
Reason Rack is not called a ‘rack’ for nothing those Players and Utilities almost make it a DAW within your DAW. Now you suddenly have Reason classics like Thor running in your VST3 DAW – what more could you ask for? A lot more as it goes. You can either control-click the Rack to open a drop-down menu to load in instruments or simply drag them in. Hit the Browse Instruments option to reveal a top-line list of Reason Instruments, Effects, Players and Utilities. Drag or load the former in as an instrument and you will be faced with a selection of great Reason instruments to click on, but that’s not the end of the story – there’s plenty more where they came from in the main browser. Once loaded in, you will see the Reason Rack Plugin and Reason Rack Plugin Effect. Otherwise, you might simply find that neither the VST3 folder nor the Reason Rack Plugin are visible in the standard Live browser, where all the other VST instruments are found. That might be a simple matter of scanning for it (although most DAWs automatically scan for new plug-ins on boot up), or in Live’s case, making sure that it is ‘looking’ at the correct VST3 plug-in folder.

… you will have to ‘prepare’ it for the Reason Rack Plug-in. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re running through how you can load the new Rack up in Ableton Live, but many of the principles will apply to whichever VST3 DAW you own.

The Reason Rack Plugin is compatible with the latest versions of the following VST3-compatible DAWs, according to its makers: Ableton Live, FL Studio (Windows), Studio One, Cubase, Reaper and Bitwig. This means that you can run the software’s best parts – its instruments, effects and utilities – in a channel in your DAW as a VST instrument (with AU compatibility promised imminently). Reason 11 was announced a few months ago and the huge news was that the best bits of it can now run as a plug-in instrument rack – called the Reason Rack Plugin – within other DAWs.
