The Beginner's Reasoner - Part I
The best way to learn Reason is ...... do a cover. Seriously :)
I mean, how often have you been in a mixed-instrument music shop, drooling over a new electrotoy, when some dork picks up a Strat and out comes "Smoke On The Water" or _that_ Zep riff? Like any instrument, the best way to learn how to handle what's new is to begin working with something that you are familiar with.
Everyone has done it...
I'm sure all of you have fired up Reason, played the demos, and if you had
a MIDI keyboard got a Subtractor running and you were doing Van Halen's
"Jump", or a Goldie-inspired bass riff, or some inane Yanni progressions,
or the Dr Who theme ... we've all done it. Look at our dorky friend the
guitarist in the shop again ... if he's relatively new at the music biz,
he'll have a tatty electric and a small amp at home, and he's learning how
to play by attempting to play along with his favourite tracks (in the hopes
that he'll get into a rock covers band where he can convince the others
that his tunes are really worth playing at a pub).
Those of us with a MIDI keyboard, or experience with synth-playing have done that too; given something that can make a few notes, we'll be picking out a bass line or a chord progression or a melody from something we've heard recently.
What about people who are completely new to making music?
And even to the extreme newcomers, those who've only ever _listened_ to
music up until now, this approach of practicing by playing a pre-existing
composition is important, and if extended becomes an excellent learning
tool - not only of the capabilities of Reason and how you interact with it,
but even the musically challenged :) can develop an "ear" for What Sounds
Good and "Aw, man, turn dat shit out! Geez!" But before you think about
getting those tunes and beats that are inside your head into a Reason song
that will make you the next danceclub-floor superstar, we gotta do a cover.
A cover? Awwww, do we have to?
Yes, and if you want to even be remotely serious about it, get a MIDI
interface and buy a tiny MIDI keyboard of some kind - even if it's some
cheesy Casio at the local charity-goods store (something that's got
velocity sensing is best, but you need *a* keyboard). You could get by in a
pinch by using the appropriate QWERTY-to-MIDI program from the Reason CD,
but there's no substitute for the real thing.
What is this series about?
The aim of this series of mini-tutes is to recreate an already-published
piece of music with nothing but Propellerheads' "Reason". The primary aims
of this tutorial are three-fold:
- to reduce the learning curve of the Reason interface, by starting with a pre-recorded tune that is familiar to the student ("Start with what ya know, and work up, kid. You'll go far."
- to help develop an "ear" for analysing a piece of music into component parts, and
- to set up some basic concepts of the Reason work environment by using user-configurable defaults.
Where do I start?
Find a tape, or CD track, or MP3, of one of your favourite bits of music,
and set yourself up so you can play back bits of it or all of it quickly -
an MP3 player in another computer window is good, but an AIF or WAV playing
is better (less taxing on the CPU means more time for Reason). If you're on
a low-end computer and want maximum CPU for Reason, or are more comfortable
listening to the original music on a separate sound system, by all means do
so - cue up that CD and get ready to wear out the pause and shuttle
buttons.
Focus on one thing at a time
Play it all the way through once, and try to focus on just one particular
instrument - the kick pattern to start with is always good. If you're
playing the original through something which has an EQ in/on it, use it to
help you focus in on the sound you're after - for a kick drum, boost the
bass a bit and cut all of the midrange and treble. You'll still be able to
hear the whole song, but the "track" you want to "solo" will be more
pronounced and easier to follow.
Listen closely to the structure of a few bars, and tap the rhythm out on your desktop with your fingers or something. Get a *feel* for the rhythm. Replicate that in Reason, either via a simplified version in a Redrum, or directly into a Sequencer track. Do this again, but with the snare or hi-hat.
Repeat this process, focussing on a different sound - and *only* that sound - in the track, using your player's EQ to help you isolate the sound in the mix. Play along with it if you can, figuring it out, then programming it into a pattern or track.
No Effects!
Don't even *begin* to think about effects yet! Not even if there's a
throbbing bassline that has a permanent 3-step echo! They come later, once
the rhythm and melodic content are recorded.
(Doing it this way teaches you how to think in layers when it comes to music - akin to layering in Photoshop - where you imagine the track you want in your head, and you can break out a chunk of the track and work on it _in context_ with the original idea, instead of just jamming along to something and hope it works. Not to say that jamming is bad, but this is just another way of thinking about music and how its made. Once you learn to think of all music as virtual tracks, and can mentally home in on any track and pick out what it's doing, you will be very glad you did.)
What sounds & modules should I use?
As for the sounds you use in Reason's modules at this early stage, just use
something approximate. Get as much of the "original" music recorded into
Reason as you can before you start the fine-tuning of how each track should
sound.
So now that you've figured out the drums, and the bass, and made a fairly good stab at the chords (pun intentional :)) and the other elements, now's the time to save your song.
Duh :)
Save your songs often
Actually, get into the habit of saving regularly. We're still at a
one-point-oh release, and for some, Reason still isn't 100% stable, so
saving after every major change to a song (or whenever you feel paranoid
enough) is a VERY good habit to get into. Also, if you rename the song
after every few major changes (append a v1, v2 etc, for example), you can
always have a path to go back down if where your tune is heading seems to
have hit a dead end or lost itself in a sonic swamp. Hey, Propellerheads
gave us a ten-stage undo buffer, why not extend that concept to files?
Always use the song information
Okay, now enter some basic info into the Song Info pane. You have 255
characters to make notes with, so name your song, put your name (or
preferred handle) in as the creator, and edit anything else you feel
appropriate. I mean, what's the point of having your song propagate to
other Reasoners if they don't know who made such a killah choon? What if
they want more, hmm? Or a club DJ wants permission to cut your track to CD
(or vinyl if he's got a Vestax cutter) so (s)he can use it in a set at a
gig or rave?
Lets make life a bit easier
In fact, you only have to do this naming thing once. Close all documents in
Reason, and select Open from the File menu. Navigate to the Templates
folder and open "Empty Rack.rns". Nothing but the hardware interface,
right? Collapse it by flipping its little triangle doovy (aren't Macs
wonderful?), then add a mixer. Now, go to the Song Info window again and
edit your default details (name/handle as creator, your edress, URL, etc).
Leave notes area and song title field blank. Close that, and now save this
Reason song as "Default song.rns", and save it in the same directory as the
Reason app. (If you get a pre-existing file warning, stop, and move the
original Default song.rns to the Templates directory first before
attempting to save again).
Now, when you start up Reason, it will open this way all the time unless you opened Reason by opening a song from the Finder/Explorer, and every song you make will have your details in it. Feel free to develop your Default song into something you know intimately. The sign of a good tool is something you don't have to think about (much) when you're using it, and Reason is flexible enough for almost any preferred method of stringing things together.
Become more intuitive
The more you work with Reason, the more you will find a neat new trick, or
develop a Matrix/Redrum pattern you like to use a lot. By saving these into
your Default document or some other template, you learn to develop Reason into
a tool that becomes customised to the way *you* work. It also makes you familiar
with the mechanics behind Reason's programming interface (the Sequencer and
Redrum/Matrix patterns) and allows it to grow with your level of skill. You
see, the more familiar you are with the tool you're using (and Reason is a
tool to get the music out of our heads and into an audio format), the less
you have to think about how you *use* the tool. It gets more intuitive, in
other words - second nature - and the less you're worrying about what
button tweaks which cord, the more time you'll dedicate to useful output.
Anyway.
So what is next...
Now that we've _built_ the track framework (some people refer to this as a
"bed", we need to start _shaping_ it by finding & tweaking some appropriate
loops or samples, and/or reprogramming Subtractors. That comes in my next
lesson. In the third lesson, I'll cover the use of effect devices and
alternate routings to _texture_ the final piece.
After that, we'll drift over into the realms of composition (ooo, the C
word!
Let me and reasonstation know how you got on and whether you found this tutorial usefull by posting on the message board. And lets start making music...
Brains