I’ve not made any tunes for ages, but when I do I use Logic. I actually miss having Reason on my computer though (lost it ages ago when my laptop got damaged). I’ve heard loads of good tunes that have been made on it and I’ve been surprised at some of the big-name producers that still use it (can’t think of any off the top of my head right now but there are a few).

There’s something really intuitive about the interface that I find allows me to be creative and get the results I want without getting too bogged down with the inner workings of the program. I always found it pretty cool how you can flip the whole rack round and patch CV and gate signals between equipment like on old-time analogue synths! Want a sample to wobble in time with your bassline? Just patch your bass LFO to the sampler’s filter cutoff input etc…

It definitely has its limitations though – lack of audio sequencing + recording makes it a real pain to do a lot of things that would take two seconds in Cubase/Logic, and the synths that came with my version (2.5, I think) sounded pretty thin and ‘digital’, needing some serious beefing up to make them sound exciting (but doesn’t the latest version have better instruments nowadays?). I love the drum machine though – and how that sounds will just depend on the quality of the drum samples you use.

And if you want to use it with your favourite VST instruments and plugins you can just Rewire the program into Cubase, which effectively runs the two transports in sync and makes all your Reason channels available as inputs in Cubase.

So I reckon for someone wanting to learn how to produce music you could do far worse than getting a copy of Reason. If you find that the synth selection and lack of audio sequencing is too much of a limiting factor you can always get Cubase and a collection of tasty VSTs at a later date.