No Reason to Go Back

I’ve started making electronic music on the Amiga 500 using music trackers many, many years ago.

I then got a PC and used several shady Cubase versions. After that, I got a Mac and started using Logic for a while. At that time FruityLoops was weak and Reason’s sequencer wasn’t in a good place. But then something happened – Reason 6.5 introduced rack extensions and shit. And then came version 7, and I though it was the greatest. Everything was fine –  for a short while. When Propellerhead released version 8, focus had shifted to the surface, and community building seemed to be the new black. So I switched to Ableton Live.

Reason 9 just revealed. It adds pitch edit, scales and chords, note echo and dual arpeggio. What do guys think? Well, I for one, am not going back.

No Reason to Go Back

I’ve started making electronic music on the Amiga 500 using music trackers many, many years ago.

I then got a PC and used several shady Cubase versions. After that, I got a Mac and started using Logic for a while. At that time FruityLoops was weak and Reason’s sequencer wasn’t in a good place. But then something happened – Reason 6.5 introduced rack extensions and shit. And then came version 7, and I though it was the greatest. Everything was fine –  for a short while. When Propellerhead released version 8, focus had shifted to the surface, and community building seemed to be the new black. So I switched to Ableton Live.

Reason 9 just revealed. It adds pitch edit, scales and chords, note echo and dual arpeggio. What do guys think? Well, I for one, am not going back.

In the Thick of It

This blog is about music production and gaming. And I live in Stockholm, Sweden. You might now this if you’re following the blog. But did you know that I live in the same part of the city (Södermalm that is) as several of the famous Swedish manufacturers? Of course it doesn’t mean anything, there’s no synergy or anything, just a fun fact.

Teenage Engineering is only 240 m away. And I pass DICE, 1.8 km from home, every day going to work (some years ago I work at a news agency in the same actual building). Clavia is in the same area too, 1.1 km from home. Propellerhead Software is located 4 km, a bit further west, still on the same island. Moreover, Mojang is 2.7 km from home and 600 m from my job.

Only Elektron is located in the second biggest city of Sweden, Gothenburg (Göteborg), and Massive Entertainment is situated in the third biggest city, Malmö. SoundCloud started in Stockholm but moved to Berlin, Germany.

Maybe I forgot some companies, like Spotify and whatnot, however, it’s a small capital and a small country.

In the Thick of It

This blog is about music production and gaming. And I live in Stockholm, Sweden. You might now this if you’re following the blog. But did you know that I live in the same part of the city (Södermalm that is) as several of the famous Swedish manufacturers? Of course it doesn’t mean anything, there’s no synergy or anything, just a fun fact.

Teenage Engineering is only 240 m away. And I pass DICE, 1.8 km from home, every day going to work (some years ago I work at a news agency in the same actual building). Clavia is in the same area too, 1.1 km from home. Propellerhead Software is located 4 km, a bit further west, still on the same island. Moreover, Mojang is 2.7 km from home and 600 m from my job.

Only Elektron is located in the second biggest city of Sweden, Gothenburg (Göteborg), and Massive Entertainment is situated in the third biggest city, Malmö. SoundCloud started in Stockholm but moved to Berlin, Germany.

Maybe I forgot some companies, like Spotify and whatnot, however, it’s a small capital and a small country.

Some Thoughts on Reason 8

Where’s Propellerhead at? The company wanna help musicians make more and better music – “this goal defines us”, it says. True, that’s honorable and ambitious but is Propellerhead on the right path?

The Reason 8 upgrade ships on September 30th and brings, ehum, a new browser and drag and drop support. I’m not convinced, to say the least. Come on now, this is an insignificant achievement in comparison, and in these days of responsive user interfaces.

Then we got Propellerhead’s app Take. For real? It’s just redundant and I just can’t see the need of such for anyone.

The recent in-house racks, A-List Acoustic Guitarist and A-List Electric Guitarist – Power Chords, address to whom? One could argue that earlier racks have been tailored first of all to beatmakers, singers, sound designers. Not to mention the focus on the experimentalists with Reason’s whole modular core design of tweaking one’s own audio signal paths. But these A-List racks? I dunno… And as an electronic musician I’m neither interested in pre-fab guitars nor sounding like undistinguished commercial radio hits. Moreover, I believe real guitarists would rather record their own shit, and then layer and comp takes in the sequencer.

So what’s going on? Is this Propellerhead shifting from professional to consumer (much like Apple did with Final Cut Pro X). I might be wrong, I hope I’m wrong.

Except for a few flaws – like inability to customize shortcuts and program macros – Reason 7 has been a great DAW with its relatively versatile set of rack extensions.

It seems to me that, what we see now is Propellerhead lacking of real innovative ideas to push things further.

Some Thoughts on Reason 8

Where’s Propellerhead at? The company wanna help musicians make more and better music – “this goal defines us”, it says. True, that’s honorable and ambitious but is Propellerhead on the right path?

The Reason 8 upgrade ships on September 30th and brings, ehum, a new browser and drag and drop support. I’m not convinced, to say the least. Come on now, this is an insignificant achievement in comparison, and in these days of responsive user interfaces.

Then we got Propellerhead’s app Take. For real? It’s just redundant and I just can’t see the need of such for anyone.

The recent in-house racks, A-List Acoustic Guitarist and A-List Electric Guitarist – Power Chords, address to whom? One could argue that earlier racks have been tailored first of all to beatmakers, singers, sound designers. Not to mention the focus on the experimentalists with Reason’s whole modular core design of tweaking one’s own audio signal paths. But these A-List racks? I dunno… And as an electronic musician I’m neither interested in pre-fab guitars nor sounding like undistinguished commercial radio hits. Moreover, I believe real guitarists would rather record their own shit, and then layer and comp takes in the sequencer.

So what’s going on? Is this Propellerhead shifting from professional to consumer (much like Apple did with Final Cut Pro X). I might be wrong, I hope I’m wrong.

Except for a few flaws – like inability to customize shortcuts and program macros – Reason 7 has been a great DAW with its relatively versatile set of rack extensions.

It seems to me that, what we see now is Propellerhead lacking of real innovative ideas to push things further.

How to Reason 7

I usually don’t publish news related posts in the strict sense, but I’m making an exception: Reason version 7 will be available in the second quarter of 2013.

This piece of DAW has just got better and better for every rendition. And Reason 7 comes with MIDI out support to fully integrate hardware sound into the Reason environment.

Other features are the automatic slicing of audio recordings and a new bus channel-function to group shit in the mixer. There’s also a neat shortcut to create parallel channels.

In the past versions, the DAW lacked an adequate spectrum analyzer, but in Reason 7 there’s a built-in spectrum analyzer window with a graphic EQ for total control.

While I think the biggest leap was the inclusion of rack extensions in version 6.5, I’m not sure these new features – nonetheless desirable – deserve the constitution of version 7.

Note: I work with any given DAW, really, but primarily with Apple Logic Pro 9 and Propellerhead Reason 6.5 on Mac.

How to Reason 7

I usually don’t publish news related posts in the strict sense, but I’m making an exception: Reason version 7 will be available in the second quarter of 2013.

This piece of DAW has just got better and better for every rendition. And Reason 7 comes with MIDI out support to fully integrate hardware sound into the Reason environment.

Other features are the automatic slicing of audio recordings and a new bus channel-function to group shit in the mixer. There’s also a neat shortcut to create parallel channels.

In the past versions, the DAW lacked an adequate spectrum analyzer, but in Reason 7 there’s a built-in spectrum analyzer window with a graphic EQ for total control.

While I think the biggest leap was the inclusion of rack extensions in version 6.5, I’m not sure these new features – nonetheless desirable – deserve the constitution of version 7.

Note: I work with any given DAW, really, but primarily with Apple Logic Pro 9 and Propellerhead Reason 6.5 on Mac.