencer. Pressing it again zooms out to show the whole song. For me this covers 90 percent of all zooming requirements and is way easier to remember than the other options.

I’ll leave you with perhaps a slightly leftfield idea... Both the Mixer and Rack views are often taller than they are wide, so if you’re spending some significant time working in Reason why not try turning your monitor to portrait orientation if it allows it? I’ve experimented in the past using two screens, with one in portrait mode for the Mixer and Rack, and one in regular landscape mode for the Sequencer.