How to Make Solid Drums in Reason

If you aren't recording real drums in a studio then your drums can end up sounding incredibly lifeless. So how do you give your drums life when using a sampled or digital sounds in Propellerheads Reason? Here's how.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Propellerheads Reason

1. Open up a Redrum drum machine inside of Reason. There are other ways to use drums in Reason but Redrum is the most effective by far.

2. Draw a 1 bar pattern into your sequencer. Inside the pattern draw a kick (C1) on every beat and a snare (Csharp) on the second and fourth beats. Loop this section and hit play.

3. Go back to your Redrum machine and browse through presets or drum sounds you have downloaded until you find a kick and a snare you like. If Reason is looping the earlier section you should be able to hear the new drums sounds playing when you click on them in the browser.

4. Add a little bit of reverb to your drums (and distortion if you like) followed by a compressor. To give your drums 'pop' add a compressor with a ratio of 3:1, a threshold of -15 db, an attack of 100ms and a decay of 10 ms. Bring the mix up till the drums are peaking at around 0 db. For a longer 'pop' sound lengthen the attack and for a harder 'pop' increase your ratio and boost the overall volume of the drums.

5. Try some parallel compression on the drums (creating a barely heard bus of your drums with heavy distortion and compression) and adjust any values as you see fit.

6. Draw in longer and more complex drum patterns, add some hi-hats if you like and voila! Your drums are ready for a song.

Tips & Warnings

• Read the software manual for more help using effects and plugins
• Learn how to use compression, it is invaluable

[Foxility]

on 2/21/2009 Great information.

[Punkuns]

on 2/8/2009 Great information and a well written article!

[jseven]

on 1/28/2009 My son plays drums so I can share this with him :)..5* RCRR