Assignment: Reason

I'll preface this post with a discovery I made when doing my project: the longer I spent making my song, the longer I felt I needed to work on it to make it good. In tinkering with Reason, using various effects and synths, pads and samples, it became clear that you could spend either one hour or a hundred making a song. Mine fell somewhere in between. Though I'm sure I overlooked some cool Reason features, by the end I felt as though I was able to work into the song most of the effects/sounds I was aiming for. I hope you like it.





Creation: where to begin?

I don't know if this is backwards, but I started with a sample and built a piece around it. Over break, I spent a lot of time thinking of what sample I wanted to use. Then I was watching Family Guy (which is worse than South Park, but better than the recent Simpsons), and came across the episode involving the Kool-Aid man. Ohhh Yeahhhhhh. And there it was.

It took me a while to find this sample in high quality, I guess it hasn't been used in any of their more recent advertising campaigns, but it was used by comedian Dane Cook in a track entitled "Not So Kool-Aid." The track was only moderately funny, but the sample was perfect.

To make it more manageable in Recycle, I copied the .mp3 into Logic Pro first, and isolated the several second clip (which I aptly titled "Oh Yeah.aiff"). I bounced it, and brought it into Recycle. By cutting it down in Logic first, it made my job in Recycle much easier.

Having made the sample, I brought it into Reason. I didn't especially like Dr. Rex, so I messed about until I was able to set up my sample in the NN-XT Advanced Sampler. I set it up for the keyboard, and after assigning the sample to all keys, I got a pretty cool effect - by moving up and down the keyboard, the sample was lowered in pitch/slowed down or elevated in pitch/sped up. Moving up or down by simple octaves kept the sample durations in usable durations, and let me imcorporate the sample into different stages of the song easily. A pretty sweet feature.

Then I set about creating the bassline. I'm not sure how real DJ's/composers do this, but it seemed the most logical place to start. First, I identified the elements of House that I wanted to bring into the bassline - basically four-to-the-floor plus a hi-hat effect - and so I primarily used these sounds. Then, I identified the effect I wanted the bassline to have - I wanted the song to gradually ramp-up, until about 45 seconds, where it would then prominently feature the "oh-Yeah" sample that had been more subtly deployed earlier in the piece. So I made five or six different patterns in 2 instances of ReDrum, and went to work.

Then I got really stuck. How did I make it actually sound good? It took me a while to decide what sound I wanted (I chose c-minor as the key, because it's easy to play, minor, and I had already centered my sample around middle C). So I set up several instances of Thor (one specifically to use a pad to bring additional depth to the piece), and also a subtractor and arpegiator. The arpegiator became the focus of the first several bars of the piece, as the other instruments/sounds came in around it, adding layers and depth of sound. This augmented the building of the bassline, and I liked the effect.

After adding and recording all my tracks, I needed to go back over them to add some effects/automation etc. This was useful, especially for smoothing the introduction of new instruments, and getting new sounds from existing ones.