It's Music Making Month on the Propellerheads web site. Head on over and you can view archives of tutorials and interviews. Great stuff.

Check out this blog post by Aaron Mahnke. In it, he talks about how he writes a novel. I thought the tips were just as applicable to writing music. I really like the idea of removing friction. If you have to launch 3 apps, plug a bunch of stuff in, and spend minutes configuring everything, many times you'll just say "forget it, what's on tv?" That's one of the reasons I like Reason - you have everything you need to get 'er done. You don't have to plug anything in or even turn anything - just open the lid of the laptop or wake your computer from sleep. In fact, Reason is always running on my laptop, just in case I have a random idea. 

With Reason 5, I like to use the on screen keyboard if I am out and about. It turns the keys of your laptop into a mini keyboard. It's not touch sensitive (obviously), and you really only get about 1 1/2 octaves, but it works in a pinch.

Another thing I like to do is always keep an acoustic guitar out, whether hanging on the wall or on a stand. Now, I am by no means an accomplished guitarist, but for some reason it's easy to walk by, pick it up and bang out a few chords if I have a spare minute or two. Sometimes, it will even spark a musical idea. 

Along the same lines, you can keep your ewi out of its case just lying on your desk ready to go for when inspiration strikes.

Do you have any tips for removing friction in your musical endeavors?

The Friday podcast from NPR's Planet Money team was about how musicians use the internet. In it, they profile musician Jonathan Coulton who is a guy you've probably never heard of, but he makes a ton of money making music. 

Listen to the podcast.

The internet has certainly helped me. Without it, I would never have met such engaging, talented people through this web site. 

Has the internet helped or hurt musicians? Let us know in the comments.

In this tutorial I thought I would talk about resampling in Reason. What's resampling? Well, it's taking a sound you like, which could be a synth sound or sampled sound, and  sampling it back into a Reason device.

Why would you want to do this? There are a number of reasons (no pun intended!). First, you may have a huge layer made of 10 or more devices with effects. This may use a lot of CPU when you play it. You could sample the whole thing, throw it into an NN-XT or even an NN19, play the one sample and save a lot of CPU.  Another reason would be to add breath control to a sound or device that has no breath control or CV inputs. I know we talked about how to route breath performance data to anywhere in the Reason rack, but there is at least one device that has no breath control or CV inputs - the ID8 device from Record.

To be fair, the ID8 was never intended as a replacement for the other synths or samplers. It is there for Record users who do not have Reason so they at least have something to play. Not only that, the sounds are REALLY good and fit very nice in a song. There are some surprisingly good sounds in here and the Record sound bank has a few combinators that use multiple ID8's to good effect. 

I wanted to add breath control to one of the combinators, so in order to do that, I sampled the combinator sounds via the live sampling feature in the NN-XT in Record 1.5/Reason 5. I was then able to add breath control to the NN-XT sound. 

Click 'Read More' to learn how to do it.

I'm messing around some more with the Bottle waveform on the Malstrom. This sound is not breathy, but clean. It has something of whistling sound to it, but also a vocal quality. It's still a light, airy sound.

I was inspired by the subtle sound of the blown bottles in Pat Metheny's Orchestrion, which you should definitely check out.