Getting Unnatural With Reason 10’s Natural Instruments

Andy Jones shies away from Reason’s crazy synths for an experiment with their natural instruments Klang, Pangea and Humana. Here’s a quick guide to help you get started. Make sure you check out our Grain and Europa tutorials

1. Reason 10 has three sampled instruments, for more natural sounds. Here’s Klang, a tuned percussion instrument. It has over 30 instrument presets, including Glockenspiel, Music Box, Whale Drum and Kalimba.

2. You can choose these instruments from a drop-down menu. You can’t go that far off-road with the plug-in, but the Cylindrum offers some neat bass notes, which can be made even more chunky with a touch of delay.

3. Pangea is similar in layout and number of presets and instruments, but has a slightly larger scope – thanks to a wider range of instruments at its core. Some of these are actually classic sounds, such as flute and piano.

4. Here’s a lesson on how to make world-music sounds out of those classics. Take the flute sound and modulate it a little, increase the attack and release times and you’ve got yourself an evocative, African-style pad.

5. Lastly, Humana – and it’s the same GUI layout in terms of parameters, but has a different design and set of 10 core instrument voices. Within specific octave ranges, these are very effective as natural voices…

6. …but again, to make them a little more unnatural, you can adjust the volume envelope to create a pad sound. And here, there’s a clever use of the filter envelope to create a slow ‘wow’ in this sinister preset.