Rewiring Reason into Cubase For Mixdowns + post production VSTs

Hello everyone! I've just purchased Cubase and I'm going to be attempt to rewire Reason into Cubase tonite so I can start learning how to do a bit of post production. I'm a total newbie to this all... I hope my questions are coherent.

One thing I dispise about Reason is that for every instrument in your rack, you need to create 3 or 4 tools (compressors, parametric eq's, reverb, filters, etc) to tweek the sound. I'm hoping that the Cubase interface provides a cleaner approach because this gets kinda messy....

One thing I'm curious about is, for all of you people that rewire reason to cubase, how do you divide the responsibility of each tool? do you just pipe in your subtractors etc directly into to cubase and do all your reverb, phaser, etc etc in Cubase, and have both tools running at the same time for the entire production? or do you use the tools that reason provides and only rewire at the end when you're completely finished your track?

What are some good VST's to own when doing post production? I'm looking for some good parametric EQs, compressors, spectrum analyzers etc to aid me in my mix downs.

Hope to hear from you production masters soon!

[(val)Liam]

Waves makes a lot of post-production vsts... they normally come in bundles with a bunch of stuff...

when I rewire, I just use reason as if it were another VSTi and use a bunch of other VST/i's in... for post-production I use adobe audition 1.5, after sampling my tracks seperately...

if you aren't using automations for the effects you're applying to your tracks, you can render them in your samples... toolbar->audio->process or plug-in... that'll cause a lot less stress on your CPU...

[Krusha]

^ except that you can't freeze or pre process plugins on a rewire channel , since its just routing audio like a bus , at least thats the way logic works and i dont see how cubase would differ in that department but maybe it does .... you wanna confirm this?

[ill-esha]

no george, you're right. he would have to export an audio mixdown from reason, import it into cubase as an audio file and then process it.. just like logic i'm sure.

Rewiring reason into cubase is sooo easy.. it's like the third drop-down menu from the right and there's an option called "Reason" select it and pick the channels to wire and then bob's your uncle.

Cubase is "cleaner", so to speak... because while Reason has the virtual rack with all the modules stacked on top, in Cubase you plug them into the track and when you're not editing them they are just titles in your channel window. (eep I'm not explaining well today but you'll see what I mean).

Now, I'm not big on Reason, I got into cubase pretty quickly when I started, I DO like a lot of the samples in Reason particularly the NN-19 piano preset, so I usually will rewire the instruments into Cubase and do any processing there. of course, I would say this would be dependent on the number of VSTs you have installed versus the number that come with reason. if you have almost nothing in Cubase, then obviously you will probably process in Reason and just do your final tweakings in Cubase.

I second Liam's vote for the Waves bundles. they are pretty comprehensive. There are so many ones out there, Waves is the best.


A good MASTERING program (once you've exported your track into a single stereo file, import it into a new project and run this) is Isotope Ozone, it's got great EQs, compression, spectrum analyzer, and other things like that to really brighten your final mixes.

Or, if you're lazier/not as advanced.. get T-Racks!

I got it all working the other nite! thanks guys.. fairly straight forward.


Quick question, when mastering, do these mastering plugins work in realtime?

I was recommended a mastering plugin by waves called L3 Multimaximizer. By the sounds of it, it works like magic. You just feed in your mixdown and voila!

I was also recommended one called the "Vintage Warmer". Any comments on this one?

[ill-esha]

yes, they work in realtime. quite neat.

Vintage warmer is nice, but it doesn't have as many options as the other programs I mentioned. If it's the same one I'm thinking of, I use it as an effect, not to master.

[(val)Liam]

Originally Posted by Krusha

^ except that you can't freeze or pre process plugins on a rewire channel , since its just routing audio like a bus , at least thats the way logic works and i dont see how cubase would differ in that department but maybe it does .... you wanna confirm this?

I just record the samples (say a 4 bar melody) and process the wav... I honestly don't like freezing my stuff... it takes longer to do and takes up nearly just as much space on your harddrive...