I grew up with pattern-based/nonlinear (MIDI-) sequencing, so the concept certainly isn't new to me and I really like some aspects of it - yet with every DAW I tried (Cubase's Playlist, Studio One's Arranger, Reason's Block, Reaper's Regions) , it's mostly useless to me personally,
because:
From having played in countless bands over the course of many years, I have learned that sequenced transitions between song-sections often do not sound natural to me because they simply are not at all.
It sounds like a cut, a switch, a hard edge.
Performed music is not like that. There the transistions start a few beats or even bars before the actual section change. At the section change, they are often not completely finished either. And for this reason you can get away with much more diverse transitions if they are performed, than if they are sequenced based on sections/patterns - and I learnt that because of this dealing with e.g. Studio One's Arranger just isn't worth it for me as fighting the shortcoming takes a lot more effort than not using it at all in the first place.
(And I said as much when this feature was added several years ago and since then nothing has changed.)
So now coming back to Reason:
I don't know why I never tried this myself, but reading through the SOS article on Blocks I learnt than Song-mode you can add and record Clips over the greyed out block based ones and those have a higher priority. That's fantastic!
That's such an elegant solution to the problem. You can start Building your song based on Blocks, and whereever a transition isn't smooth, you add stuff on top of it a) without having to change/edit your actual Blocks (i.e. sections) and b) in song-mode it's super easy to spot where you added stuff that's not part of the Blocks. If you e.g. want to make a looped drum-rhythm more natural by adding breaks here and there, you'll see exactly where you put them with one quick glance in song-mode. If you want to try a slightly different rhythm, you can do that in Block-mode and still can leave the breaks where they are. Want to add a different ending in one certain bar to a guitar pattern that keeps repeating? Just record it in song-mode - yadda yadda.
I have never seen a nearly as elegant combination of linear and pattern-based sequencing. It's absolutely brilliant. And I had no idea until a couple of days ago.
