I Might Take A Stab At Making Music

Well, I erm, "acquired" version 3.05 of Reason last night (based on the number of recommendations, but I might try FL if I get totally lost in Reason), and I'll probably install it tonight or tomorrow and get started.

Mind you, I know very little about music structure, etc. so who knows what I'll come up with. Probably some ghey beat with some twiddly bits over the top, LOL.

    Quote

some ghey beat with some twiddly bits over the top

i've been making music for probably 5 years now and that describes most of it

Well, I fired up Reason... fuck me, that's a bit scary. Need to read a good tutorial or getting started guide. Any advice on what's best?

easy peasy. load in a mixer (right click on a bit of blank space in the rack and choose "add mixer" - doesn't really matter which one at this stage). load in a reverb effect (in the same way - right click and go down to the effect bit and choose a reverb machine). load in a delay effect. load in a compressor effect. now load in the Redrum machine and put some drum hit samples in the different parts. load in a subtractor synth. load in a matrix pattern sequencer. (do everything in this order).

right click on your matrix sequencer and choose "randomise pattern". press play. you should hear some noises coming out. go back to your subtractor and click on the folder option to choose the preset you want. try starting with the classic TB synth in the folder called Bass or something similar. randomise your pattern until you have a nice acid riff. fuck about with the cutoff and resonance for a bit (just for a laugh)

press stop.

now try entering in a drum pattern on the Redrum machine by choosing a sound (one of the drum hit samples you've already loaded in) and pressing some of the buttons on the step sequencer bit at the bottom of the redrum. put in a few more patterns with different sounds. press play (the master play button, not the one on the Redrum) and you should now hear your acid riff and your drum pattern playing together! it's the start of a track!

now go up to the mixer and you'll see that two of the channels are now labelled as to the things that you've loaded in (your redrum and your subtractor). at the top of these channels will be some little red knobs. these correspond to the effects that you loaded in earlier. try turning them to see which one is connect to which effect. one of them will add rever, one will add delay and one will add compression. just mess about with these until you have an interesting sound.

now just add in loads of other stuff (more drums, an NN-XT sampler, another subtractor, whatever) and put things in them.

you should have basically created a PART which will probably be what your whole song would be like when it's at it's peak and all the different components are playing together.

You can now mess about with the mute and solo buttons on your mixer to bring in different parts to kind of make it into a track on the fly.

you will now need to sequence all these different parts into a song that runs in a relevant order, but i'll get to that another time as i've finished my lunch break and it gets a bit complicated...

you should be able to have loads of fun just making PARTS though.....

OK, I'll try that and see how it goes. Been a bit busy lately so I haven't made the time to really sit down and go at it. Thanks for the advice!

Reason definitely is a great place to start. The only down side is that it doesn't handle audio directly in its sequencer. You have know/figure out how to load loops into the samplers, how to use slices, and how to program notes/beats in a midi sequencer.

FL does handle audio directly (right?) so it might be easier from that perspective.

Overall though, Reason is the better of the two because it will make you understand (visually) the fundamental linear sequence involved in basic music making: input midi trigger (i.e. press a note on a keyboard) > connected to synth/sampler > connected to mixer > connected to audio bus/output = sound

Reason is a breeze. have fun

reason.

best way to learn the basics of electronic music production, both in terms of working with audio and the ins and outs of midi.

shitey sequencer, but keeps it simple.

Reason's good to start with and continue with as well. My advice is don't be discouraged if all you can make is piddly crap for a while. Though I'm an exception to this rule, you'll get better as you keep making stuff.

fruity loops.

im my honest opinion Reason is a program that is too overly complicated to be a good beginning program.

at the same time it also has a cieling, once you use all of its stock sounds and instruments you're going to be craving the use of Vsts and external plugins that Fruity Loops can use.

the nice thing about fruity is that anybodyu can jump on and start using it but the design of the sequencer is very powerful. You can pretty much do all the same type of things in fruity that you can do in logic and cubase. In Reason you are stuck with a bunch of stock instruments , and unless you really really love those stock instruments you are going to get bored/creatively impaired by it eventually.

  Ghostbusters III said:

im my honest opinion Reason is a program that is too overly complicated to be a good beginning program.

 

at the same time it also has a cieling, once you use all of its stock sounds and instruments you're going to be craving the use of Vsts and external plugins that Fruity Loops can use.

 

the nice thing about fruity is that anybodyu can jump on and start using it but the design of the sequencer is very powerful. You can pretty much do all the same type of things in fruity that you can do in logic and cubase. In Reason you are stuck with a bunch of stock instruments , and unless you really really love those stock instruments you are going to get bored/creatively impaired by it eventually.

I see what you mean... visually, it's overwhelming for me, and by stock instruments, you mean that you cannot add new sounds to it, only create ones from the ones that come with the software?

he means that you can't use vst synths. you can only use the subtractor, malstrom and sampled instruments (which you can get for free from many sources outside of reason via refills).

of course, this isn't exactly true as you can rewire reason into other hosts such as Cubase or even FL, but admittedly that's not a basic function for first time users.

Reason certainly has its limitations, but it's best for people who are totally new to music making because it virtually simulates the real life process. if you start with FL, you can learn how to use FL but have no idea how things are done outside that specific environment. with Reason, you learn a lot more about the music making process in general. Reason's full user manual is particularly good for this. it's one of the best manuals for any software product i've seen. it goes beyond just using reason and explains the basics of synthesis and sampling. definitely recommend that you read it.

  LOL Alzado said:

he means that you can't use vst synths. you can only use the subtractor, malstrom and sampled instruments (which you can get for free from many sources outside of reason via refills).

 

of course, this isn't exactly true as you can rewire reason into other hosts such as Cubase or even FL, but admittedly that's not a basic function for first time users.

 

Reason certainly has its limitations, but it's best for people who are totally new to music making because it virtually simulates the real life process. if you start with FL, you can learn how to use FL but have no idea how things are done outside that specific environment. with Reason, you learn a lot more about the music making process in general. Reason's full user manual is particularly good for this. it's one of the best manuals for any software product i've seen. it goes beyond just using reason and explains the basics of synthesis and sampling. definitely recommend that you read it.

Ah, great - I think I will print it out (if it's not too hefty) and read it on the bus home!

if reason had audio channel that'd be perfect

  Joyrex said:

  LOL Alzado said:

he means that you can't use vst synths. you can only use the subtractor, malstrom and sampled instruments (which you can get for free from many sources outside of reason via refills).

 

of course, this isn't exactly true as you can rewire reason into other hosts such as Cubase or even FL, but admittedly that's not a basic function for first time users.

 

Reason certainly has its limitations, but it's best for people who are totally new to music making because it virtually simulates the real life process. if you start with FL, you can learn how to use FL but have no idea how things are done outside that specific environment. with Reason, you learn a lot more about the music making process in general. Reason's full user manual is particularly good for this. it's one of the best manuals for any software product i've seen. it goes beyond just using reason and explains the basics of synthesis and sampling. definitely recommend that you read it.

 

Ah, great - I think I will print it out (if it's not too hefty) and read it on the bus home!

I know it looks absurd when you first load it up but you just have to fiddle with it, have the manual handy but I wouldnt bother reading it, youll get just as confused.

My advice to play with it initially:

load a mixer

load a redrum and a preset

load a subtractor and a preset

then go down to the sequencer, its probably on an 8bar loop I think, you might want to drag the end of the loop left to make a shorter loop (1bar maybe to start with)

select the pencil cursor and put in some drum hits, you will be able to make something you like easily enough... work out what the 'snap to grid' and 'quantize notes' buttons at the top of the sequencer window do (manual!).

then select the subtractor and put in some notes

when you have a synth line and drum pattern, play them on a loop, go back to the rack and play with some knobs on both of your machines, some things will have obvious effect (filter freq) and others may seem to do nothing for now, dont worry about it, check the manual for specific knobs for explanations

maybe try adding an effect unit - select the redrum and then add a reverb unit, play with some more knobs

This might be much to simple, or not, I think I would have cracked reason faster if I had just stuck with a simple set up of those two instruments and worked them out to begin with.

  LOL Alzado said:

Reason certainly has its limitations, but it's best for people who are totally new to music making because it virtually simulates the real life process. if you start with FL, you can learn how to use FL but have no idea how things are done outside that specific environment. with Reason, you learn a lot more about the music making process in general. Reason's full user manual is particularly good for this. it's one of the best manuals for any software product i've seen. it goes beyond just using reason and explains the basics of synthesis and sampling. definitely recommend that you read it.

I disagree. There is nothing about FL Studio that obscures it so that it only works within that process. I started out in Sonic Foundry Acid (HORRIBLE software, don't recommend it), and then moved onto FL Studio and not long after that I got into Synthedit (I tried Reason around this point and found it to be shit) and then MAX/MSP and Reaktor. FL studio provided a pretty good basis for all of this. Reason still is shit to me. It's alright for people who are skilled with it, but it's illogical and nothing like how my brain envisions the sound process that I comprehend with some kind of modular synthesis thing (I still really "think" in Synthedit even though I now use a combo of Reaktor and FL Studio the most). FL Studio gave me a good starting point to get into complex modular synthesis shit and MAX/MSP-type audio programming.

If you want to learn how to use hardware, use Reason as a starting point. If not, use FL Studio because it's a lot easier to use and is a lot more flexible.

I already know how hardware works, so I don't use Reason because it has a billion limitations. If I had cubase already, why the FUCK would I use Reason? Plus it's kind of stupid to emulate hardware with a software program in the first place because you're using software to GET AROUND using the shitty UI's of hardware.

I personally like the stress the importance of good songwriting over shmancy sounds, so I think something reeeeally simple is a good place to start. Get an old copy of like, Fruityloops 3 and start with that. Then once you think you've figured out how to write a decent tune and/or beat, get something a bit more substantial. I have to be honest, I've only really used Fruityloops so I don't know about anything else... but FL Studio 5 or whatever the rest of the people here say is as good or better than that.

I mean... essentially the best place to start is probably noodling about on a piano or guitar.... writing music has nothing to do with software.... it's about song writing :P I suck at both so I dunno how useful my advice is gonna be...

  HYPERFUKBOT said:

I disagree. There is nothing about FL Studio that obscures it so that it only works within that process. I started out in Sonic Foundry Acid (HORRIBLE software, don't recommend it), and then moved onto FL Studio and not long after that I got into Synthedit (I tried Reason around this point and found it to be shit) and then MAX/MSP and Reaktor. FL studio provided a pretty good basis for all of this. Reason still is shit to me. It's alright for people who are skilled with it, but it's illogical and nothing like how my brain envisions the sound process that I comprehend with some kind of modular synthesis thing (I still really "think" in Synthedit even though I now use a combo of Reaktor and FL Studio the most). FL Studio gave me a good starting point to get into complex modular synthesis shit and MAX/MSP-type audio programming.

Im confused. In what way did FL Studio get you ready for modular programming? Reason's Combinator is more like modular patching than anything in FL Studio, thats for sure!

  ten fingers ten toes said:

Im confused. In what way did FL Studio get you ready for modular programming? Reason's Combinator is more like modular patching than anything in FL Studio, thats for sure!

exactly.

Joyrex, take everything you read here with a grain of salt. everyone is an expert with an opinion to flaunt.

joyrex, do you play an instrument at all, even to a fairly basic level?

fruity loops > reason

  Ghostbusters III said:

fruity loops > reason

I dunno. I mean I don't use either, but, Reason has some quirky, interesting things about it (Combinator mostly), and you can always ReWire it into Cubase or Abe Live, giving yourself basically FL Studio with better native synthesis and sampling. FL Studio is just a very competent and cheap DAW from what I can tell. It's biggest selling point ot me would be Buzz machine interfacing but I care less and less about that every day it seems.

reason's samplers pwn