Where is the regroove mixer

If you want your tracks to flow with that loose, yet tight feel, a regular shuffle control just doesn't cut it. That's why we created the ReGroove mixer, Reason's own realtime groove management device.

The ReGroove mixer gives you more than just a set of sequencer swing parameters - this is a unique device dedicated to one thing: the groove. The ReGroove Mixer applies its timing magic non-destructively and in realtime, giving you freedom to adjust its settings - and fine-tune your groove - as your music is playing.

You can lock all your tracks together into one unified feel. This is pretty much the same kind of process as you would find in previous incarnations of Reason. Simply right—click on a notes clip that has a feel you like, and choose Get Groove From Clip. Reason will analyse the timing and velocity variations in the Clip and create a template. This will immediately replace the groove in whichever ReGroove channel currently has the active Edit button. If you want to save the template to disk, so that you can load it into other channels, you can save it by clicking the Save button in the Groove page of the Tool Window.

Like many, I was initially fairly underwhelmed by the idea of the ReGroove mixer. However, after getting to know it I've come to think this could prove to be one of the most significant developments in MIDI sequencing for a long time — I can't think of anything else that can do what it does. If you mostly make straight-cut electronic music or techno, ReGroove will probably do little to change what you do in Reason.

However, if electro, house or hip—hop — not to mention rock or jazz — are your thing, you're seriously missing a trick if you don't give the ReGroove mixer a go. The Global Shuffle knob to the left of the ReGroove panel replaces the Pattern Shuffle knob that was found in the Transport bar in earlier versions of Reason. This knob sets the amount of shuffle applied to any Redrum, Matrix and RPG8 devices that have their Shuffle buttons activated. In previous versions, you could apply the Pattern Shuffle to any sequence of MIDI notes, by selecting them and choosing Shuffle from the Quantise menu.

This allowed you to match the feel of MIDI tracks and step-sequenced parts. You can still do exactly this, using the Quantise section of the the Tool Window. However, you can now also apply the Global Shuffle to any track in real time using the Global Shuffle button found at the bottom of each ReGroove channel.

This overrides the channel's local Shuffle knob. Simple grid quantisation is still treated like an edit task in Reason 4.

The familiar Quantise controls that used to be in the sequencer's toolbar have now been moved to the Tools tab of the Tool Window. It's a shame that a straight quantise option is not included in the ReGroove mixer.

This would allow you to add grid quantisation by varying degrees with a fader, instead of by the limited range of preset amounts that are offered in the Tool Window. No matter — it's very simple to add this feature yourself, by creating a groove template with no groove. To do this, you need to use the Get Groove From Clip command on a one bar clip with 16 straight hits at 16th—note intervals.

The quickest way to generate such a clip is to create a Redrum, select all 16 steps on any drum, set a one—bar loop with the Left and Right timeline locators, then use the Copy Pattern To Track command. Now you can use the steps detailed in the main text to extract and save a groove template from the clip. You can then load this clip into ReGroove channels and apply varying amounts of grid quantisation to tracks.

An important setting in the ReGroove mixer is the Anchor Point. This tells Reason which bar your song starts on. In my example track, the song starts on bar one, but if there is an intro section or a pick-up measure you need to make sure that the Anchor Point is set to the bar that your song actually kicks in on.

Note that ReGroove only works for notes on note lanes. When working with grooves, you'll make use of three interacting sections within Reason's interface:.

First, in the Sequencer, each note lane can be assigned to any of ReGroove's 32 channels. You assign a note lane to a groove channel by selecting it with the Select Groove pop-up in each note lane.