Epic Fail!

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?

 
In Memory of Nicole Bernard

While there has been a lot of buzz surrounding other Propellerhead news this week, a tragedy has befallen the family of our friend, James Bernard, PH Artists Relations and Reason Specialist. On July 13, 2011, James’ wife, Nicole, passed away. Nicole was 36 years old and was the mother of their four children, Ava, Chloe, Mia and Asher.

 
What's on Your iPod?

Maybe it’s music making month that has me exploring more new music out there. Or maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve been rather introspective lately, looking at various sound design ideas, and needing to take a break from tutorial writing (don’t worry, I’ll be back with more tutorials soon). But right now I’m looking more at what other people are doing out there. Instead of writing a tutorial this week, I decided to present a few things that are inspiring me. My tastes lately have gone more ambient and less dubstep, drum n bass, and whatever other new “step” is the new vogue.

 
Some Amazing Happenings

Every once in a while I get some great ideas coming into my inbox. This week has been more active than others, and I wanted to share a few ideas with you from some great members sending me some interesting ideas. Here they are, in no particular order.

 
More Substance

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all the same questions I see over and over in the Reason forums. So I thought I would try to grab the best and brightest resources and tutorials (aside from my own. . . ahem!) and create a sort of compendium of the best things out there that every Reason and Record user should know about.

 
New CD Release! 2011 Kicks off

2011 is here and it’s time to kick off the new year, get back to work with some crazy ass tutorials, make music, patches, refills and all other kinds of crazy things. To start the year off, I’ve released a new CD which you can check out at CD Baby.

 
The Musician's Manifesto

The Musician’s manifesto. Or, subtitled: “The Reason Guide to getting Zen and Musical” — these are just some of the things I’ve learned throughout my life and more specifically being a musical-minded person working with Reason for the past 5 years

 
Organizing your Files

I would diverge a bit and talk about a subject that everyone needs to understand: organizing your files. Hopefully this will shed a little light on how Reason files operate, and at the same time provide some ideas with a safe method of organization.

 
A Word of Thanks. . .

With the latest release of my “Generations” refill, there’s been a flurry of activity on other boards to help me promote it and showcase it to the world. I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks to everyone for putting all of this together. Thumbnail and picture credit: Cristóbal Vila (http://vimeo.com/eterea)

 
Reason 5 / Record 1.5 Overview

Reason 5 and Record 1.5: An overall 6 out of 10. Bottom line: The updates improve workflow, but there is nothing here which is earth-shattering, and very little that you can’t already do with Reason 4 and Record 1.0.1. Still, I’ll end up buying the upgrade because I’ve already invested $850 in the software. So what’s another $129 right?

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