The Reason Sequencer And Me..., What makes it sub-par Options

[Levon River]

I want to love the Reason 2.0 sequencer in OS X like I love the rest of the program, but it is just unlovable. Here is one curmudgeon's opinion of some of the major reason's why, in no particular order:

1. No way to select all events on one note (in order to transpose or otherwise fiddle with them) without zooming out and dragging over all of them. A major and repetitive pain in numerous parts of the anatomy.

2. No dotted-note support. (!)

3. Can't horizontally resize sequencer window panes. (I mean, this *is* the 21st century.) Better use short names for your tracks, and don't put unique identifiers only at the end of the names. (E.g.: "Violin Section AdvOrch," "Violin Section Miroslav," etc. About all you'll be able to see is "Violin Sec" unless you go click on each name, because you can't resize the pane. Which is a...pain.)

4. No batch "human feel" function.

5. No functional or useful randomizing of velocities.

6. The *colors*. My eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeees!

7. No way to sync views between tracks, and no way to view multiple tracks in one editor window. This is one of the biggest liabilities of the sequencer, and causes endless scrolling around and resizing of the sequencer window when going to edit different tracks. Every time you click on a track (if you've changed anything) you are in a completely different magnification and position in the song, and it is extremely disorienting, and makes editing contrapuntal or harmony parts between voices cumbersome to the point of "why bother." This kind of separate control of track view is great as an option, but when it's the only non-option available, it's just awful. If there has to be only one way, this one is probably the worst possible.

8. No automatic setting of current values for controller lanes, e.g. volume. IOW, if you have the volume you want set on an NN-19 or NN-XT patch, but then want to put in a volume curve at measure 182, selecting the controller lane and selecting volume just gives you a blank lane with no indication of the current volume setting of the device. You then have to go to the device and get a readout off of its volume knob to know where to set the default volume for that track in order to then draw in your curve.

9. Along with the above: NO cursor-position feedback! This is just inexcusable. There's no information in, e.g., a controller lane about precisely what level of the vertical scale for that controller your cursor is at before you click to enter a value.

10. Along with no way to select all the events on a single note (#1 above), there is no universal track "event selecter." I'll compare this to the one in DP where you can add endless parameters for narrowing down and defining the events on a track that you want to munge. This is invaluable in a complex part, especially if you want to find and select *every* sixteenth note that falls in the third sixteenth-note-position of the third beat in every measure. If you want to do it in Reason, better pack a lunch.

There are more, but these are some of the major stumbling blocks I've encountered. Love to hear others' views and experiences. Maybe we can bundle 'em up and humbly send them to Propellarheads with cap in hand, begging for an upgrade.

[Levon River]

sounds to me like you are in need of Logic more than Reason if those things really bug you. ;-)

Yeah, they bug me, and no, I don't need Logic. I will not become a dongle-wife, ever, under any circumstances, to any company, for any... Reason.

And rumors of my stupidity have been greatly exaggerated: I wasn't even attempting to compare Reason to Logic. They aren't remotely comparable products. I was discussing Reason's sequencer. Period. I was discussing ways I think it could be improved.

It arose out of a complete wild-hair experiment, planned as such with malice-aforethought by me and an adventurous friend--three fingers of JD each--only to see if a full and decently convincing rhythm section could be beat out of Reason with a big enough stick and a high enough stack of NN-XTs. In fact it worked out well enough that the results are going into a demo studio this coming week for sweetening and vocals. So it can be done. What I laid out in my post are some of the more annoying things I ran into doing it.

I'm familiar with Logic, having had to learn it and use it (and about every other DAW package that exists) in freelance engineering and producing. When dongle-danglers want to pay me to work in the copy of Logic they're married to, I do. Then I walk away from it--whistling.