Posts by JType

I agree with AlumoAudio here. I think that the most important thing is, obviously, the quality of your sounds, but when it comes to profile design/layout, it’s important to prioritize making it easy for visitors to find everything they need and want, as well as making sure they can easily browse other items that will suit their tastes.

I’ve been meaning to update mine for ages now. Gotta get on that!!

Yea, just make sure that whatever sound is playing in your Reason rack is not clipping or pushing any device too hard and I think you should be fine.

That was an interesting discussion you linked (well, before it just descended into bickering, of course ), but seeing as it was from back in 2005, I’m not quite sure how relevant it is to today’s versions of Reason. I’ll have to do an A/B test one of these days (been a while).

On the subject of your 2 Reason songs. I hope they do get approved. Feel free to PM me when they do and I’ll happily give them a listen and maybe some feedback on them also.

Personally, I think the criticisms people have regarding the ‘sound-quality’ of Reason (or any other DAW , for that matter) are more criticisms of the quality of the stock sounds and stock presets. There’s no real reason why your finished audio production will sound worse in Reason, if you use the same sounds as you do in any other DAW .

On the other hand I do concede that, in the early versions of Reason, the audio processing units could very easily suck the life out of any sound you put into them. Thinking back to the early compression unit and the early foldback distortion unit, it’s really easy to make good sounds terrible on those, for example.

Also, it’s worth noting that, because Reason is so unique in DAW terms (a DAW build entirely around emulating a physical studio), it’s quite easy for people to make mistakes that aren’t as punishing in other DAWs/Plugins, like pushing sound levels too high pre-fader. In an entirely digital environment, this isn’t such an issue. If you max out the volume output in, say, NI’s Massive, but make sure it’s not clipping on the mixer channel, there’s no problem. In Reason, the sound would still be distorted.

Check out this snippet from a Sound On Sound article on Gain Structure in Reason:

Although you might think this is an ‘old school’ topic more suited to analogue studios, ‘gain structure’ is important in Reason. This is the art of keeping all the devices in your studio running within their optimum volume levels. In a digital environment such as Reason, the main imperative is to keep levels fairly high (for maximum resolution), while preventing signals from hitting the top of the range of values that can mathematically be represented within the software. Straying above this range will result in flat lines at the tops and bottoms of your waveforms (clipping), which doesn’t sound pleasant! You’ll probably have clipped the main output from Reason at some point, resulting in the red clip light coming on in the transport bar. However, you can clip signals at many points before this within Reason. The output from any instrument can clip, for a start, and turning that down in the mixer will not help because the problem lies before the signal gets to the mixer inputs. Mixer inputs can be clipped. Effects devices that you’re sending signal through can be clipped. The main mixer output can clip. In other words, watching the red ‘Audio Out’ clip light is not enough; you need to be in the habit of setting up each device so that it receives and outputs a decent level without maxing out. One thing to bear in mind, especially if you’re used to working with an analogue mixer, is that, like most digital mixers, the way in which signals are mixed together in the Reason mixer follows slightly different rules. All the individual channels are summed together into a stereo signal known as the mix buss. This is what arrives at the master fader on the right of the 14:2 mixer. Intuitively, you might think that if you mix together two signals that are almost at the maximum level, the mix buss signal would ‘go over’ and clip, but this is not the case. Reason uses 32-bit floating-point maths to sum the signals together, which means that there is an endless amount of headroom on the mix buss. The master fader scales this final signal down without any loss of audio integrity so, if the final output of the mixer is clipping (showing red lights on its meters) you can pull it down as far as is necessary to get a clean output. If this means that the master fader is quite a long way down, this isn’t a particular cause for concern, as it would be with an analogue mixing console.

So, to answer your questions:

1) As long as you make sure that there is no clipping in your signal chain in Reason, before rewiring the sounds into Cubase, there should be no problems whatsoever.

2) When you Rewire Reason, you run it in ‘slave’ mode, with the main DAW (Cubase, Live, Logic, etc) being the host, or master. This means that any changes you make to the length of the project, or the loop markers in Cubase should be reflected in Reason automatically. So exporting projects shouldn’t be an issue if the selected regions to be exported are correct.

3) You can certainly do that. I’ve done similar things before to make use of higher-end audio processing plugins in a different DAW . But make sure you remember that the same principles apply as with rewiring. Make sure that the original, source sounds in Reason are of good quality and not clipped or distorted in any way.

Hope that helps!

Here’s my submission:

http://audiojungle.net/item/j-type-patient-jazz/11041

Yea, I mean I marketed it pretty much in the same way that I usually do, but somehow it really didn’t get noticed. I’ve had far better results from doing far less marketing in the past for various projects and works of mine, but this time it didn’t really work.

I wholeheartedly agree that it’s me who’s at fault (I know that I’m terrible at marketing my work), but it was just funny that it yielded such poor results this time around.

Hehe! I put a video of my latest upload up on youtube and it only got about 6 views.

Dunno what I did wrong..

Nice one dude! Hope your sales come fast.

I have another $1,247 to go before my next paw.

Hmm.. Loudness is dependent on quite a few different factors, including the dynamic range of the music, the frequency content/spread as well as it’s peak DB level.

If you’re referring to the peak DB level, then I generally limit my masters at -0.3db, but the dynamic range and actual loudness of my songs varies tremendously.

The only new feature that I’d heard about, prior to this post, was uploading direct to soundcloud.

Will definitely keep an eye on it, but I’m pretty happy with my Reason/Live combo for now.

Mixing has definitely been one of my weaker skill-sets when it comes to music production, so over the years I’ve read tons of books, guides and magazine articles and watched loads of videos on the subject of mixing.

Personally I try to spend more time now, in the beginning stages of my production, just making sure that the sounds that I’m using are very good quality and sound good on their own. I find this makes mixing down the song afterwards a lot easier, as I don’t have to worry about making each audio track/channel sound better or listenable, but rather on the overall balance of the sounds.

In the end, despite all of the advice and tips that you can gain from those sources, it does just come down to, as Sonicbyte pointed out, giving your song’s core elements space and prominence in the track, so that your listeners know what you want them to hear.

Having said that, if you would like help with mixing in a specific genre, or learning different mixdown techniques, then feel free to ask here in the forums, or track down some of the thousands of articles and videos available on the subject.

A word of warning when it comes to finding advice on this subject (and on anything regarding music composition/production/engineering), though: Be wary of anyone saying that there is one ‘best’/’only’ way of doing things. There’s no one plugin or technique that will make all your songs perfect, of course, and it purely comes down to what works for you and your music.