I had an e-mail from boyinaband.com reader Ash…
Hi David,
Firstly thanks for putting in so much time & energy making a great website that I’m sure many people such as myself get to benefit from. It’s great that you’ve done all those brilliant tutorials, well filmed and narrated. It’s funny how I found your site – my new american girlfriend told me about this Saturday Night Live sketch – “I’m on a Boat” and that eventually led me via Youtube to your site. Being into music production, I of course then spent hours reading your site and looking at the tutorials – I love how serendipitous the internet can be!
Anyway enough waffling and onto my main question. I’m getting back into music production (as a hobby for now but I’d like to make more of it) after a break for a few years. Last time I was playing around with this stuff it was Cubase SX 2.0 and Reason (2.0?). Anyway, I am looking at what software I should use now – the market has changed a lot, all the packages have tried to become all-encompassing – even Ableton Live is now purporting to be a production/recording suite. I’m tempted to have another play with Reason 4, but I want to make sure I invest my learning curve in something that can go “all the way” …
So, the question is: do you believe that Reason 4 is a serious music production tool – can it be used to produce a professional quality track to the standard that other software (e.g. Logic, for example) can? That is really my only doubt about Reason, holding me back from buying a copy. I’ve had fun with Reason before and I guess it’s easy to see it as a scratchpad, something for prototyping, because it is quite dinky and novel to use – but perhaps I’m judging it unfairly and missing its power?
Anyway – I hope you can find time to answer me!
Best wishes
Ash Dando
Yeah, I left in that first paragraph partly for my ego’s benefit and partly because I frickin’ love the word “serendipitous“.
But yes – the question. Can Reason be used as a production tool to rival the big players like Logic? My answer…
I’m glad you’ve found the tutorials useful! With regards to your question – I’ve been using Reason 4.0 in combination with Sonar 8 – this allows me to make the synths (which can sound seriously professional – just take a listen to the demo tracks that come with it) in Reason and record live instrumentation and vocals in Sonar. It’s good to use Reason with something else, as it falls short when it comes to anything with Audio beyond simple sampling, but I love how powerful it is when it comes to making synths – it’s intuitive and fast, which are two things you can’t underestimate when producing!
I make 90% of my electronics for my band You and What Army in Reason and it’s been great – I prefer having everything in one place rather than a million different soft synths cluttering up the screens, but that’s my workflow – you might have a different preference.
I’d say Reason can definitely be used as a professional producing tool, but more so in conjunction with another piece of software, such as Logic, Sonar, Cubase or Pro Tools.
I hope that helps you guys out – I love Reason as a production tool, it’s just easy to use and very versatile. No doubt there are other pieces of software that can provide similar quality, but there are few that are as concise as Reason 4.
What do you think? Is Reason suitable for use as a professional production tool? Leave a comment below with your opinions!
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Just look at the featured artists section on the propellerhead website. Lots of big names on there, I’ve worked in pro audio we we’ve used Reason on commercial productions – it also gets a specific mention (as an example) in the Grammy Producer and Engineer’s guidebook to managing sessions.
So yes, Reason belongs within any well tooled studio.
For your readers, Dave: If any of you ever doubted Reason as a professional production tool, take a look at the artist stories on Propellerhead’s website: http://www.propellerheads.se/substance/artist-stories/
…yes, that’s coming from the creator, but look at the big names on that list and watch their videos. More and more people are replacing hardware with Reason.
Keep up the great work, Dave!
Hah…and if I had read all of ThisIsSka’s post, I would have seen that he/she said the same thing, basically.
Sorry about that, ThisIsSka.
Good point guys, if it’s good enough for Mix Master Mike it’s good enough for me!
Hi…I´m Reason user since v2.0. Using Samplitude for the mixdown/mastering. Other than that EVERYTHING happens in reason (in my case). Just ordered Record, since I´m propellerheads-fan. And I´m sure it will take Samplitude´s place in my setup. Cheers from Germany/Czech…J.
Good call, J!
Record is awesome – it’s missing a few things like autotune (I actually did a blog on what it’s missing), but if you can sing in key then it’s frickin’ sweet!
Ofcourse no doubt reason is a very powerful program..with synths like thor and Malstorm and Samplers like NNXt the possibilities and Genres are limitless..very RAM friendly and Rewires too.
As has bee pointed out, many Big names use Reason, and some folks (eg Fischerspooner) rarely stray from the presets but still make uniques sounding stuff. Reason 4’s shit is just that smooth. For my a Great combination was Reason and Ableton Live., Reason for actually making the music and Live for doing Live Audio and for theits Live performance/mixing capabilies its a match made in Heaven.
Enter Propellerhead’s “Record”. quite possible the best v1.0 product I’ve ever had the pleasure to Test and use. If you have Reason all you stuff seamlessly integrates. and the Mixing Console is Ace. That said I would still use it with Ableton Live because Abletone just brings a different workflow for designeing sets for Live use, not to mention the APC 40 Rocks like crazy!
[...] 17th, 2009 by Dave I recieved another email from boyinaband.com reader Ash [...]