The DAW Experience
November 2024
MOST PEOPLE who make music or design sounds with a computer do so using a digital audio workstation (DAW). There are many to choose from. I tried several of them before I settled on one called Reason.
Reason appealed to me on an aesthetic level. If there’s one thing that distinguishes it from other DAWs, it’s Reason’s skeuomorphic interface. While Reason has a “piano roll” like a lot of DAWs where you can place notes along a timeline to create melodies and rhythms, the sounds these notes make are generated by “instruments” that are rendered realistically on the screen as if they were actual hardware devices bolted into a rack. And then you can flip the rack around revealing the backs of the devices, many of which have switches and jacks. The switches toggle, and you can connect wiggly cables to the jacks, joining one device to another.
Reason’s instrument rack
Instrument heinies
I think I got pretty fluent with Reason. I learned a lot about basic synthesizer and studio device functionality using it. But knowing how to use music making software does not necessarily equal making actual music. In fact, after fiddling with it on and off for about eight years, I had accumulated only fragments. No “finished” music at all, good or bad. I didn’t necessarily hate the fragments. I thought some of them were interesting; they just didn’t go anywhere. Anyway, one weekend — and frankly, I don’t know how I managed to do it — I sat at the computer determined to polish up as many of my fragments as possible and to then upload them to SoundCloud. Was I polishing turds? Maybe, but I charged ahead. I ended up with 16 items. Some of them were quite short — obvious fragments. But a few of them were long enough to possibly qualify as … semi-actual musical ideas?
The end results gave me some validation, but at that point, I also felt kind of tapped out as far as my own music composition abilities were concerned. Or at least I needed a break.
Check out Reason
