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Patcher with ReWire and Reason Experiment

Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 5:03 am
by Schwa Iska
I'm reasonably certain this hasn't been covered before, simply because the whole idea of having Reason work in Rewire, in Patcher seems kind of ludicrous.  However, I love to experiment.  

When I realized Rewire could be opened up in Patcher, I was intrigued.  I didn't expect to even be able to open up Reason in that way, but it worked.  I figure it worked simply because Patcher was designed to work with most anything you could throw at it.  It wasnt designed on a plugin by plugin basis, so my assumption was that there was no particlar logic behind this integration of Rewire.  It just happens to work as other native format plugins.  

As I played around with it, however, I saw some potential for this application.  The main advantage to opening Rewire and subsequently Reason in Patcher is the ability to take multiple Reason outputs, and plug them into ONE mixer slot in FL.  Those of you who use Reason rewired into FL know how annoying it can be having to route stereo Reason audio into two mixer slots in FL and then panning them to their respective sides just to preserve their stereo-ness.  THEN having to route those two to a summed mixer slot so that you don't have to use the same EQ/compressor/flanger/reverb/etc. on two individual tracks! 

With Patcher, you can do all that summing before your audio even hits FL's mixer.  What you do is you take your left output from Reason, and in Patcher (as an input), route that to a panning plugin (Fruity Balance, Fruity Stereo Shaper, etc.).  You pan that all the way left.  Then you take your right channel and route it to a second panning plugin, and of course, pan that all the way right.  Now you take those two outputs from your panning plugins and route them to the same FL mixer slot.  Voila!  Stereo sound using one mixer track instead of three!

I know some of you are scratching your heads right now saying,  "Whitey, this seems like MORE work than the usual ass-backwards way.  Why the hell would I want to do this?!". Well that's a good ass question, my inquisitive friends.  One answer is, I don't know yet.  I'm still experimenting.  I don't yet know if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.  If you're like me, you already had a work flow set up for using Reason rewired to FL.  It's still a little bit clunky (the nature of the beast) but it's what you're used to.  

Luckily with Patcher, you can save all your routing for a template to be used in a future project, but you're still going to have to do some adjustments. You may not want your Reason audio to come in on the same mixer slots so you may be doing more routing audio each time.  

The big thing, that I haven't figured out yet, and I don't know that I will, is how to effectively control MIDI in Reason.  Ordinarily, you'd just have a bunch of MIDI Outs assigned to the proper ports and channels controlling your Reason sounds.  However, I've had some difficulty with the Patcher set up.  

I've tried adding MIDI Outs in with the rest of the channels (outside of Patcher) and setting the MIDI options in Rewired to input on port 0 of Reason.  The problem is, it doesn't seem to matter what channel the MIDI Outs are set to, they only control note data in channel 2 of Reason.  It recognizes different ports, just not different channels. Interestingly I can get it to multiple control knobs/sliders (CCs) on multiple channels, but as I said, not note data.  That means I can only ever get FL to play one Reason instrument.  There may be some other settings I messed with as well that I'm neglecting to mention (I'm not looking at FL right now.)

I don't know if this is something doable since I don't think Patcher was designed to operate in this way.  The main impediment would seem to be the fact that Patcher only accepts 1 MIDI input from FL.  Now, I'm in no way an expert on MIDI.  There may be another reason, but that's my best guess.

Well, that's all I've got so far. I hope you've all found my findings interesting.  If y'all have any insight as to how this might work better, or even opinions on whether or not it even seems possible, I would greatly appreciate it. :)

Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 9:59 am
by nucleon
Indeed I think some things need to be sorted, b...

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 1:06 am
by Schwa Iska
I've been messing around with the settings in R...

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 1:17 am
by Schwa Iska
Here's an example that shows the main benefit o...

Re: Patcher with ReWire and Reason Experiment

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2014 12:49 am
by mango
Any developments in this department? This is an...

Re: Patcher with ReWire and Reason Experiment

Posted: Sun May 18, 2014 10:18 pm
by Schwa Iska
I'm afraid not. I never really got this off the...

Re: Patcher with ReWire and Reason Experiment

Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2014 11:41 pm
by LoopBeatz
thanks for the experiment..i don't think i woul...

Re: Patcher with ReWire and Reason Experiment

Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2015 7:56 am
by mango
I had some success with this. Instead of sendin...

Re: Patcher with ReWire and Reason Experiment

Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2016 1:56 am
by mango
Some Call Him Whitey wrote: I can only ever get...

Re: Patcher with ReWire and Reason Experiment

Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2016 12:33 am
by MR44hz
mango wrote:Some Call Him Whitey wrote: I can o...

Re: Patcher with ReWire and Reason Experiment

Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2017 2:00 pm
by donkeytugger
mango wrote:Some Call Him Whitey wrote: I can o...