"live"recording Usage Of, For Example, Reason 2, maybe i´m going about this the wrong way Options

[skogge]

Hi guys, and girls if there are any ;-)

Need some help here. I´m not a midi guy, i´m a songwriter in the lo-fi, indierockfield that switched the Tascam for 450MP, also used for graphic design. OS is Jaguar.
I use the computer like I would the Tascam, recording old organs and guitarsounds channel by channel. The first thing I record is a basic drumtrack from an external drummachine just for tempo. Since I don´t have a sampler and no real piano (just a wurlitzer, my neighbours would n o t enjoy a real piano...), I´ve been looking into the softsynth alternatives and I found Reason 2. I love the woodwinds, the strings and pianosamples! It´s perfekt for my arranging/recording needs (until someone gives me money to go in to an all analogue studio ;-)
But how do I get those sounds recorded into the audioprogram (for the moment Deck 3.5, another soon to come option is digi001)? My current setup is the G4 450MP running OSX Jaguar, M-audio Audiophile 2496 and Bias Deck 3.5. I´m trying out Reason as earlier stated. Any suggestions? Maybe i´m missing out on possibilities here, stuck as I am in old habits and ways of doing things.

Regards

/skogge

[gorillacake]

Reason can be hooked up to other sequencers via Rewire. Using rewire you can route the outs of all your reason instruments into individaul tracks in your Sequencer allowing you to use your plugins with Reason. I'm not sure if you can do this with Bias deck but the others can (cubaseSX, logic if using os9 although logic6 is supposed to have rewire, DP, and Pro tools). I recommend getting Reason. It's easy to use (lot's o' fun), and is quite versatile. With reason you can throw your drum machine away. Redrum rocks. I think you'll find that you will be able to use Reason to compose a substantial amount of your songs. Even if you can't use rewire with your sequencer there's still so much you can do. If you want to add live bass, guitar, drums, vocals, or whatever, just export what you've done in reason as a WAV or Aif and then import it into Bias deck and then build on it from there.

[skogge]

Thanks for your kind reply Gorillacake, but it was not the answer I was hoping for. I don´t want to add guitar and stuff to my Reasontrack, I want to add Reasonsounds to songs made in Deck, hopefully by just playing the synth and somehow routing that sound to audio in in Deck. It seems perfektly logic to me; you have a (soft)synth, the you shold be able to play it and record the sound it makes. That seems like the first thing a software synthesizer should be able to do. Or...

[Synthetic]

in Reason.... you can output either your whole song as .aiff file or you can set the "L"eft and "R"ight locator in the sequencer to loop just one part and then export the loop out as .aiff file and then pull that into Deck. The export functions are in the "file" menu at the top.

[gorillacake]

Hey Skogge,
Well like I said, Reason can do what you want but only if your sequencer has Rewire implementation, and I don't think Bias Deck does . But if your in the market for a new sequencer I would recommend Cubase SX or Cubase SL (which is a lot cheaper than SX and still has all the useful features SX has, especially if your just doing lo-fi indi rock stuff). Both SX and SL work great with Reason using Rewire. I'm actually in the same boat as you. I just started using a computer to record my music(I used to just use a Yamaha Mt4X four track). Right now I use cubase 5 VST with Reason but I'm planning on getting Cubase SL because I want to be OSX exclusive. Still an Indi rocker at heart, guided by voices, the microphones, pavement(still the shit), etc. the list goes on for miles. Getting into more of the breakbeat/IDM type stuff now though. Well anyways, hope some of this helps. Oh yeah, you might want to check out native instruments Reaktor. This is one bad ass program. You can create your own synths, drum machines, or whatever. If you don't want to do that there's already a nice library of pre-made stuff. Reaktor 4 will be out soon and it will run on OSX. It supports VST and AU but it's kinda expensive. Something to think about.

[skogge]

Gorillacake! Nice taste in music! Pavement made me the guy I am today and GBV is my all-time favourite band. I recently caught them live here in sweden. It was as great as I always expected them to be. I caught Phil Elvrum a couple of weeks ago as well.
So, if I understand you guys (thanks for replying synthetic) correctly there´s no way to work around the use of a sequencer and exporting that miditrack?

[Synthetic]

export midi track? does Deck do midi? if Deck accepts midi... then you can export midi tracks from Reason as well as audio... using Deck... you might be limited on how it works with other apps and such. You are aware the midi is not audio data and just note information in computer code right? guess I am a little confused as to what you are wanting to do with Deck and Reason.

[gorillacake]

Hey how was phil Elvrum? I heard microphones shows can be pretty strange. Almost theatrical and sometimes won't even play microphones tunes. As for the other stuff, I'm afraid the only way to wire Reason directly to your sequencer is with Rewire. So you'll have to ditch Bias if this is really important to you. You've probably heard of cubase and logic etc. but Cubase SL really does seem like a good deal ( I'm partial to Cubase cause I already know how to use it). If you really want to work in the sequencer first and then Reason you could always export what you have in Bias and then import that into Reason via the NN-XT sampler but that has some limitations as you can imagine. Then there's the other way I explained before about working in reason first and then exporting your song or loops. then importing those into Bias. I think this is the info your looking for. Hope it helps.

[rickenbacker]

ReWire would seem to be the answer to what you want to do, Skogge. It means you have both programs running at the same time (so your CPU has to take the strain) and the output of Reason appears in the mixer of your chosen sequencer app. Use all the best bits of Reason (drums, strings, synths etc) and add guitars, vocals etc in the other multitracker.

Logic 6 is supposed to have support for ReWire 2, but their implementation of ReWire so far has been sketchy to say the least. Cubase SX and ReWire from Reason works like a charm for me under OS X - even though a Steinberg rep told me it wouldn't! Ableton's Live 2 might also be worth a look for ReWire. But I love SX - got it about a month ago and I don't know if I'll ever go back to Logic now.

If you buy a Digi001, you're tied in to Pro Tools. I don't know about ReWire support there. But like Synthetic said, if you don't want to run two programs together with ReWire anyway, you can just export Reason tracks as audio or midi files and import them into your recorder. Or doing it the other way round, you could record audio sections in your multitracker and drop them into Reason's samplers.

[skogge]

You are all going to flog me now but I thinking about doing a stupid workaround. If I rout the audio from Deck (by the way, it does midi) to the macs built-in audiocard for monitoring the song, and then rout the magnificient stringsound from Reason via the M-audiocard to my stand-alone mixer and back to the audio-in on that same card I must be able to just play along to my song and getting that audio recorded? Hopefully..?
The problems with my recordings that I want to add stringsounds to is that nothing is in sync with a sequencer of any kind. Just with a drumtrack from a stand-alone drummachine recorded as audio on track one.