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Wave Sequencing | Vocoder Mod | Lead Synth

I’ll admit it: When I first heard about the new features added to the 3.0 release of Propellerhead Reason, the venerable virtual studio program, I wasn’t exactly breathing hard. Aside from the MClass Mastering Suite (and since I’m not a mastering engineer, that’s not the kind of thing I get excited about), the big news in 3.0 is a device called the Combinator. Trouble is, the Combinator doesn’t do anything. It’s just a big empty box that you put other, older Reason modules into.

That’s what I thought, anyway. I was dead wrong.

When I installed 3.0 and started going through the Combinator factory presets, I was amazed at the creative sound design. And there’s no denying it: Being able to stuff a number of synths and effects into the “big empty box” both speeds up the process of creating new music and makes it easier to archive your visionary sonic experiments. Still, hardware synthesizers have been able to layer sounds and save the settings of built-in effects processors along with the synthesis parameters for more than 20 years.

But wait. There’s more to the Combinator than that. And amazingly, very few of the factory presets take full advantage of the Combinator’s features. Specifically, if you hit the Tab key while auditioning those factory Combis, you’ll discover that the CV (control voltage) inputs to the four rotary knobs are seldom used. Those four jacks turn the Combinator into a very respectable modular synthesizer. When used in tandem with the Combinator programmer window, the CV inputs make it possible to control many more of Reason’s synthesis parameters using envelopes, LFOs, and Matrix patterns.

In this article I’ll outline the concepts you need to grasp in order to take full advantage of the Combinator’s CV inputs. Then we’ll take a quick look at three Combis I cooked up to give you a taste of what you might want to do with your own Combi patches. If you don’t have Reason, consider downloading a free demo from the Propellerhead site.

Propellerhead Reason offers an infinitely tall rack of music gear. At the simplest level, the Combinator helps you tame that rack by grouping modules into single playable units that you can save as a Combi patch, like the DeDigitalizer here.

Related Reading Digital Audio Essentials A comprehensive guide to creating, recording, editing, and sharing music and other audio By Bruce Fries, Marty Fries