General question about production

[djflan]

Hey I just joined the forums. I am the proud new owner of a Virus TI Snow.

I have questions regarding producing, most of which involves my abandon of Reason. I am producing melodic trance. Track structure is not an issue, I know the elements. In reason I am used to creating short clips, then copying and pasting them.

Because Reason has no way of MIDI Out/VST/Audio Recording capability, I have turned to Sonar as my DAW. I am wondering how you guys put together tracks. Do you record short clips, or entire tracks at once. What about transposing, etc?

Any advice at this point would be helpful.

- Thanks

[Voom]

Originally Posted by djflan

Because Reason has no way of MIDI Out/VST/Audio Recording capability, I have turned to Sonar as my DAW. I am wondering how you guys put together tracks. Do you record short clips, or entire tracks at once. What about transposing, etc?

I've used Reason + Ableton for years. Sometimes I use Digital Performer, but that's pretty parallel for your purposes. I've always done everything in MIDI. I make sections on each track and loop them out as long as they need to be. Often I'll just use one track per loop. The loop just runs infinitely and I use automation to create the composition.Other times I'll use one track per timbre, when I'm making more dynamic or evolving tracks (read: actually play them).

Sonar should have a MIDI transposing tool built in. DP and Live do.

V••m

[annikk.exe]

Hello, welcome to the forums :>

I too used to use Reason as my main platform for musical creativity. I've recently moved to Cubase 5, so although our new platforms are different, we have a common history. :>

I use the copying and pasting techique too. Basically my songwriting process is as follows: Write some sounds, or quickly throw together an idea then refine it to make everything sound good. Keep going till I get a 4 bar loop. Create another riff with the same or complementary patches, and it becomes an 8 bar loop. From there I typically copy and paste, expanding on different parts, adding fills and automation and tweaking things here and there, until the song is reaching a conclusion.


On recording, I'm not sure if you mean recording as in midi notes, or actual audio.

For midi, I normally play a riff several times while recording it, then go back and find the nicest take, then quantize/adjust it and form a "block" of those notes, just like in Reason, and copy/paste them along the controller lane.

For audio, it depends on the source. For a vocal performance I normally have the vocalist do the entire piece in one sitting, but do several takes of the whole song. This is because the lyrics will carry some emotional weight and I just feel this comes across better uninterrupted.
For other sounds, such as sampling instruments or percussive sounds or (this really happened) the sound of me blowing bubbles with my head plunged into a bucket of water, I normally do a series of short takes.

Transpose function works fine in Cubase though. Thankfully a lot of the features are quite similar to Reason.

Grats on your purchase :>


-Annikk