Check out my Ignite video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFLHswkdmCs Well… how did I do it?
First of all, I have two pedals. I have a sustain pedal (which lengthens notes) and a patch change pedal, which I’ve set to change Reason’s active track. So whenever I press that pedal down the active track changes, and thus I move to the next series of sounds. Secondly, I’ve designed my tracks in such a way that when I move from one to the next the keyboard zone in which I’m playing remain the same, but the zones in which I am not playing change. For instance, at 1:47 I have a high string part in the upper octaves and more of a synth sound in the lower octaves. I press my patch change pedal at 2:02 while I’m playing the synth part. There is no audible difference, but it remaps the higher octaves to a piano sound which I use a few seconds later at 2:07. Thus I can patch change at my leisure and yet still have plenty of room to include lots of sounds in my performances.

Another interesting tidbit is that sometimes I still run out of room on my keyboard to create enough zones for all the sounds I need to play so I have to resort to interesting tricks. You’ll notice that at 1:30 I have a harmony part in my left hand that sounds an octave higher than the melody in my right–even though on the keyboard it is almost two octaves lower.

As you can imagine all of this leads to a pretty massive Reason rack. In fact, if you add up the total rackspace for this song, my rack is over 72 feet high! I’ve got zoomable rack images at the bottom of the post so you can see just how massive this song really is–there is no way I could ever do this in hardware.

I’m also publishing the backing track I used to make this video in both MP3 and RPS format so you can play this song live yourself. Note that the RNP file requires a massive amount of RAM (Reason swells to consume about 1GB) and the following Refills: Reason Drum Kits 2.0, Reason Pianos, SR Synths 1 R3, and SR Triple Guitar R3. I optimized it enough to work on my machines, but if you don’t have really nice hardware you’ll probably need to optimize it some more.

Check out the front and back of my rack.