March 25 2008
Working “Reason” into worship, drum loops, synths and other crazy things
Tagged Under : Ableton, audio, Chris Tomlin, Easter, gear, mp3, Our Rising Sound, Reason, worship
I have for quite some time been hoping for a Abelton Live/Reason/synth/jack of all trades musician to come to our church. I love working with it in the studio but I’ve always wanted to get it integrated into our live worship sets. Sadly that person has not walked through the door yet so I got myself a midi controller(M-Audio Oxygen 8), installed Reason and started hacking away.
I was very impressed with how easy Reason 4 was to work with. I was able to make some real progress really quick, the transport features are similar to standard recording software (Logic/ProTools), the mixer and components are all easy to work with. The patches it comes with are plentiful and give you plenty of avenues of creativity. So I was off and running there. I started looking at Abelton but it felt very Windowsy to me. Being a completely saved man (mac man) I can’t be havin that. So it’s just Reason for now.
This Easter we tried out our first go at playing with a Reason track. We did a stripped down acoustic version of Mighty Is the Power of the Cross by Chris Tomlin and integrated a reason track I recorded. I think we’ve been reasonably well paced in the progression of musical style in our church and I hope we haven’t left many behind. This was another leap forward and I must admit, my first try at it so it wasn’t all that great but it was a start. For the first time in a long time I was nervous. I was panicking that my computer would shut down or the track would pause or something funky. Thank God it went smoothly, giving me a bit more confidence using this live going forward.
So here’s a 2 minute cut from what we used on the outro. This of course had live vocals as well as an acoustic guitar.
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Reason is good if you want the same sequence from start to finish every time. Live’s power is in its ability to organize music in segments (intro, verse1, chorus1, bridge, etc) and is flexible enough to be rearrange the parts of the song (extra chorus, etc) on the fly and remain in time with the song. You might want to create your parts in Reason and execute them during worship with Live if you need that flexibility for on the fly rearrangements.
That’s a good tip Brian. I had been wondering how best to accomplish this and know a lot of people use Abelton Live…well live
So that makes sense. Thanks again for the tip, I’ll try working with that.
[...] 4 – I talked a bit about how this came to be in an earlier post. Slowly been integrating more synth tracks, live and [...]
I have been using Reason for 4-5 years now in live worship. I am a keyboardist and it has completely transformed how I play. I often will help the worship staff by producing loops and then rewiring them into Logic to bounce. Those loops are then transferred to our master click track. Reason is so limitless in it’s possibilities. I play now with only my Macbook and my CME midi controller. I’d never go back to a hardware keyboard. Check out our church’s website – lcbcchurch.com.
[...] “I was very impressed with how easy Reason 4 was to work with. I was able to make some real progress really quick, the transport features are similar to standard recording software (Logic/ProTools), the mixer and components are all easy to work with. The patches it comes with are plentiful and give you plenty of avenues of creativity. So I was off and running there. I started looking at Abelton but it felt very Windowsy to me. Being a completely saved man (mac man) I can’t be havin that. So it’s just Reason for now.” (Kyle) [...]
[...] “I was very impressed with how easy Reason 4 was to work with. I was able to make some real progress really quick, the transport features are similar to standard recording software (Logic/ProTools), the mixer and components are all easy to work with. The patches it comes with are plentiful and give you plenty of avenues of creativity. So I was off and running there. I started looking at Abelton but it felt very Windowsy to me. Being a completely saved man (mac man) I can’t be havin that. So it’s just Reason for now.” (Kyle) [...]