The best and most important piece of advice I can give as someone doing production for about 8 years..

FUCK REASON IN THE ASS

It’s shit, it’s a massive waste of time. It may be intuitive for a beginner but you will really struggle to make anything sound half way professional, it’s barley better than the playstation music making thing

Cubase and Ableton, even FL studio all piss all over reason from a great height. Take the plunge, learn a real sequencer, it will be frustrating at first as the learning curve is steeper but you will be on the road to great production without wasting time.

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.

Yeah Cubase is decent, it’s what I use. Massive is a very good plug in for it too.

@cheeseweasel 450952 wrote:

Yeh, whoever developed that one is basically responsible for the sound of most dance music to come out over the last 5 years.

native instraments. 😉

Yeah I’ve used rewire with reason running thru cubase and it’s a massive headache. You have to deal with two lots of saved stuff as well … so even transfering it from place to place or even comeing back to the tune at a later date can be a pain to get soughted out as you’ll need to of labled everything perfectly or you’ll just forget what’s what.

The best piece of advice I can give is nothing technical but more about approach.

Give yourself breaks! Don’t get absorbed in one loop or sound for too long. Try and work quickly and creatively. I find that I have spent ages on small sections/loops before and have become almost hypnotised and ended up turning something that was originally good in to something completely abstract and shit. It’s hard to explain clearly but in your head you follow the progress of the loop/sound like it’s some kind of minimal techno and the subtle changes progress the track in your head and you lose sight of that fact that it’s but a mere section of the overall track.

I’ve often come back to a tune the next day and wondered why the hell did I think that sounded good.

So, I tend to think that being quick, creative and giving your ears/head a break every now and again works wonders.

@dubstep_joe 451467 wrote:

=D looking forward to hearing it.

will cost you a few shillings

I use KRK Rocket 8 G2’s, not the best, but for the price range a clear head and shoulders above the rest.

@`Matt 452180 wrote:

Cheers for that guide, havent had much time to produce this week. But ive been working on trying to produce some badaboy bassline, which hasnt been going too well. I guess pratisice makes perfect tho 🙂

hardware synth
hardware synth
hardware synth
hardware synth
hardware synth

best move I ever made musically, my production quality rocketed, so much easier than faffing around with software synths

Yes but different DAWs have different pros and cons

Logic has amazing effects, Ableton has amazing audio file manipulation, etc.

I mostly make psychill.. and a bit of wonky hip hop

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used to make breakcore

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