Let Us Have A Look At Reason 4..

I copied this off from my other blog, http://glacius.multiply.com/journal

Precaution:
Here's another blog you can kindly click the large X on your top right.

.. Only if you're not interested, or if you're bound to get lost in the midst of whatever that's going to come out.

A little introduction for this programme that I've been using since the release of the Sentimentalities project by Fundamental Mentalities. Besides Wormy laying down the beats, I assisted him in the desperate composition stage, only because I found a new toy to play with along with his Oxygen 8 ..

.. AND the MacBookPro.. how could I ever forget blocking my brother's Internet Connecton with Wormy's AirPort and disallowed him to play WoW for the very first time XD.

I grew fond of Reason 3, and got my own copy sooner or later; and that's when music production began for me. The first song I really did for someone else is still Love Letter by none other than Schizzow a year plus ago.

With 1gbs of nonsensical instruments, I managed to expand my creativities and really let loose upon the world of MIDI, and understanding rewiring cables upon devices and learning what they're capable of through automations.

But not only have I expanded my creativity thanks to Reason, but I've messed around with everything possible. Velocity lanes, understanding effects, controller lanes, etc. God knows what I've went through, and what I will go through. But, having the knowledge to beat the person who introduced me to this programme can be unforseen.

And just as I was getting used to Reason 3, Propellerhead sent me an email saying that the latest version's about to be released -_-

Honestly, whatever I've done, or my knowledge with Reason, is only 5% of what this programme really can offer. Despite the book I have with me, I still can't learn much.

And of course, I'm sure you all know that I have already obtained the latest version of Reason..

.. Reason 4 :)




The first few things I noticed about Reason 4 is that they did give a facelift to the bottom Reason Transport bar. It's more..robotic with the green on it now.


Yummy!
And if you're experienced with Reason's automation device, the green outline on a certain device would mean that somewhere in the song, the value is bound to change for the corresponding rack. AS for this, In Reason 4, you're able to toggle the tempo AND the most important thing for Progressive Rock fans - the time signature - halfway throughout the song. If you've listened to DJ Paul Van Dyk (SP?) and some of his stuff, the crazy trance/techno stuff, the tempo automation's definitely your next best friend in Reason 4.

Now there are a few more things that comes with Reason 4. Beside the Record button, you can finally record layers of stuff on a single sequencer track. In other words, multitrack recording! New Dub means that you can record harmonies for a certain sequencer track, and the New Alt means that you can record a whole new track with different ideas, and later compare what you've done during the final stage of the composition. Definintely something Reason 3 was missing of. And I can't show any examples because I still haven't purchased my MIDI keyboard. Saving up on one so everythign doesn't sound so stale!


The ability to toggle the change of time signatures throughout the song.

You are able to set the preset time signature changes in a song, or input one yourself if you ARE insane enough.

..And this brings me the new interface for the sequencer window. I loaded Break Free on Reason 4, and I thought everything was screwed, because everything came in tiny little bars as you've seen. That's not.. exactly normal. Where were my notes? My pitch bend automations for my drums during certain parts of the songs? The panning? The volume control? Changing from Bypass to On at certain parts of the songs? So on and so forth. With the new interface, it was made to look neater in some ways like this..


Urk.

This was when I found out that with a mouse click away, your confusing and messy work will be tucked away into single lines instead of having every single setting all over the place.


Even a bigger headache now.

And the best thing I found out about Reason 4 now, is that the Controller Lanes (marked in blue) can be viewed in both the edit and the arrange modes, so you can have an overview of what is really going on. Especially when you're mixing through Reason 4, and not depending on other DAWs to do the work for you, this is one of the best updates compared to the rest.

Another thing when it comes to messing around with controller lanes, it now can be humanized. If you're working with a MIDI controller to hook your knobs to whatever Reason has, then it's not really a big deal. But to people who hasn't gotten our controllers yet, who still depends on the mouse to do everything for us, then it is sort of, an interesting update. Now with the controller lane, you can humanise whatever automations it is with Reason 4's amazing Vector Art thing. This is an example of a simple automated channel panning from 0 value, hits hard to +63, then -64..



Let's have a closer look at this..



And with the Vector art thing available, you can use your pencil tool and do something like this..


It may look messy, but you can adjust them manually by dragging them, or setting them at the right position with settings provided by the toolbar.

Speaking of which, you can't really work with Reason unless if you have clips. It's kind of confusing to explain now, but for those who are interested in Reason 4, you'll find out sooner or later. I used to have a problem with Reason 3 on Vista. Everytime when I group a particular bunch of notes, even if they're seperated, they turn out to be the same colour and there's no way you can tell the difference between parts of the song.

.. Which brings me to this:



Lame update, but I'm very fond of this, mind you. Except in the Mac version, you don't need to study the colour languages and just pick the colour you SEE which you like. Not which you READ to like, and end up picking a horrid colour. Way to go, dumbass Microsoft.

Besides that, as you can see, with the shortcut key, M, you're able to mute clips that you don't wish to hear. Something else that Reason 3 doesn't provide, obviously. Quite helpful when you're planning to pull off acapella stuff to silence off a drum loop for that certain part of the song, etc.

And here's another minor update when it comes to clips too..



Perfect. Though I don't label my clips in Reason, but it's available for those who gets confused in between of their works.

Of course, there're 3 new racks in Reason 4. It gives awesome sounds and very cool automation settings and programming, but I haven't got the time to experiment with that yet. There's more to this programme than what I just wrote above.









And Wormy.. I still can scroll down in the picture below. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL












That's it for my side. Reason never fail to amuse me everytime when I want to come up with songs. Instead of assisting me in what I need, its amazing preset sound banks come up with more nonsense and I tend to expand whatever I originally had in mind. Rather a good thing, but in the long run, we lose that certain inspiration to create our tracks.. So yeah.

As per system specifications for the installation of Reason.. For both Windows XP and Vista, you need 2gbs of HDD space. For XP, you need at least 1gbs (yep 512mbs more compared to Reason 3) of RAM, and 2gbs of RAM for Vista. And guess what? For XP, that's no problem. But Vista, take my advice. You need at least 1503850187089127409817234086150716 times MORE RAM than the given specifications for it to really run smooth. Vista rox :D

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that killed some time. Time to semi-mix and complete this song. Urgh.

Edit: Some of the pictures were automatically cropped, so you can head off to my original Reason 4 journal post to check out the larger pictures there.