Here’s an interesting patch that I submitted to the productspecialist@propellerheads.se email in response to their first video in the “Reason Sound Design” series, a new series put out by the Propellerheads to help us all learn a little more about the Combinators inside the Factory Sound Bank, and allow the user community to submit their patches. I love it when they launch a new series!
One of the best things you can do to learn, improve, contribute, and generally be creative is to enter your music in contests. Usually there are several contests through magazines, online music forums, bandcamp, soundcloud, and the like. I would strongly urge you to look up some of them and enter into the contests you feel are appropriate for your style of music.
There’s a wealth of great information out there on recreating the sounds of old computer chips, like the Commodore 64 or old SID chips and video console chips, and using these sounds to create tunes (Chiptune). I honestly knew very little about the subject until I, along with several other very talented folks, were asked to put together some fresh new sounds for the Reason 6 Factory Sound Bank (FSB). So here I’m going to explore and explain how I created a few of these sounds, and show you that you can definitely recreate some convincing Chiptune sounds using nothing but Reason and a little experimentation.
Let’s continue with the Alligator and find a few other tricks that it can perform. In the first part, I looked at how the Alligator works, and provided a few ideas for how to work with it. In this part, I’m going to get a little more practical and show a few new ideas you can incorporate into your tunes. Hopefully this will provide you with some new creative inspiration.
In this tutorial I’m going to talk about the new Alligator device in Reason 6. I think no other device has mystified so many since the RPG-8, and a lot of people have reluctance to really dive into it, thinking it’s mainly built for electronic musicians. Truth is that it’s a very easy device to work with, and it has applications for all kinds of instruments and all kinds of genres. So don’t be intimidated by all the knobs and levers. It’s a veritable evil laboratory, but getting it under control is easier than you think, and that’s the focus here.
Anyone using Reason should already be sufficiently versed in the work that Ed Bauman has done. If not, then this is the perfect time to get acquainted. Simply put, he’s one of the gurus. And he has recently released a ReFill for version 4 and up, titled “88MPH Vol. 1″ (a new volume 2 will be available late 2011 and volume 3 available early 2012). This ReFill packs in 51 Combinators of 80′s sounds; sounds which he used to recreate with utter realism some of the best hits of the 80′s. From Prince’s “1999″ to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” he is the man who can’t get his perfect recreations (“Re-Covers,” to use a term he coined) posted on YouTube because the video service can’t recognize his tunes from the original. That’s just how good he is!
When you get a creative spurt, don’t dismiss it! Make sure you embrace it, accept it, harness it, and get it out of you immediately. Most importantly, learn to understand it’s happening (or when it’s about to happen), and let it ride for as long as you can. I can tell you this because from experience you will have dry spells and they tend to last longer than the creative spells. So it’s important to read the signs and act on them.
Today let’s take a nice little look into the world of The Echo. New to Reason 6, this is one of 3 new effects which were much anticipated by the User Community (Do we all remember posts with subject lines reading “We need better effects in Reason”? I do).
Reason101.net proudly introduces The Pureffects ReFill for Propellerhead Reason 6. This is an effects-only ReFill which is not genre-specific, and instead provides a wide variety of presets well suited for Drums, Loops, Pads, Synths, Basses, Guitars, and all other audio. With over 1,000 single effect device patches and 200 Combinators, Pureffects provides some of the most unique and powerful audio effect processing on the market. From subtle warm compression to distorted chaotic feedback oblivion—and everything in between, Pureffects contains the power to completely reshape any sound you throw at it.
Yes, I own this T-shirt.
I recently read an article at the Wall Street Journal called “Better Ideas Through Failure.” In it, the writer shows a curious trend in company management to reward failure. The point is simple. The more “Epic Failures” you have, the more innovative you are. It’s not so much that you fail, but rather, it’s about learning from your mistakes. Flash forward to the Propellerhead User Forum, where every once in a while I see a post that looks like this: How do I get out of the loop?. The OP there has not finished a song in 4 years, and everyone is jumping in to give lots of very helpful advice on how the Original Poster can break out of a clear creative block. In other words, how do we become more Creative? And how do we finish a song?
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