What Does Reason Do?

You write the music; Reason performs it. You're the writer and producerReason is the orchestra, conductor, and control room all wrapped up in one package, ready for a performance. Reason performs your music, then captures the performance on your hard drive as an audio file. Not bad for one program.

How do I use Reason?

Although Reason can do a lot of complicated things, it's remarkably easy to use. A project in Reason never has to be more complicated than you want it to be: If you don't need a gizmo, just don't put it in and you never have to think about it! With Reason, these are your basic tasks:

1.	Set up a studio. Create your studio by loading it with gear, instruments, and effects. Hook it up any way you want or let Reason take care of all the cables for you.
2.	Start writing. Add as many instruments as you need, whenever you need them. If you get in over your head, use Reason's tools to help manage your hefty studio setups, keeping them simple so you can stay productive and inspired.
3.	Fine-tune everything and mix it. Reason gives you control over every mixing fader and instrument knob, then "conducts" and mixes the performance until everything sounds exactly the way you want it.
4.	"Master" your music (put the finishing touches on) for whatever format or production specs you're using.
5.	Save your music as an audio file that can be burned to CD.

Can I write my style of music in Reason?

Reason's synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers can be set up to compose any kind of music you wantfrom writing parts to mixing them, and saving your music to digital sound files that can be burned to CD. Reason is versatile enough to use for any music style, and ships with a huge library of sounds to use in your instruments, including an orchestral bank of more than 700 MB.

The back panel gives Reason's virtual instruments the flexibility of their hardware counterparts, because you can take any output and plug it into any input. This means you can hook things together any way you want. The drawbacks of hardware studioslike shorted-out connection cables, electrical interference, and crawling into crannies to follow a cable to its inputare things of the past. Reason makes studio configuration fast, painless, and reversible (just click Undo).

Reason's advantages

Digital music programs typically trade the hands-on control, configuration, and quality of studio hardware in favor of the micro-control, space-saving, and pricing advantages of software. But with Reason there is no trade-offyou keep the knobs, levers, and even the custom setup advantages of hardware.