On Thursday, June 26th, current IAR students packed into a seminar delivered by Dana McCurdy, IAR instructor and electronic music specialist, covering some of the special features and advanced techniques available to the savvy “Power User” of music production software REASON. Developed by the Swedish company Propellerhead, REASON has become one of the most popular music production tools in the industry, and is a core part of IAR’s MIDI curriculum along with its companion protocol, REWIRE, which have quickly become industry standards.

Dana’s appearance was part of IAR’s “DIY” series of seminars on audio topics that are offered to our students in addition to the regular course work, and he returned to the DIY series by popular demand, to deliver a two-part seminar. In this one, Dana concentrated on techniques that will work with any version of REASON, including the simplified version known as “Reason Adapted.” Emphasizing some of the flexibility and hidden depths of this software, he showed students countless ways to customize and personalize their REASON grooves, using different modules including Redrum, Dr. Rex, NN-19, and Subtractor. Dana used Redrum to load custom sounds and showed students how to tweak those sounds by changing the pitch, length, and starting time. He encouraged students to record and import their own customized sounds and played samples of his own: a salad bowl, lamp shade, metal rack, and floor creaks. He then programmed in different rhythms and used the sounds to create a beat. Dana went on to demonstrate grooves and songs he had previously created to exemplify other creative techniques and tools such as automation, customizing REX grooves, original sound programming in Subtractor, and patching on REASON’s back panel to create unique rhythmic patterns with gates and low frequency oscillators (LFOs).

Coming soon, Part II of Dana’s DIY seminar will demonstrate some of the newer and more extensive features of Reason 4.0, the current “full” version we have been running in IAR’s MIDI labs.