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.

[Synthetic]

sounds to me like you are in need of Logic more than Reason if those things really bug you. ;-) I like Reason but its just not flexible enough for myself to use as a complete studio package. To me, Reason is just another tool for sound creation and sometimes use to build a foundation for song but have only completed one song almost entirely with it... still pulled the audio files into PT LE for some enhacement with plugs and to mix better.

[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.

[Mugwomp]

Do you know what dongles are? They're for copy protection. What'd you think they were?

The x-key is about as painless a device to use and it fits on your keychain. Inserting/removing a USB device the size of a lighter isn't that hard. Emagic replaced the dongle with the x-key fairly recently but it works fine - I can even have Logic installed on my other computers with zero hassle. Very nice. Plus Logic rocks. (I'm a Logic junky!!!) I just don't think of Reason as much of a compositional tool anyway - doesn't really compare to Logic, but you were previously venting on your lack of OSX audio options.

http://www.emagic.de/xskey/english/xskey.html

[twelve]

why not just rewire the output of reason into your favorite sequencer. i do this with Live cause its more intuitive to me.

http://www.thecolortvs.com

[Levon River]

Do you know what dongles are?

Yeah, they're the $700.00 piece of crap in the $1,000.00 box. And you pay them for the privilege of getting to put it in for them, right?

[ryosode]

Okay ,so Levon River's point taken. These feature limitations bother me as well and fixing those would make a great dot release!!

Now going out of the focus of this forum. Logic is simply too expensive a software if you are not needing the extras after extras. As for dongle, I think they are stupid. I don't even have an extra USB port anymore. I don't wanna buy a hub just for it. *_*

As for ReWire, yeah it's great. It works with Live and that's how I capture Reason stuff and instantly putting it to work, isntead of going through export, but I can't recall too many OS X softwares that support ReWire. If my memory is correct, Logic for one doesn't.

BTW, did you guys notice that Logic 5.5 has not only LAP but Gold and Silver (?) OS X edition as well? This means if you don't need all the unlimited tracks, you can simply go for Logic BigBox (Silver plus a few plugins, usually on sale for $249) and upgrade it to OS X version!! Now that's cheap.

http://www.emagic.de/english/news/index.html#097

[twelve]

As for ReWire, yeah it's great. It works with Live and that's how I capture Reason stuff and instantly putting it to work, isntead of going through export, but I can't recall too many OS X softwares that support ReWire. If my memory is correct, Logic for one doesn't.

yeah thats right, no rewire anywhere but in Live i hear. Seems strange as everything in os 9 had rewire and live has had it forever. i think the new cubase might but i'm not positive.

http://www.thecolortvs.com