Reaktor or Reason with Live 6?

dm · Post by dm » Fri Feb 16, 2007 2:08 am

easily reaktor. endless sound capabilities, thousands of free ensembles to download and if you want to do just a wee bit of tinkering you can make sounds that are really your own.
plus, as a plug-in, reaktor is very conveniently integrated into live. especially if you save all your ensembles as live clips in the midi channels, so you can just drag and drop them in, instead of going through the reaktor vst/au path directory every time. (you'll have to do it 1st, of course).

reason on the other hand is too self-contained, isnt a plug-in, has to be rewired...and most importantly imho sounds a bit cheesy.

kuniklo · Post by **kuniklo** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 2:34 am

Reaktor can do more but if you want to experiment Reason is 10x easier and faster to work with. Building your own instruments in Reaktor is pretty much a fulltime job but you can just start tossing things together for fun in Reason in seconds.

If I could only have one I'd pick Reason.

muthafunka · Post by **muthafunka** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 2:53 am

Another Reaktor vote here, would also recommend getting the Electromnic Instruments 2 pack. Tbh I haven't built a single thing for myself but tweak extensively and the quality of the included synths and drum machines/weirdbeard sound generators plus all the fx from standard delays/reverb/compression through to the beyond-the-brain kind of stuff, really has helped me whittle down the other plugs I don't really use so much now. It would seriously be no challenge whatsoever to use Reaktor and Live and nothing else at all. It can be so inspiring just creating sounds and general sound-mangling in standalone to use in Simpler/Impulse etc, nevermind as a plugin. Soundwise I haven't listened to Reason in a while but R5 has crunch, punch and downright fruitiness in spades. Did I say I dig Reaktor?

leedsquietman · Post by **leedsquietman** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 3:59 am

if you're a real 'synth enthusiast' type who fantasizes about owning one of those original 1960's moogs with the wire board and who actually enjoyed trying to program a Yamaha DX7 then Reaktor.

If you want to create original sounds and are prepared to spend a lot of time tweaking and retweaking to get the 'ultimate' pad or ultimate 'acid bleep' etc the Reaktor is for you. Complex sounds in Reaktor can guzzle quite a bit of CPU juice but as mentioned you can save them into Live as clips which helps negate this somewhat.

If you want some fairly goodish (not exactly vienna symphonic instrument quality but would fool 85% of the population) meat and potato strings/pianos/eps/guitars etc, put together in a package with good presets that don'e need building up from scratch, with easy to build up effects and the combinator (which allows layering of instruments and effects chains a bit like Racks in Live 6) and something which is light on CPU usage the Reason is the better option. (although rewiring into Live obviously negates the CPU issue a bit). PLus you get a rex2 loop player and a great little beat machine in Redrum (although you might find that you still like Impulse better)

They are totally different animals - in an ideal world you would get both !!

mcconaghy · Post by **mcconaghy** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 6:11 am

For me, Reason is the portable little sketchpad - I can quickly bash out embryonic ideas, make things sound pretty nice, and then transfer the whole audio and MIDI over to Live/Logic/ProTools. And I still have a crapload of REX files, for which Reason comes in handy.
Reaktor is like a big box of Lego. It's so easy to hammer together what you're hearing in your head - weird sounds, chopped up shit, it's all in there, and the user library is amazing. There are some sick people contributing to that library, and for the first two years or so of owning Reaktor that's all I played with. Whatever you can think of, someone's probably contributed it to the Reaktor user library.

rbmonosylabik · Post by **rbmonosylabik** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 8:11 am

robtronik wrote:you don't have to use the dragging cable metaphor. You can right click outputs and get a menu of where you want to route it to. Easy.

The cables are fun, but not necessary to manually route them via drag and drop if you don't want to.

rob.

Still, it gets messy quite fast, be it by untangling virtual cables or by scrolling through a dropdown menu.

Benshik · Post by **Benshik** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 10:24 am

reason's sound scope is wider. you get lots of samples of acoustic instruments as well as synth sounds. it is also more straightforward. its divided in well known instruments like pianos, violins, synths, blabla

reaktor's more experimental and less trying to emulate a non-computer world. you find lots of weird instruments but also great acoustic-ish sounds... for example im very fond of metallic and string sounds but i prefer to generate them in reaktor rather than using some guitar or vibraphone samples... and for synth sounds, reaktor is incredibly superior.

so personaly, i use reaktor coz i feel when playing it my computer becomes a sound generator, an instrument, and not a machine hosting a program emulating an instrument...

but i played with reason a couple of times and found it pretty fun too.

aisling · Post by **aisling** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 1:18 pm

Naive Teen Idol wrote:
aisling wrote:Just like your dp vs logic thread.....
Oh, man -- I'm getting a rep already.

aisling wrote:It comes down to where are you at in your musical development? Are you just getting going (2 years or so under your belt) that you have the time to learn (2 years) and master the best software out there, Or are you more into the game (6 or so years) where you need to be creative and not always teching/studying.

If time is no issue and you still have "curiosity", learn reaktor hands down!!!
But if your in a flow of making tracks from start to finnish, and tech stuff ruins the vibe, use Reason. There are plenty of ways to make the audio quality in Reason sound pro (not like ver 1/2) and your making music in 5 minutes!

In my opinion, you got to have a check and balance measure for gear envy. Before you you know it 2 years can go by and you never really even accomplished anything except some software updates......
These are all really good questions and points. REALLY good. Basically, I'm far along in the development stage. After tracking a pop record in DP3 a few years ago, I've sort of moved into a more electronic thing recently; I'd been using Reason 2.5 and Live 3 until I decided to go Intel Mac. It's def. slowed down my creative process a bit as I've had to learn Live 6, which is pretty seriously advanced compared to Live 3. So your point about tech stuff is spot on.

I think one thing that folks might be playing down about Reason is its sample-playing capabilities and library; for instance, as I understand it, Reason's library makes Live's EIC kind of redundant. And though I've just played around w/ it in the Reason 3 demo, the Combinator is sort of Reason's Rack — and it's worth mentioning that the sounds they made available (in the demo at least) are of a very high quality. And the combinator mappings allow for some pretty remarkable Rack-esque tweaking.

All that said, I'm thinking twice about it. Frankly, I've never had a computer that could even run Reaktor properly; now I do. And w/o question, one thing I'm struggling a bit w/ is not having a proper sound library to start from. So, thanks for all the advice, peeps...

[/quote]

Things I do to "trip Out reason" tracks.
Run through external hardware, pod, filter factory's, boss delays, odd stomp boxes, synths with inputs. Yes, it can pick up noise and gets convereted d/a/d but it's fun and can be managed (24 bit). (I would encourage all soft synthers to patch anything you can in and out of the digital domain every once in a while.....)
Powercore/uad dsp or similar plugs on the track. (I never realy print much below 40-50 hz either)
Not to be taken out of context as I have tremedous respect for reaktor, hands down but if you are going to invest that kind of time to learn something, The Access virus is always worth it weight.

paradiddle · Post by **paradiddle** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 4:09 pm

I'd go for reaktor also mainly because of the huge sound palette you can draw from.

You don't really need to build instrument, you can just combine bits and pieces of some ensembles you like and make a new instruments or effects out of it.

robtronik · Post by **robtronik** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 6:13 pm

rbmonosylabik wrote:
robtronik wrote:you don't have to use the dragging cable metaphor. You can right click outputs and get a menu of where you want to route it to. Easy.

The cables are fun, but not necessary to manually route them via drag and drop if you don't want to.

rob.
Still, it gets messy quite fast, be it by untangling virtual cables or by scrolling through a dropdown menu.

you don't have to endure either option. Here is how:

1) turn off the cables under the option menu.
2) hover your mouse over the outputs and a pop up tells you where it is routed to automatically. Move your mouse, it disappears.

Need to route that output to a new input? right click, and select.

No biggie there. (i.e. easy as pie).

rob.

victorjohn · Post by **victorjohn** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 7:12 pm

I like them both for different reasons.

Reason is a great way to have gotten rid of all my gear, but to maintain the overall sounds and aesthetic of the process. I really like it and can usually bang out a track pretty quickly, if I know what I am going for. It sounds great too!

Reaktor I like because its inspiring to sit there sometimes and just make gnarly sounds. That's what it is good at, like someone said earlier, the "ultimate pad", "ultimate acid line"... very inspiring.

Live ties both my worlds together nicely.

That being said, I hate NI as a whole and their anti-piracy methods often cause more headaches for the registered user than the pirate. Also, never expect to have 100% stability with an NI product, as you will be paying for an update before the bugs get worked out every time.

Reason on the other hand has not crashed on me once in 8 years. Props stuff is always totally stable and always flies low on the CPU radar, which means less stopping to bounce stuff down.

R.J.Dubya · Post by **R.J.Dubya** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 7:50 pm

Another vote for reaktor. It sounds wicked and the instruments always sit well in mixes. Now that you have a macbook, many of it's bread and butter synths/samplers will actually take less cpu than many other standalone synths. Use the original carbon or kaleidon from R4 and you're looking at 5 or 6 % of one processor only, and they still sound good. Then you use the more complex stuff like carbon2, metaphysical function, photone, and just freeze if you need to, or drag bounces into simpler/sampler. And you don't have to have two programs open and use rewire!

Reason has one big advantage: It's super-stable and efficient. But that's because it's self-contained. Me I like to have everything in one song of one program, no rewire.

Reaktor can sometimes be a bit unstable, but it's been pretty good during V5.

And people talk about how complex it is, but that is only true if you want to build synths. Otherwise it depends what synth you are using, and it's often no more complicated than any other synth out there.

But the sound quality is truly excellent, and not just for instruments. Great reverb, effects, mastering tools etc. And the user library is killer. Best place to find recreations of analog classics like a Juno.

my 3 cents.

rjw

Naive Teen Idol · Post by **Naive Teen Idol** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 8:47 pm

R.J.Dubya wrote:Another vote for reaktor. It sounds wicked and the instruments always sit well in mixes. Now that you have a macbook, many of it's bread and butter synths/samplers will actually take less cpu than many other standalone synths. Use the original carbon or kaleidon from R4 and you're looking at 5 or 6 % of one processor only, and they still sound good. Then you use the more complex stuff like carbon2, metaphysical function, photone, and just freeze if you need to, or drag bounces into simpler/sampler. And you don't have to have two programs open and use rewire!

Reason has one big advantage: It's super-stable and efficient. But that's because it's self-contained. Me I like to have everything in one song of one program, no rewire.

Reaktor can sometimes be a bit unstable, but it's been pretty good during V5.

And people talk about how complex it is, but that is only true if you want to build synths. Otherwise it depends what synth you are using, and it's often no more complicated than any other synth out there.

But the sound quality is truly excellent, and not just for instruments. Great reverb, effects, mastering tools etc. And the user library is killer. Best place to find recreations of analog classics like a Juno.

my 3 cents.

rjw

Based on what I just played around with last night w/ the demo, I have to say: I concur, RJ. Even tho I went to school for electronic music, I'd always found Reaktor's complexity and myriad windows a bit daunting; even the browser takes a few seconds to understand! But last night, and for whatever reason, it just seemed really, really easy. And the sounds really are remarkable.

It's almost as if you get Reaktor and the EIC and you've got Reason and a whole lot more.

glu · Post by **glu** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 7:24 am

perhaps a little more apples to apples...

Reaktor Vs Nord G2rack...

?

G2rack is hardware though, so not quite an apple....

Lo-Fi Massahkah · Post by **Lo-Fi Massahkah** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 8:29 am

glu wrote:perhaps a little more apples to apples...

Reaktor Vs Nord G2rack...

?

G2rack is hardware though, so not quite an apple....

Hard one.

Clavia wins for the editor. It's so easy and quick to begin making patches. And I mean easy. Really easy...

Reaktor has got a bit more in it's bag of goodies and it's VST, so it blends right in with Live (or any other DAW). And I love not having any external sound sources (except my voice an a melodica) anymore... But it has a time consuming learning curve.

Tough call.

-M