That’ll often be all you need to know to get stuck into recording. Hit the record button and you’re away. However, there are some other cool options to explore.
Clicking the tuning fork button switches the input level meter into a tuning display, ideal for guitarists. It works incredibly easily: you play the note you want to tune, and Reason figures out the target pitch and guides you up or down.
If the input level meter doesn’t give you enough feedback — I always wish there was some clearer calibration — you can choose Recording Meter from the Window menu. This pops up a big, floating, well‑calibrated meter window.
Creating a mixer with virtually unlimited tracks, but without causing cabling pandemonium on the back of the rack (well, no worse than usual, anyway...) doesn’t seem like an easy task, but the Propellerhead nerds were equal to it and have come up with a nifty solution. Basically, any channel you see in the mixer has a counterpart in the rack, in the form of either an Audio Track device or a Mix device. These communicate with the mixer via an invisible, virtual ‘P‑LAN’ connection.
A lot of the time you never have to think about these new devices, or interact with them in any way. Audio Track devices are created automatically whenever you create an Audio Track — in a very real sense they are the Audio Track. And Mix devices show up in partnership with any individual or Combinator instruments you create. In old versions of Reason, you’d see just instruments and effects devices in the rack. Now every instrument has a Mix device ‘shadow’, and as you add effects to instruments, they get patched in between the instrument and the Mix device.
In no time at all, the presence of a bunch of Audio Track and Mix devices should feel completely familiar for Reason upgraders. There are a few aspects of how they work, though, that are worth noting.
Firstly, they are not just a conduit to the mixer. You can also patch effects directly into them. Try it: right‑click an Audio Track or Mix device and choose an effect from the Effect submenu.