Making music with Reason can seem overwhelming at first due to it's seemingly infinite number of tools and instruments. It is the complexity, the realistic interface, and the endless options however, that make Reason the best program available for making music.

One of the first steps to building your rack is creating an synthesizer, or sampler.
Reason 4 offers the following under the 'Create' menu:

• Sub Tractor Analog Synthesizer
• Thor Polysonic Synthesizer
• Malstrom Graintable Synthesizer
• NN19 Digital Sampler
• NN-XT Advanced Sampler

For this example, we will create a Sub Tractor Analog Synthesizer.

After selecting your Sampler you will need a way to produce notes. This can be done by connecting the sampler to a Matrix Pattern Sequencer.

Since we only have one item on our rack, the Matrix Patter Sequencer should connect to our Sub Tractor Synthesizer by default. However, once our rack expands this can get a little bit tricky. Just remember that the Matrix Patter Sequencer will connect to whichever item is currently selected. You can always toggle to the back side to check the inputs.

You should now be able to input notes into the Sequencer. For long, sliding notes click on "Tile Gate" before clicking your note. You will probably want to select a better instrument in the Synthesizer as the default sounds is pretty weak. Simply click on the file folder icon and an entire sound bank is available.