Smug.BONES wrote:Surely that's for Off-Topic? I would hope that threads in the main forums are informative.Hovmod wrote:Hm. Funny. I didn't realize this was a thread where we're supposed to convince or persuade anyone. It seemed to me it was about one guy having a good day at the computer, and he felt like telling us.
Open source debates aside, here's my little tale then:
I use reason in almost all my song projects, and just for fun. I know Reason well, I've used it for years. So making music with Reason doesn't include learning the tool first. I value that in itself, because tweaking OS or reading manuals doesn't ... swing.
Coming from hardware (many years ago I did actually work in studios and some live work and I had sound and lights at a theatre and so on, so I have had some experience with *actual stuff*), Reason was very intuitive and I didn't need to read the manual to get started. As soon as I hit TAB and saw those cables I knew what to do. So I learned it fast. Not only that, I had fun while learning it, and I was making songs. The distance from idea (or just a seed somewhere in the back of my head) to actual song was suddenly much shorter - earlier I had tried all sorts of other stuff on slower computers, which always ended up in reading manuals, tweaking Windows and swearing a lot, but no music.
So if only for sentimental reasons, Reason has a reserved place in my rack. It's still my go-to environment for testing out ideas. I can slap down something fairly useful in no time.
Then there's the refill (I don't like refills either, don't go off on that tangent) called Reason Drum Kits. Outstanding multisampled drums that I love working with. The sampler (or sample player if you want to nitpick) NNXT is simply very good, and the RDK is tailor made for it. With the combinator module that came in Reason 3, it's very simple to construct a drum kit setup complete with loads of velocity layers, with different effects and settings on the various instruments, routed to a mixer whose master output in turn ends up on one stereo channel in the main mixer (or more often goes straight out to the rewire host). The drum kit can be saved as a patch, complete with all that signal routing and tweaking, that opens in a "2U" rack unit with a single stereo output - in any song whenever I want. I haven't seen that anywhere else, if you don't count energyXT, where you could make a complete setup and save as an eXT file. Reason Drum kits is very useful. To me.
The combinator also opened up for more extensive routing of the CV signals, which is Reason's most powerful feature. If I want the LFO of one instrument control a parameter of something else, I can. Many of my setups use the LFO from a synth to control the pan pot of the mixer, for instance, or the rate of another LFO, or the depth of a phaser, or almost any knob on almost any unit in Reason. The Scream distortion unit can output CV generated by the envelope of incoming audio, which in turn can be routed to just about anything else on any unit in Reason. Say you want the cutoff frequency of the EQ to follow the envelope. You can. Very easily. I know you can get many of these things by way of extensive workaround methods using different VST audio and midi effects and intricate signal routing, but in Reason you can get from A to B with tools designed for it, in one environment, straight out of the box. And I think that's pretty unique. I don't *know* it's unique, because I haven't tested everything else. For instance, when I tested the demo version of Orion, I was put off by the multitude of overlapping windows with no visible signal routing. Insert x here - OK, where's the output go? Or worse, why do I get 16 channels in the mixer when I ask to rewire? Sure, I could read the manual and stick with it and learn how to *make* it intuitive, but that didn't suit me. (Note how I don't call you names for having a different opinion on that than me...). So maybe it's possible to route LFO2 from the WaveFusion to control Aux1 level in the Orion drum mixer, but I don't SEE it in the interface, if you know what I mean. It's not obvious.
These are some of the things I like about Reason. I even like the GUI, despite the loooong racks I sometimes have to scroll. I like the fact that I know how to do stuff there. I like the support I get, I like the community around it.
So. When I need audio, I use rewire. Reason has never said it can record audio. I have put in my two cents about that in the Feature Suggestion forum at the prop site, along with many others, but unlike a lot of people I don't think that suggestion requires the developers to do anything. I also don't think writing it two or twenty times is useful.
Anyway. I use rewire. Not because I love rewire or think it's brilliant or anything, but because I want to. I *want to* use Reason. Particularly for drums, and despite your best efforts there's nothing you can say that will change my mind on that. For me, there's nothing that beats RDK for drums, and if there is, I don't particularly feel like paying for it and learning it because RDK suits me and meets my specs and I already have it. I get things done with RDK. Once Reason is rewired I have all the rest of it rewired as well, of course, so I can do more stuff in Reason. Like I said, the NNXT is a good sampler. So I don't use other samplers much. The Sub and Mal often (not always) provide what I want. The effects are good, particularly the new so-called 'mastering' tools. And so on.
I could whine about what Reason lacks, or I could make music. Whine, make music. Whine, make music.
Once rewired, I control the Reason units from the host, and I can process the audio coming from Reason in the host if I feel like it. So I can choose. RV7000 (that's a reverb) or Glaceverb? Got both. I'm not praising rewire, but I use it. Because I love to use Reason. And I have found a way to work with it that isn't a pita. I have to save two files for one song. I can live with that.
So. I think Reason is brilliant, I have told you some of the reasons why I think so, and some of my thoughts about why I put up with rewire and the lack of certain features. I don't ask to be persuaded otherwise, and I'm not trying to persuade you. You can use what you want, and that's fine with me. I use your killers, too, sometimes. I just don't see red because I can't stick them in a Reason rack.
........
Silly me!
