Start Stop Sync in Reason Studios

Hi there, I am trying to get patterning 2 to sync to the start stop in reason. Is it possible to set this up? I was thinking of programming the start stop by setting up the control surface (iPad) and mapping the midi message. Does anyone know what message the start stop is under?

I’ve got it working! I just had to turn on the clock sync output. Now… Reason is triggering Patterning 2 to play but the clock sync seems to jump around (see top right of this video) as I change tempo settings in Reason.

Hey - glad you got it working! Yes, MIDI clock should automatically start/stop. How are you sending the MIDI to Patterning? It looks like there is some jitter in the incoming MIDI clock messages, which can happen in certain situations especially over a wireless or bluetooth MIDI.

Patterning tries to average out the clock messages to figure out the tempo, but if there’s a lot of a jitter it’s going to just keep correcting for the error.

Thanks for the reply! MIDI is over lightening cable from iMac to iPad.

Ok, yeah the jitter is probably unavoidable in this setup. Does it sound okay though?

The reason the tempo jitter happens is that the MIDI information is coming in without a timestamp, so Patterning just sees the MIDI event happening at the beginning of each render cycle. So instead of getting a sample accurate clock, it just knows that the clock happened at some point in the last audio buffer. Kinda hard to explain! This is just one of the limitations/drawbacks of MIDI clock.

Ableton Link was invented to solve this problem. Reason supports Link, so if possible, I’d recommend switching to Ableton Link as your clock sync method… it’s way easier and more stable. It also supports start/stop like you are wanting.

Thanks again for the reply man. I’ve started using the Ableton Link setting. It’s syncing tempo fine but start stop just plain doesn’t work for some unknown reason.

Do you have the link start/stop enabled in both Patterning and Reason? It has the be enabled. I’ve never tried it with Reason so I’m not sure if it’s supported or not.

It doesn’t seem to work out of the box but I had start stop working when I was using the ‘custom setup’ I’ll get onto Reason support. Thanks