Aug 01, 2006 05:42 PM
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A veteran musician in today's world will be cursing the latest advancements in digital music production technlology. Not so long ago were the times when a musician had to painstakingly arrange and record real instruments irrespective of its relevance or prominance in a given song recording or music composition. Not to mention it was done in the expense of hours and hours of time, Loads of energy and literally bags of money spent on doing it. Today, thanks to the digital technology which is getting more and more powerful, one can achieve the best results in vertually no time with so much of ease and at his own comfort. The same job to achieve otherwise, wouldn't make much sense today. Anything produced digital is economical. For example, A producer wants a song to be recorded. If he follows traditional measures like 1) arranging musicians, say 15 different instruments and players, 2) Book a recording studio for err.., say 20 odd hours for Music recording then another 10 odd hours for mixing session 3) A recording engineer and/ also a mixing engineer, 4) Vocalists (Main and Chorus) Again, not to mention the time and energy spent by the producer in preparing all the materials needed for the production like staff notes, musician's hospitality and accomadation arrangements, etc. Above all, the excruciating feeling of the deadline nearing for the completion of the production and money gushing away every minute like a broken pipeline. By the time the producer is done with tackling these issues, he would have lost the magical spirit needed to produce a song. It's this spirit that actually will be called the soul of Music later when it is finished. Producing the same song with Digital Music production will ensure that magical spirit is sprinkled just fine through out the song. traditionally a producer would have spent anywhere between 2 to 3 lakh rupees (Highly subjective) on production of the song. Today we can buy a music production software for less than half that much money. Moreover, it's a one time investment and we can produce hundreds of songs without having to spend on Musicians, engineers, rentals of instruments, amd many many things. There are quite a lot of available softwares which call themselves music production workstations. But only few of them even have the eligibilty to output something that can be called MUSIC. few of the names that have proved themselves with authenticity and quality are Image line Fruityloops, Sonic Foundry/Sony Acid, Cakewalk Sonar, Steinberg Cubase and Nuendo, Digidesign Protools, Apple Garage band, and some others. All the above mentioned software are successful in today's high quality seeking and feature thirsty Market. I have experienced and worked on all these softwres first handedly. Believe me when I say, All these softwares gave me this impression as a whole:- "Digitally, its this easy to make music. Sometimes you don't even have to know music to make music." But there is something called professionalism and quality factor which is mandatory. all the softwres I mentioned above had everything needed to convinve me that they are serious toys in the hands of professionals. As I said "TOYS!". I personally felt they all lacked the "GRACE" factor. When I say grace, I mean the product which the softwre outputs must be capable of winning veteran musician's respect for its quality and ability. One must find that "soul" existing in the song. Thats where all these softwre fail in one or the other way. Sometimes very negligibly, but fail. In other words, everything in digital is actually virtual. Meaning, Instruments are not real, Sounds are generated from synthesizers. So when nothing is real, it's really hard to produce somthing that sounds very close to reality if not totally real. This is where REASON comes in. This 3 cd set software bundle has it all. I think this software is the best MIDI based music production software ever produced. It has everything that a serious professional music producer needs to make his dream come true. Starting from loads of high quality real instrument sound samples to a full fledged Mixing console with mastering suiete. In other words, we have all the instruments and the recording studio ready in one window. The main window layout is made to look like a rack stand found in studios. we can start mounting whatever gadget we want. Reason provides with many (virtual) gadgets like: samplers- NNXT and NN19. Loop Player - Dr.Rex Synths - Malstrom Graintable and Subtractor Brialliant Drum machine - Redrum Computer, with 10 kit assemble. Step sequencer - Matrix 14:2 Mixing console, Mclass Equalizer 4 band parametric, Reverb machine - RV7000, Delay machine, phaser, Mclass Compressor, Auto gain compressor, Line mixer - 5 channel and a combinator. For samples we have - Orchetra sound bank - real instruments samples and Factory sound bank - all u need!!! the main window can be detatched into two windows gadets window and sequencing window. Pressing TAB will take you behind the rack where you can patch manually any special connections otherwise mostly reason does all the patching by itself. Reason has the best sequencing window with upto 10x zoom and all the midi functions needed with an 8 octave key pad display. automatic colour application for tracks. Standard transport pannel. Automation was never so easy on any software. Detainling of automation is inbeatable. Reason is also Rewire compliant (Slave Mode) If you have a steinberg Nuendo or Cubase already installed you have virtually a whole new universe of didital Music Production Opene doors for you. Using reason's virtual gadjets is surprisingly simple and easy. The maximum number of gadgets that can be used directly depends on the Processing power of your computer. As per my experience, a P4 with 512MB and a creative soundblaster live as a basic config will yeild you 100% professional sounding results. One has to lay his hands on this baby to really believe in it's fine blend of supremacy and simplicity. reason works and sounds best on directX Primary Sound drivers for windows. The torturing factor in any MIDI based music production is LATENCY. But people. Those days are gone. Reason especiaaly will not give you even the slightest feeling of latency even on reasonably fast computers. After 3 years of working and learning about reason, I can tell you this much. Reason certainly has that magical something which is extremely rare in digital domain. It has a texture fo the sounds it produces which is unlike any other. Even better news is that Reason has a distributor here in india, located in mumbai and chennai (Pro Musicals). The only thing I cannot be able to tell you is it's retail price. It seems to differ from time to time. on an average one should be able to buy it for around Rs.20000 The only drawback within this software is that it doesnot allow anolog recording and Third party plugins. But this is negligible thanks to its rewire compliancy. Hooking Reason up with nuendo or cubase will kill even this minute restriction. After all this is said and done, I hope the message is clear. Perfection is Only the REASON why I recomend this product.
