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The Propellerhead Reason Years

November 2024

THIS SHOULD REALLY be entitled the Propellerhead Reason, Fl Studio, ReNoise and Ableton Live Years because I tried quite a few software digital audio workstations (DAWs) before I settled on Reason. A stripped-down version of Ableton LIve came free with an audio interface I’d purchaced. I never got the hang of it. ReNoise is super cheap but even more abstract in operation than Ableton. You type notes in hexadecimal code, for crying out loud! FL Studio was on sale, so … I don’t know, I just bought it. I suppose I hoped that music would somehow magically pour out of one of these applications, but apparently, that’s not how it works.

Of the four, Reason most 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 draw in 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 19-inch 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 cables to the jacks, joining one device to another.

I learned a lot about electronic music and basic synthesizer and studio device functionality using Reason, but I’m afraid no chart-toppers emerged. 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 moderately interesting, they just didn’t go anywhere. Anyway, one weekend — and frankly, I don’t know how I managed to do it — but 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 provided me with a small sense of validation, but at that point, I also felt kind of tapped out as far as my own music composition possibilities were concerned. Or at least I needed a break.