Ableton Forum

and why do you use both? i keep hearing about reason but don't understand what it does that live dosen't and why use both, thanx in advance

Reason is great.
But its also shite.


Seriously though its good, when rewired into live, you can use its synths, the samplers and the drum machines... got alot of great stuff. But standalone is (the only way i can describe it) feels.. empty .

But i have had good experiences with it Rewired!

I think it is a good tool to rewire as well. Its GUI are clumsy and take up too much processor speed.. but

The NNXT sampler is very good. A decent alternative to Live's Sampler.

The Maelstrom is a great Synth. Not as good as Sampler or Operator, but good.

Dr.Rex (Rex player) Is OKAY. Live kind of made it obsolete.

The Mastering Suite is amazing.*

The Compressor is REALLY good, and has Sidechaining.*

The Scream Distortion plugin is really good.*

The Big reverb unit (Forget its name) is nice too.*

Everything else about it is sub-par nowadays. (* Allas, reason does not have Auio input, so all these nice plugins are mostly moot when used with Rewire).

I use Reason Rewired for the NNXT. I don't want to spend $200 to get the Sampler, when I have a decent alternative.

Reason makes a great instrument rack when ReWired. It's also a great scratchpad for coming up with arrangements quickly; I use Reason a lot that way.

totalvo wrote:Its GUI are clumsy and take up too much processor speed.. but

What processor hit? Most Reason songs (including all the factory demo songs) use less than 10% CPU here...

ew

Reason is great but it can be a CPU hog when running it with live and the fact that it can't be used as a VST/ AU is annoying as hell. That's actually the reason I went with NI plug ins cuz I got sick of saving 2 files for one song (1 reason; 1 live) and then constantly shooting back and forth between them (unless you have 2 monitors it's pretty annoying).

.02

I use Reason 2.5 and Live. Very good combination.

Reason is great because it has a whole bunch of sounds (2 synths, plus NNXT/NN19 and the soundbanks with useable, if not top of the line pianos, eps, strings, woodwinds etc), plus it can handle REX files which Live cannot. Also redrum which is a useful drum machine with a greater variety of sounds compared to the built in samples for Impulse.

Live doesn't come with inbuilt synths and stuff, the EIC helps a bit but otherwise you have to get 3rd party vstis.

I rewire it to Live and/or Cubase usually, or export audio files and reimport them. I don't need find a big need to run it as a VST given this.

You could of course go out and get 3rd party drum vstis and vsti synths but Reason gives you a lot for the money and the new Reason 4 is looking tasty and even the sequencer is not looking as crap in the screenshots, plus Thor is looking like an awesome synth.

I don't use Reason as much these days as 2 or 3 years ago (have so many synth vstis and tend to prefer Impulse for knocking out some quick rhythms in spite of it's limitations) but it's still a useful tool. Although I never compose solely using it because of the inflexibility of the sequencer and the fairly poor GUI.

Also, Reason by itself is waaaay less CPU intensive than Live, I can run it at 64 samples latency in my soundcard, Live struggles at 128. Rewiring is CPU intensive *2 programs running simultaneously) but so is running a bunch of vstis unless you're going to freeze tracks afterwards.

I have old Reason projects with 40 tracks and fx that run at less than 30% CPU, even if I froze vsti tracks in Live that would be seriously pushing for max on the CPU (and generates GB of temporary files for freeze). Reason has some advantages over Live but it's hard to truly love it because of the horrendous GUI and poor sequencer implementation. Live6 gets the gig as lead performer for composing because of session view and all the on the fly and realtime tricks, plus racks etc.