About cables

Cable appearance

If there are many connections in Reason Essentials, the cables can sometimes obscure the view, making it difficult to read the text printed on the back panels of the devices. Cables can be displayed in “normal” mode and in “Reduced Cable Clutter” mode.

Toggle cable display mode by pressing [K] or by selecting “Reduce Cable Clutter” on the Options menu:

•	In “normal” mode, i.e. with the option “Reduce Cable Clutter” deselected, all cables for all devices are displayed at the back of the rack.

•	With “Reduce Cable Clutter” selected, the cable appearance depends on the settings in the “Appearance” section on the “General” tab in Preferences:

Select “Show for selected devices only” to only display the cables for selected devices.

All other (non-selected) devices will have “transparent” cables to make it easier to distinguish the cables of selected devices.

Select “Hide auto-routed cables” to only display manually routed cables.

All devices with auto-routed cables will have “transparent” cables to make it easier to distinguish the manually routed cables.

Select “Hide all cables” to hide all auto-routed and manually routed cables.

All cable connections on devices will be indicated with colored dots in the jacks, and no cables will be displayed.

“Reduce Cable Clutter” selected with the “Hide All Cables” appearance.

•	In “Reduced Cable Clutter” mode, it’s still possible to connect and disconnect cables in the same way as when they are shown.

See “Manual routing” for a description of routing methods.

Checking and following cable connections

You can always check to which device a jack is connected. This is especially useful if the patch cables are hidden, but it is also practical if you have a lot of cables in your rack, or if the two connected devices are far from each other in the rack:

Hover with the pointer over a connector and wait a moment.

A tool tip appears, showing both the device name and connector that the cable is connected to.

About the “Scroll to Connected Device” function

It’s possible to scroll directly to a connected device as follows:

1.	Click and hold (or right-click (Win) or [Ctrl]-click (Mac)) on a connector.

A pop-up menu appears.

2.	Select “Scroll to Connected Device” from the pop-up menu.

The device in the other end of the cable will be scrolled into view in the rack.

Cable color

To allow for a better overview of the connections in the rack, the cables have different colors:

•	Audio connections between instrument and mixer devices are different shades of red.

•	Connections to and from effect devices are different shades of green.

•	CV connections are different shades of yellow.

•	Combinator connections are blue.