(compMus1) File organizaton with Reason

I left out some tips that you should follow to keep track of all your files for the creative project with DP and Reason.

Store your Reason patches and racks in a folder inside of your DP project folder. I created a ReasonFiles folder. It would be a good idea to make subfolders inside of the ReasonFiles folder, so that you can store patches for each iinstrument (and your racks – Reason song files) in separate folders. You should also make a subfolder for your audio files that you use for samples, since these are not saved as part off the patch files.

So the folder hiearchy is something like this:

• project folder (Kothman2 project) that contains the DP data file, DP audio files, analysis files, and a Reason folder.
• the reason folder should have subfolders for each instrument’s patches, and a subfolder for your rack files. It should also have an sample subfolder.
• The sample folder doesn’t have to be subdivided by instrument.

You want to file things this way for several reasons. Since Reason doesn’t store samples, only where to find them, you want to put them somewhere that will get backed up with your project. Use the finder to move them into the subfolder before you load them into a sampler. Another reason to put things into subfolders is that it lets you use the arrow keys by the browse icon to switch between patches for an instrument, and switch between samples in a key zone. Once you’ve loaded a patch from a folder, the instrument looks in that folder first for other patches when you use the arrow keys. It makes for easy patch browsing without having to navigate a browser window.

I’ll talk about this more on Tuesday.