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The cable guy: make sense of Reason's routing options.

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The front of Reason's rack-style interface sure looks pretty, but it's when you delve round the back that things start to get really interesting.

When it comes to routing, Propellerhead's software is endlessly flexible. In fact, once you start getting busy with its virtual patch cords, you can do things in Reason that simply aren't possible in any other application.

Not convinced? Here are 14 routing and combining possibilities that you might not have considered.

1. Saving up
Reason's much-lauded loop machine Dr. REX doesn't facilitate the storing of presets (or even the saving of specific commonly-used parameter setups), but you can use a Combinator as a work-around. Simply Combine a Dr. REX and save the Combinator preset. Now you've automatically saved the settings of the Dr. REX, too!

2. Ready, set, go
While Reason doesn't feature channel strip presets, it actually offers something even more versatile. By saving a commonly used sequence of effects (for bass or vocals, etc) as a Combinator patch, they're available at any time.

3. All together now
When you're working with lots of individual drums, you'll want to be able to set the levels separately, but you might also want to adjust the overall level of the section. So, create a drum group using an additional mixer and route everything to a single channel.

4. One plus one
Use a Spider Audio Splitter to create mad stereo effects from a mono signal. Simply divide the signal, apply processing to one side (or use different processing on each), then route the two resulting signals to either side of a stereo fader in your mixer.

5. 'Thormidable'
Have a look around the back of some of your synths to see what modulation options are available. For example, Thor let's you route CV signals into it to control things like filter cutoff. You can also assign one modulator to multiple synths using a CV Splitter.

6. Total Control
If you want a crazy source of modulation mayhem, you can't go too far wrong with Malström and its incredible array of LFOs. Using a Spider Splitter, you can send these to multiple parameters all at once for some hectic automated control.

7. Talented Remix
The ReMix mixer enables you to control level and pan using CV controls, so you can use Spider CV Splitters to control more than one at a time with the same signal. In fact, using chained Splitters you can control an entire mixer using one signal (although you probably wouldn't want to!).

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