The easy riser, it ain’t pretty but it’ll do the trick. This quick tip is for when you need to add some magic to your transitions but you’ve already sunk all of your energy for the day into your track. It’s going to be quick, effective, and it requires little effort on your part. Interested? Let’s do this!
You Will Need:
- Reason, or a DAW of your choosing plus the Reason Rack Plugin.
- An instance of Thor, either in Reason or the Reason Rack Plugin.
- Your favourite Reverb.
- Some way of faking side chain compression. Pump or Synchronous will work.
By all means, do your sidechaining with an actual compressor if you want, just be quick about it!
The Reason Users Easy Riser:
All we need to do is make some noise, draw in a note for the entire length of our track, and then express our excitement in the form of some quick and dirty automation. To tidy things up a little, we can use the SSL’s filters to remove some of the lows. It’s often also appropriate to give it a little extra top end.
Make Some Noise With Thor:
All we need to do in Thor is add a Noise Oscillator, open the filter all the way, and then add a little resonance. Then, hop down to the Amp Envelope and crank D and S all the way up. While we’re in here we may as well right click on Thor’s Master Volume and add an automation lane.
Adding Reverb and Pumping Side-Chain Effect:
The Reverb: I used the Synapse Audio DR-1, but use whatever works best for you. All I did was increase the time for the reverb tail and then give it 100% dry wet. Play with the settings until what you hear makes sense for your track.
Sidechain: I opted for Pump because I knew I wouldn’t have to change a single setting. Even though my Kick wasn’t a 4 on the floor, I still wanted to pump the riser as if it were. You can use Synchronous for this too as it comes with a preset that will work nicely.
Setting Up The Riser In The Sequencer:
As you can see in the above image, this was some low maintenance automation. Once the note was taken care of, I only really had to create three automation clips; the intro, outro, and one of the section clips. All of the other sections are resized copies of the original. The last section did need to be tweaked to ensure it went into the outro appropriately. Here’s a closer look.
And, that is that. Once you get your volume at a sensible level across the whole track, you might also find bouncing it to audio to be beneficial. That one long note can be a nuisance otherwise. We said it wouldn’t be pretty! It’s not often that you can get away with such simple moves, but today it worked out fine.
Got an even quicker method? Let us know in the comments!