Three tracks of guitars were edited into 4-bar loops, and imported into Reason's NN-XT sampler. I used the NN-XT instead of Redrum because there were more than 10 loops. After setting up the sampler (assigning a note value to each loop, balancing the levels individually, etc.) I used the pencil tool in the sequence window to draw in 4-bar chunks of guitar loop.
Some of the loops began with a pickup, so I had to slide a couple of regions to the left slightly. I experimented with offsetting some loops that were played on the beat, and came up with a really interesting result! (See about halfway through (above), where the middle guitar comes in over the low one? The upper part is offset earlier by 1/4 beat, and makes for a really interesting counterpoint!)
I created a new mixer (below) so that I could balance out the three different kinds of loops, and process them (fx, eq, pan) slightly differently. Using the NN-XT sample edit window, I assigned each group of loops to a different stereo output, then cabled those outputs to the Guitar Mixer. I created a special FX chain for this mixer, sent the guitars through it, then passed the whole mixer to a channel on the main mix (not shown). I heart submixing!
ADX finalized a vocal take and doubling tracks on a recent session, and I began thinking about how to bus the dub mix around. I prepared the vocal tracks in the same way as the guitars, chopping them up into multi-bar sections and importing them to an NN-XT device. I named each loop something like "vocals_05_09" for the section that went from bar 5 to bar 9, etc. That made it real easy to lay out the MIDI note triggers on the sequencer track. A couple of quick pencil moves and the vocals were all lined up and ready to process.
