Logic 8 is out

Once you crack rewire, it's bum easy and makes soooooooooooo much difference.

Try rewiring reason into Live! GREAT combo.

Fascinating discussion here about different DAWs being the same, but being different. for rhythm programming.

So here's the question - what did the old garage guys use? At the time they seemed to use cubase on Atari and MPCs - because so many came from a soul / hiphop background, but I could never get a real fix on it.

rewire is audio only, reason's swing won't go into live.

here's a "secret" - use mpc swing at around 57% in the regroove mixer, on everything and make sure the bass notes line up with significant kick and snare hits. Ahhhhhh...

reason's sequencer really isn't that bad, just a bit kludgy. Forcing you to draw boxes before you can draw notes (I don't have a keyboard, so I draw everything in).

I'd be tempted to go for live rather than logic, easier to use, lets you DO much more stuff, and though it doesn't sound as good, I just don't think that matters.

Logic is very much Mac only now. Though benga still uses v5.5 on PC.

I've never used Sonar but it looks alright and I think Kid Kameleon uses it. Dunno what it's like for cracks - on PC most people use cubase + cracked plugins (which is a tempting prospect tbh).

Well... I use ableton as a great big sampler and route reason through it because you can't do it the other way round. Plus you can (and I really should do this more) record segments of beats, bass, melody and play them in Live DJ style, and you can get very good musical results that way.

And I have to say to my ears Live sounds very good when you render it out. Rewired tracks aren't being warped, so you don't have that sound degradation issue.

Plus, the tools it has really aren't bad. the 8-way eq is pretty good- I'm beginning to prefer it to Logic's - and the compressors from 7 onwards are OK, and they have a side chain input, which can be very useful. Though TBH I'm finding that I am taking off compression a lot of the time these days, you're better off balancing levels and changing sounds (or the octave of the notes) rather than trying to eq and compress things so they fit.

Above all, Live is FUN. Logic and Cubase promise much, but in the end, they aren't that much fun to use. And having fun means you make much better music, more quickly. But people say Sonar is fun too! And Loefah and Oris Jay absolutely swear by Logic and think that's fun. I'm actually going to buy Logic soon anyway - it's addictive enough for me to want a version that's stable (the crack that's out there is the very first v8 and is not that stable).

Download the demo of Live off the site and see what you think, it's bum easy to use. I think there's a demo of Sonar too.

It's easy. You make beats and bass etc in Reason, probably in little sections, 4 or 16 bars or whatever.

You take them into live and play back different bits as if you were mixing different records together.

It's much easier to program sections of music than it is to program whole arrangements. Almost anyone can make a decent 16 bar section without too much trouble. But stringing it all together in a way that's musically satisfying is much harder. However it's easier to do it well by bringing different bits in and out of the arrangement, doing it intuitively, dj style.