Advice Needed: Template For Mastering Albums In Reason

[ionly]

Hi,
I'm curious how you guys master albums in Reason. I've just purchased Waves V.10 Abbey Rd Chambers and TG Mastering Chain and can't get them to work in Presonus Studio One 2. They freeze its mastering suite and corrupt all the other Waves V.9 plugs I own - I then have to uninstall/re-install everything again. Very very annoying, but there you go. They work fine in Reason 10, thus I'm now thinking of setting up a mastering template for it instead. I've always mastered my music in S1, as I tend to work with albums, and find its visual layout very convenient/easy to use.
Thanks

[EnochLight]

Hi,
I'm curious how you guys master albums in Reason. I've just purchased Waves V.10 Abbey Rd Chambers and TG Mastering Chain and can't get them to work in Presonus Studio One 2. They freeze its mastering suite and corrupt all the other Waves V.9 plugs I own - I then have to uninstall/re-install everything again. Very very annoying, but there you go. They work fine in Reason 10, thus I'm now thinking of setting up a mastering template for it instead. I've always mastered my music in S1, as I tend to work with albums, and find its visual layout very convenient/easy to use.
Thanks

I also own Studio One (on version 4 currently). The bad news is that Reason simply doesn't have any visual mastering setup like S1 does, no mastering song view, no Song Layers or Versions, no specific window arrangement, etc. That said, with the right plugins (whether they be VST or RE), you can do it in Reason as well. While I don't use Waves, I use iZotope Ozone 8 (and Neutron 2), so their inner-plugin communication helps a great deal. I'll use Reason's sequencer and setup my stereo tracks one after the other on their own track, staggered, in the order I want them to appear on the release, and use iZotope Insight to compare levels. I'm sure there are Waves counterparts that you can use as well (though without inner-plugin communication).

As far as layout, I guess it depends on what you like. I master on a dual-display setup, so my mixer/plugins windows can easily be placed in their own domain, while Reason's sequencer (where I will have my tracks laid out as mixed down stereo files) will be in another display.

Because of Reason's "rack paradigm", which is unique to Reason and unlike any other DAW on the market, there's a different learning curve to approaching mastering, but at the end of the day - it can be done. Hope that helps!

[ionly]

Many thanks for your reply EnochLight, it certainly did help! I got very familiar with S1's metering/visual layout and Voxengo's SPAN also proved invaluable as a secondary reference. Moreover, mastering on a different platform gives the process a much-needed sense of separation.
I've messaged Waves about the issue, so fingers crossed. In the meantime, I've setup a mastering template with staggered tracks, as you suggested. I've also put SPAN and Youlean Loudness Meter in Reason's master bus. Thankfully, all my mastering plugins work fine in Reason and there are a few neglected REs I can make use of as well - adapting to the workflow/visual will be the biggest hurdle.
Thanks again