Sounds in Reason are kinda thin

[yungskeeme]

Especially the Sonic Reality refills. Anyone have any tips or advice on how to thicken some of the sounds in Reason?

 

[Kontents]

Throw a scream on it with the body feature.. EQ... Stereo. I mean your just using stock sounds with nothing on it. The tools are there just tweek with it.

 

[Sanova]

The tools are there just tweek with it.

Agreed. Just experiment and find a sound that is your own!

 

[yungskeeme]

tru....thanks for the replies

 

[spartan265]

layer different sounds and pan them different directions to create a sense of space. EQ the respective frequencies so they dont overlap to prevent unwanted muddiness. whack some reverb on that bad boy and boom. its fat.

 

[2GooD Productions]

Eq alone can go a long way to enhance the frequencies you wish to beef up. It can also take away frequencies allowing you to boost others more effectively.
Then theres compression and distortion, all tools that have a learning curve of their own, but are invaluable tools to get the best out of any particular sound.
Sound mixing is another subject altogether. Im always going back over old stuff fixing dodgy patches that sounded okay before but now sound shit.
Before worrying too much about mix engineering, you should concentrate on structure, composition and layering of sounds, sampling, both chopping and arranging.
There is so much to learn, but dont let that put you off, I have had fun learning everything Ive ever learned about making music.

 

[Cell 2Dee]

Eq alone can go a long way to enhance the frequencies you wish to beef up. It can also take away frequencies allowing you to boost others more effectively.
Then theres compression and distortion, all tools that have a learning curve of their own, but are invaluable tools to get the best out of any particular sound.
Sound mixing is another subject altogether. Im always going back over old stuff fixing dodgy patches that sounded okay before but now sound shit.
Before worrying too much about mix engineering, you should concentrate on structure, composition and layering of sounds, sampling, both chopping and arranging.
There is so much to learn, but dont let that put you off, I have had fun learning everything Ive ever learned about making music.

I've got a sample, that's got mad low end on just one of the chops, how would I go about EQ'ing it to even it out a bit? Should I just lower the velocity of my kick on that particular chop?

 

[Kontents]

Compression. Does the sample have a kick in it? Im kinda lost at your question near the end. If the lows are comming in to high on the sample that it muds the kick you may want to learn about the side chain on the Mclass compressor.

 

[2GooD Productions]

I've got a sample, that's got mad low end on just one of the chops, how would I go about EQ'ing it to even it out a bit? Should I just lower the velocity of my kick on that particular chop?

run all the chops through the same eq, then just eq out some of the bass to balance the chops.
then add your own bass later.
or if you want the bass, put a compressor on the bass, and sidechain with the kick, to allow the kick to punch through.
I dont know how to explain that in simple terms though.
Maybe reading up on sidechaining would help you out.
There are many ways and means to solve problems, that is just a couple of methods.
Another method would be to eq each chop before importing into reason, using soundforge or something.
Or having all the chops in an nnxt and use the high pass filter to kill the low frequencies. <<< cpu friendly method.
NNXT is a very powerful sampler. Its just working out what all the knobs do.

 

[Greg Savage]

I never understood why people say this. I mean reason stock sounds basic layering and leveling I never had a thin sounding track out of reason. Not even using EQ or level processing

 

[SirSedric]

tricks.

I know I'm a bit late on this one...

But my secret trick in Reason to beef it up is the Maximizer.

Just turn on the Limiter and the 4ms look-ahead and then pump your input gain up 1 or 2db and turn the soft clip to about 25%.. That should allow for some pretty clean leveling, some headroom for more beef on the output gain and a little harmonic content and body from the soft clip...

Also, you may want to try stereo imaging and then recombining two wide images back into one, less-wide stereo image

 

[Freakwncy]

Layers. Make everything thick!

 

[Fury]

Well that's pretty much the heavy work in making beats by using compressors and eq and other effects like distortion to make it sound gritty

 

[Cymatic Kicks]

Agreed with everyone else. With Reason or anything else, my stuff never sounds nearly as good before I put on eq and compression compared to after I do. I chop the lows off of everything but the bass and kick, and sidechain the bass to the kick so the kick stands out. That gets rid of a lot of mud and makes things a lot clearer, giving a fuller sound.

 

[MitchHolmes]

I agree Reason is kinda thin

 

[thedreampolice]

If you think Reason "sounds" thin. Then you dont know how to use it. Once you learn how to actually program synths then you can get HUGE sounds out of it.

 

[2GooD Productions]

most synths or sounds can sound thin if you dont know what you are doing.
As for reason, I really only use stock sounds and some tweaking, and my tracks are certainly not thin.
What I will say about reason though, is that it has a sound to it, the algorithms used by reason give it a sound that you can distinguish. Someone said to me the other day that reason also has 4 or 5 db lower output than other DAWS like logic or cubase. Im not sure if that is true though, but who knows, I always do a final master out of reason anyway so the lower output is irrelevant.

 

[MitchHolmes]

^^ What do you use to mix??

 

[2GooD Productions]

If its just a beat I mix it in Reason and master it in Soundforge with WaveArts and Waves plugins.

 

[MitchHolmes]

Can you suggest a template?