Working with grooves

Applying grooves to your music

Follow this example to learn basic ReGroove mixing techniques and hear the effect that various groove parameters have on your music.

1.	If it's not already visible in either the Sequencer or Rack, open the ReGroove Mixer by clicking the Groove button to the left on the Transport Panel in the Sequencer.

2.	Decide which note lane you are going to apply the groove to.

For the most obvious effect the track should contain a drumbeat based on straight (as opposed to shuffled) sixteenth notes. A hi-hat lane, for example, might be a good source for experimentation.

3.	Use the Groove Select pop-up on the chosen note lane to route those notes to a specific ReGroove mixer channel.

The “Enabled” item at the top of the pop-up menu allows you to turn ReGroove off for individual note lanes.

This is useful for comparing with the original, ungrooved beat. If you want to do this for several note lanes set to a particular ReGroove channel, use the “On” button for the channel in the ReGroove mixer instead (see “On Button”).

To turn ReGroove off for a note lane, select “No Channel”.

4.	In the ReGroove Mixer, make sure the channel you are using is activated - the On button should be lit.

5.	To hear some of the different possibilities, start by turning up the channel's Shuffle knob while you play the sequence.

The music on that note lane (and any other note lane assigned to the same ReGroove channel) will start playing with a shuffle feel.

6.	Turn down Shuffle to its middle position (50%), and turn up the channel's Slide knob to hear its effect.

Note that, because slide shifts all notes by the same amount, you won't hear the results unless you play the track in conjunction with another track whose notes are not being slid (or with Click activated in the sequencer).

7.	Turn the Slide knob back to its middle position (0 Ticks), then click the channel's Browse button and navigate to the ReGroove Patches folder in the Reason Essentials Sound Bank.

8.	Open the Vinyl folder, select the first groove patch in the list and click Load to load the groove patch.

9.	Pull up the Groove Amount fader on the channel, to about 80%.

10.	Click the Next Patch button to step through the groove patches in the folder and hear what they do to your music.

11.	On the ReGroove Mixer channel, click the Edit button to open that channel's groove settings in the floating Tool Window.

12.	Move the various horizontal faders and listen for their effect.

Note that none of the patches in the Vinyl folder make use of Note Length, so the Note Length Impact will have no effect.

There are all sorts of creative and useful ways to apply grooves to your music. See “Groovy tips & tricks”, later in this chapter, for some suggested techniques.

Commit to Groove - making the grooves “permanent”

When you assign a ReGroove channel to a note lane, this will only affect how the notes play back. The notes will still be shown with their original, ungrooved positions if you open the note clip.

If you want to edit grooved notes (e.g. adjust timing and velocity manually), it’s useful to first actually move the notes to the grooved positions, permanently. This is done with the “Commit to Groove” function:

1.	Select the track with the grooved note lane(s).

2.	Select “Commit to Groove” from the Edit menu or the track context menu.

All notes on all lanes on the track will be moved to their grooved positions, and the Groove Select pop-up will be reset to “No Channel”.

If you play back the track, it will sound exactly the same as before. If you look at the notes in Edit mode, their positions, length and velocity will now match what you hear.

Using Commit to Groove on some lanes only

“Commit to Groove” affects entire tracks, including all note lanes if there are several. If you only want to make the groove permanent for one of the lanes, here’s a workaround:

1.	Click the Groove Select pop-up for the note lanes that should remain ReGrooved, and turn off “Enabled”.

This bypasses the ReGroove channel for those note lanes, but retains the channel selection.

2.	Select “Commit to Groove”.

Only the note lanes with ReGroove Enabled will be affected.

3.	Select “Enabled” again for the note lanes that should remain ReGrooved.

Creating your own ReGroove patches

To create your own ReGroove Patch, proceed as follows.

1.	Create a clip containing notes with the desired timing and dynamics (­velocity).

Alternatively, you could import a MIDI File with the desired effect, or use the “Copy Loop To Track” function on a Dr. Octo Rex device to extract the notes from a REX loop.

Note that some MIDI clips will make better grooves than others.

To learn some of the characteristics of a good groove-making clip, see “Tips for selecting the best Groove-Making Clips” below.

2.	Select the clip.

3.	In the Tool Window's Groove section, select an unused Groove Channel.

4.	Click the “Get from clip” button at the bottom of the Tool Window's Groove Settings tab.

Alternatively, you could select “Get Groove From Clip” from the clip's context menu.

5.	Set the various impact parameters as desired.

For a good starting point, you can simply leave them at their default settings.

6.	Click the Save Patch button in the Tool Window's Groove section and specify a name and location.

Your ReGroove patch is now ready to use. As discussed in “Applying grooves to your music”, simply route one or more note lanes to the ReGroove channel assigned to your new groove, and pull up the Groove Amount fader on that channel.

Tips for selecting the best Groove-Making Clips

The following tips will help insure that your custom grooves work their best:

Include as many sixteenths notes as possible in the source clip.

If there are any sixteenth note gaps in your source material, there will be corresponding gaps in your groove patch. This means, when you apply the groove to a note lane, some notes will be grooved and some (those that fall in the gaps) will not.

Grooves use the relative differences between note velocities, not their absolute values.

If you don't want dramatic shifts in dynamics, avoid having widely varying velocities in your source clip.

Groove patches are always an exact number of bars, so if your source clip has an uneven length, the groove will be extended to the next bar.

We recommend that you adjust your source clip to an exact number of bars before creating a groove patch.

In general, you should use source clips whose length is an even multiple of 2 (for example, 1-bar, 2-bars, 4-bars, etc.)

You can create and use grooves that are an odd number in length (3, 7, 13, etc.), but unless you're well organized and plan to use these grooves in specific polyrhythmic pieces, their general effect on most tracks will be somewhat unpredictable.