VST control voltage (CV) routing - Reason Tutorial

- [Instructor] If you've ever seen a modular synthesizer set up with all sorts of wires going everywhere, many of those wires are not carrying audio signal, they're carrying control voltage, which is used to control different parameters on the synths and effects in the system. Reason uses virtual Control Voltage in the same way. If you press the Tab key on your computer keyboard and flip the rack around, you will see audio cables and also cables that are carrying virtual Control Voltage. Hard core power Reason users have been using Control Voltage ever since Reason first came out with version 1. Now with the addition of VSTs, you can actually use Reason's virtual Control Voltage signal flow to control your favorite VST instruments and effects. I want to quickly show you how to do that. I have a simple little sequence here with a melody that is triggering a sound I've already loaded into Massive. We'll hear what that sounds like. (bass sounds) All right. Now I'd like to open the CV programmer. I'm going to load a Utility device which is capable of sending Control Voltage. Most of the devices in Reason can send and receive Control Voltage. I'm going to use the Matrix Pattern Sequencer here. I just drag that in there, and I'm going to go to Curve here. Some of what I'm doing here may look advanced to you, but if this is a feature that you're looking to use, having used it in the past in Reason, I want to show you how to use it with VSTs in Reason, or if this might be something you're interested in exploring, I hope this will fuel your creativity. I'll press Tab to flip the rack around. These connections, I don't need to disconnect them, but I don't really need them either. I want to send this Curve CV signal to one of these Modulation CV In, Modulation Control Voltage In. I'm going to change this to Bipolar, and I'll flip this back around. I've plugged into Control Voltage 1, that's the CV input that I plugged into on the back. Now I want to control the parameter in Massive, that's the whole point. I will click Learn, and it automatically opens Massive for me. Now I just need to click on the parameter that I want to control. The trusty Filter Cutoff is what I want to control. You can see that it is there in the Parameter field. If you look over to the right, you can see the base value of 41, that's the knob position right now. I'll close that for just a moment and I will draw in a little bit of information here, haphazardly. That is going to control that knob. Let's once again just look at Massive and press Play. (bass sounds) OK, now Control Voltage from the Matrix Analog Pattern Sequencer is controlling the Filter one cutoff knob on Massive.