Inside The Music In The Club With Reason
I get a lot of questions about how I’m using Reason to DJ. Some people assume that I’m somehow synching the two laptops together.
Question:I know that you can sync analog gear with midi. Creating a master and a slave. What I want to know is if the same can be done with 2 seperate computers both running Reason. I know you are djing with Reason, so if anyone should know I figured it would be you. My purpose is for live perfomace and am asking for help in this quest of knowledge. Thank you for any help you can give.
Answer:Reason can only slave. I spent the last part of the 80’s trying to sync midi with roland din, cv and gate to midi….. that’s only part of what a musician does – thats for tool operators. By just synching the machines you’re not switched on to what’s going on. You can’t always let the machine make the music for you. With the machines and software becoming more DJ friendly I can hear it in most music when I go out – everything seems to be auto synched. For instance take a Moog – it was not made for a DJ. It didn’t come with preset sounds for you to loop and had no synch buttons you could just switch on. You can synch certain elements but you had to do a lot more thinking in the configuration of things. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that some of the latest synths are basically DJ friendly but it seems like the personality in programming seems to be very rare. It would be nice to distinguish a DJ / programmer by his character sound. I would love to hear someone with their own character sound.
What I’m doing is DJing between the two laptops using my ear. Nothing is synched between the two laptops but the difference with traditional DJing is I am able to go inside the track and manipulate it from the inside out on the fly. Meaning if I feel at any moment that the bass drum needs a big reverb on it or I need to tweak the bassline that is exactly what happens right there and then. Also if I need to filter samples, add another bit of rhythm or break something down just to a single b-line. Basically everything I have learnt over the past 20 years now I don’t have to commit to a vinyl, I can do it there and then (to use a 50 cent catch phrase) “in da club”. If i was to sync the laptops it would not feel like djing for me and takes the creativity out of it for me. I get a kick out of being on the beat without the aid of the machine. It’s like the satisfaction you get from scratch mixing records – it’s theraputic to BE the music.I hope you don’t think I’m dictating to you in any way. I used to get a kick out of synching all the Roland stuff together….
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