I did this as Reason Suite 11 differs from some environments insofar as the not so obvious implementing strategy needed for the MIDI Guitar 2 (MG2) to work. Seen as a DAW next to any other, I would consider it flawed. But the fact is, I don’t. The two primary ways to have your guitar control the sounds and synths in Reason are 1) Open the standalone version and have it running in the background. it will send the information to Reason and what else you open that respond to the midi data sent. You can use an external midi controller for changing presets with different settings on transpose, pitch bends, aftertouch on/off for instance. And you can also still open a MIDI Guitar plugin inside Reason on an audio track if you like. You might want to use some of the internal synths or effects perhaps. Then, you just record them as separate audio tracks.
2) The other way is to use the Reason rack inside another DAW, as a software instrument. In that case, you can have MG2 running as a plugin as usual and still get MIDI to control the synths in reason.
I believe I have used both these strategies in these clips. I furthermore make use of a breath controller (besides the MIDI guitar) and also this isn’t as straightforward as one could have wished for. Some of the new Rack extensions such as Friktion have a breath controller alternative more readily available than perhaps some of the older instruments, where you have to do some investigations into the inner workings a little bit more. One might think that is part of its charm, whereas it is offputting to someone else.
I have here five clips just to show you, it does work.
- The first is the Friktion Modeled Strings rack extension controlled by the standalone MIDI Guitar 2 running in the background only. Pretty straightforward
- The second is a little more complex setup, but not difficult to achieve. I have MG2 running in standalone, and the breath controller is connected to the computer feeding data for CC2 (Breath). I recorded a loop with Grain on Reason, then un-armed that track (so that it would no longer receive midi data as I proceeded with my improvisation). Then I open up Respiro, which is a fantastic standalone wind synth, and just played on. In this case with the breath controller
- Back to Friktion, but this time it is controlled by MG2 (in standalone) and my breath controller. They are two different MIDI controllers, and produce two different MIDI cc feeds, working in tandem. The breath controller has nothing to do with MG2 in this case, except that they meet up and join forces inside Friktion. This was just a spur of the moment recording, so therefore I have no live GUI video to offer.
- Now this setup is more interesting. Here I play (recorded) an instance of Sample Modelings the Trumpet 3 as a software instrument inside Native Instruments Kontakt as a vst inside Reason. Why is this interesting? If you wonder how well the external software plugin instruments work inside Reason, I say pretty darn good. I use my breath controller both to control the trumpet recorded and to play a patch from the brilliant TBOR (TheBreathOfReason) collection from ‘The Art of Wind Synth’ over it. If you look closely at the Thor synth you can see where some of the breath settings are done.
- The last clip are excerpts from a single session where I switch in real time between playing Grain and the Trumpet 3 in unison over some beat, and just the trumpet alone (simply muting Grain). I use two virtual instrument channel strips in a Mainstage 3 patch switching between them. And as far as I remember, I had the beat run on a standalone version of Reason outside of Mainstage.
These are some of the ways you can use MG2 and Reason together. Not that special or in-depth, but perhaps a place to start at least?
