With the latest Propellerhead Reason 6.5 announcement, there’s a lot to discuss in the world of Reason. I have been fairly silent over the last few days, even though the forums have been ablaze will all kinds of chatter. Until the dust settles, it’s never wise to jump out and state your opinion. Did that once and it bit me in the behind. But I wanted to provide some of my thoughts on all these new changes, since they are fairly huge, and developing rapidly. So here are my preliminary musings.
The long-awaited new original Phi Sequence album and Phi Sequence Remix Project album are here. 30 tracks. Over 2 hours and 15 minutes of original music by myself and 8 other amazingly talented musicians and producers well known within the Reason community.
Dark: Original music by yours truly. 90% of this album was made entirely with Reason 6 and the Reason 6 FSB.
Light – The Phi Sequence Remix Project: Remix compilation of various tracks on the “Dark” album.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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
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.