If you’re after an all-in-one music production environment, Propellerheads’ Reason has got you. It includes Redrum, which is a premium drum samples sequencer and manipulation tool. It’s really easy to use, too!
There are ten drum samples in every instance of Redrum. In fact, you can load up multiple instances of the window to really have as many as your processor can handle at any one time. But one window at a time to start with, of course! Now, there are ten strips, with each one having their own controls. This means that you can modify ten samples at the same time, and make each complement the others. To the side of the Redrum instance, there is a volume dial that modified the volume of that instrument as it pertains to the entire project that is currently open.
Looking at the channel strips available in Redrum, we can see that some knobs and levels are more self-explanatory than certain others. One of the more straightforward controls is the length. What does the length control pertain to? It affects the length of any of the drum samples. If you find that one of the hi-hats has an unnecessary reverb tail, you can cut it off by lowering the length (turn the knob to the left). This will help you sculpt samples creatively.
The pan option for every strip is also visible all within the same window, which gives you a great visual indication of where every instrument is at. This is just one of those things that you don’t think you need until you’ve played with Redrum. Everything is viewable and no hidden menus need to be accessed! It’s good, but there are of course draw-backs to this. People new to Reason may get confused with the layout at first.
You might think that picking out ten different drum samples by yourself every time will be a tiresome task, you could be right. It all really depends on the person and how much patience you have at that point in time. But relax! There is something that will help you. Redrum comes with many pre-selected and pre-matched samples ready for your picking, and they are included in the factory Refills that are included with the sound libraries that comes with Reason. These samples have all been selected because they complement each other, so it’s unlikely that you’ll have to go looking much further.
One last thing about the Redrum interface that we have not touched on is the drum samples sequencer. It is laid out in step fashion which is very intuitive. Since you are never able to see and compare the entirety of device-specific tracks at the same time, you will be forced to listen with your ear and only make decisions on a sonic level. This is absolutely great for training the discerning musician and audio engineer in you. Redrum works very well to provide you an overview of the way things work in the real world.
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