For those of us still on Reason 10 and using Reaper, I hope this guide helps. Reason 11 solves all these problems by allowing you to load Reason devices in your DAW as VST instruments.
Download Templates
This file contains both the Reason template and the Reaper template. Unzip the contents of the folder after downloading.
- Move the Reason Rewire.RTrackTemplate file into your Reaper template folder. Mine lives in C:\Users\Will\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\TrackTemplates.
- Move the ReasonRewireTemplate.reason file into your Reason template folder. Mine lives in C:\Users\Will\Music\Reason\Template Songs.
Loading Your Templates
Open up Reaper into a blank project. Right click on your track area and select Insert track from template. This will show all the files in your template folder. You should see Reason Rewire listed there as a template. Click on it to open it. Nested tracks will appear and Reason will open automatically.
In Reason, go to File → New from Template and select ReasonRewireTemplate. This should open up 4 different instruments, all of which are already routed to the correct outputs. Thor 3/4, Malstrom 5/6, Subtractor 7/8, Europa 9/10.
This should be enough to get us up and running but we want to understand everything too. Let’s go back into Reaper and have a look at the routing.
The Reaper Tracks
This is the general layout in Reaper. We have the Reason Nest sitting at the top of everything. Under that we have the Reason Host which is the track that has Reason loaded on the FX section. After that we get a combo of an audio track with a nested MIDI track for every track we need. The Reason Nest track is just going to the master send and nothing else.
st.1 audio is routed to have the parent send track as Reason Nest. It receives from the Reason Host track on audio channels 3/4. If this were the st.2 audio track, it would be receiving on audio channels 5/6.
st.1 midi is routed to send to the Reason Host track on MIDI channel 1. st.2 midi would be set to send to the Reason Host on MIDI channel 2, etc.
Finally we need to open up the FX section on our Reason Host track and set the MIDI Send To ReWire options on there. You can see the names of each of our Reason instruments in there. If we were to create a new instrument in Reason, it’s name would automatically show up in our list. We then just need to assign each bus to the right MIDI channel. So Thor is set to MIDI channel 1, Malstrom to 2, etc.
Now you should be able to use Reaper as you would with any other VST instrument. MIDI is recorded in Reaper which triggers the instruments in Reason. This means all our MIDI in our project stays in Reaper and we can do all our Mixing and Mastering in there too, leaving Reason to host the instruments.
Head over to the contact page and let me know how you get on with rewiring Reason into Reaper.
Stay safe!