Quartet Chorus Ensemble - Reason Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're going to take a look at some new devices that were added in the latest version of Reason. One of these is the Quartet Chorus Ensemble. And essentially, it's a great new chorus device found in the latest version, not available in the intro version, so this is only going to be for users of Reason Suite. Essentially, it features four different types of chorus algorithms, and each of the algorithms can have their own settings. It's a really versatile chorus sound, and I've gone ahead first and added a kind of Fender Rhodes combinator sound here. Let's just listen to that. I'll hit Spacebar. (soft music) So classic electric piano sound, and a combinator contains multiple devices. To see those devices, I'm going to hit Show Devices, and built into this combinator, which is essentially an effects rack within Reason, a mini effects rack, we have the device itself in a sampler, the Rhodes sound, but we also have a reverb, and we have a screen for a distortion unit. That's what this amp circuit is about. You'll see if I click this amp circuit button, on and off, it's also going to bypass the distortion. I'm going to leave that on. Just adds a nice (soft music) color to the sound. We can go ahead and hide those devices again. Let's go ahead and open up the browser. I'm going to to go to Effects. Right at the top here is our Quartet Chorus Ensemble. I'm going to drag that in, and you see if we flip the rack, it's automatically wired to that combinator instrument where the Rhodes is. Let's take a listen. (soft music) So that's a hundred percent wet here. If we move it back to dry, in other words, no chorus, (soft music) that's the unaffected signal. Cool. I'm going to bring it all the way back to wet just so we can hear it. You'll notice in the center of this device here, we have our four different flavors of chorus. Starting on the left side, we have just a standard chorus effect. Essentially, the chorus effect algorithm simulates multiple detuned copies of the input signal. Classic chorus is essentially a delay line with adjustable feedback. So we're going to split the input signal into two, run one signal dry and the other through to the delay, and then sum the two signals at the end. So, (soft music) you see we have things like delay time, in milliseconds. We have a mod depth, a mod rate in hertz, feedback, so the signal feeding back into itself, and then things like width and then a wet dry, again, for controlling the output. Next, we have a BBD mode. BBD is essentially kind of more of a vintage chorus. BBD stands for Bucket Brigade Delay, and that simulates these vintage bucket brigade delay chips that were popular in the time of early synthesizers and analog devices. In this one, basically, (soft music) it's simulating capacitors, so we're simulating a delay circuit. Our first kind of delay circuit in this way, and essentially, the delay is caused by clocking to consecutively transmit signals one capacitor at a time. We have things again, like mod rate, mod depth, the delay time in milliseconds, and then we also have some interesting noise modulation on this end. Next we have our FFT mode. That essentially stands for Fast Fourier Transform. This algorithm simulates a type of chorus ensemble by utilizing noise modulation of a signal's partials. So this one gets a little bit more advanced. It's going to use the partials and modulate those with noise to achieve a dense kind of ensemble effect. The size here is going to set the accuracy and speed. (soft music) Four is the most accurate, but it's also the slowest. (soft music) So one is going to sound a bit cleaner, (soft music) it's going faster. Four is going to sound a little bit thicker because it's slower. But it's also sounding thicker because it's incorporating more of the low frequency content. And by the way, speaking of frequency range here, we can set that by moving these sliders. Now I'm starting to omit some of the low frequencies. If I make this even narrower here in terms of frequency range, and just bring this down. (soft music) Now we're kind of omitting the high highs a little above five K and everything below around 320. Final setting is our grain algorithm, and the grain algorithm is essentially going to generate an ensemble effect by extracting grains from the input signal in real time, and then cross fading those grains in various ways. The method is similar to long grains algorithm used in the Grain Sample Manipulator device in Reason. So, (soft music) we can control phase here, we can control grain size. In this case, the smaller the grains, kind of the more broken up it's going to sound. The longer the grain size, it's going to sound a bit smoother. Then we of course have things like mod depth standard to all of the different flavors, of course, something called jitter, which essentially going to modulate the grain playback position at random. This is a little bit hard to hear if you're using computer speakers. Definitely recommend using headphones for that one. And then we have things like density, we have, of course, width, also pretty standard, and of course dry wet to roll back the affected signal from our dry Rhodes signal. Finally, on the upper right corner, we have the option to change this effect from stereo to dual mono. I'm just going to leave this as stereo for now. And then last, if we hit Tab to flip open the rack, we can see that we have a variety of CV inputs in addition to our audio signal inputs and outputs so that we can further modulate parameters like the mod depth, the width, and the dry or wet using CV control from other devices.