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Reason's to be cheerful...?
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| atxbigballer1 |
Taken from http://www.propellerheads.se/
Liam Howlett of Prodigy explains why Reason, to him, is the best thing since
sliced bread.
by Fredrik Hagglund
Anyone who wasn't in a deep coma all through the 1990's would be hard
pressed not to remember Essex based dance outfit The Prodigy. They extracted
the pure essence of the rave scene, infused it with hefty doses of punk,
funk & skunk, wrapped it up and smuggled this package of unbridled club
energy into your living room in the guise of chart smashers like Out of
Space, Poison, Firestarter, Breathe and Smack My Bitch Up. But where are
they now? As it turns out, they're already on the approach for your speaker
membranes at 300 mph, dead set on making all the world's decibel meters blow
their fuses once more.
Rumblings from the Dirtchamber
We tune in as Liam Howlett, the sonic sculptor of the band, is busy crafting
the fourth Prodigy album in the depths of his studio dwelling The
Dirtchamber. It has indeed been a while since we last heard from them; 1997
saw the release of The Fat of the Land, but other than the orphan single
Baby's Got a Temper - released in the summer of 2002 - Prodigy have been
perplexingly quiet.
A six year hiatus, why?
- Well it wasn't a conscious decision or a plan, really; it just happened.
We knew there would be downtime after The Fat of the Land - we felt we had
reached the pinnacle of what Prodigy was, and I myself had my mind set on
taking a couple of years off. And then time just flew by, know what I mean?
About 2 years ago I started working again, but soon realized I needed to
shift myself out of the formula I'd gotten into from working in the same
environment all the time. I'd written everything in Cubase from 1993
onwards, with a bunch of hardware synths and Akai samplers as my main setup.
I sat down and I thought, "well... this is just so boring. How can I ever
get inspired doing the same old thing? How am I gonna write a fresh,
inspired album? I'm not enjoying it, it's not going anywhere, I hate my
studio, I hate all the equipment in it."
For a man with a hardware gear list the size of a small town phone
directory, that's a lot of equipment to hate. Liam's winding road through
the world of music making is one which many of his generation can relate to;
he started out with a simple 4-track portastudio and turntables in the 1980'
s, soon got into synthesizers, and eventually found himself using a Roland
W-30 workstation with a whopping 16 seconds worth of sampling time. The
entire first album, The Prodigy Experience, was created on just this one
keyboard. As the royalties started rolling in, so did the gear - and soon
enough Liam found himself immersed in a machine park with enough electronics
to fill a space cruiser. But, as anyone who's been-there-done-that will
know, that can be more of a curse than a blessing.
What got you back on track again?
- I bought myself a laptop, which completely reanimated my creative process
because I was able to write anywhere I went. At one point someone told me to
check out this program Reason, "it's really back to basics, you should check
it out just for fun, you know?" So I did - I started out just writing beats
on it and approached it in a sort of recreational sense, like you would a
computer game. Then I'd go off somewhere like Scotland or New York and I'd
take my laptop with me, with all my samples on the hard drive... and then it
all just started happening. Reason was just like... it totally refreshed me,
it was just amazing. It was like going back to how it was in the beginning.
All of a sudden I was writing two or three songs a week, just messing around
and having a laff again. I started something with it and got it rocking in
ten minutes. That took a lot of pressure off of me. So, to summarize: What
got me back on track was A) the laptop, and B) a program that let me feel I'
ve gone back and taken all the complication out of writing music.
A lot of people feel that way; Reason is like a lifesaver for the bored
gearhead musician. You?
- Yeah, I couldn't live without it. If Reason hadn't come along I would
probably still be in my studio, depressed, going "aww bloody 'ell, don't
know what I'm gonna do", you know? I don't want to pat Propellerhead on the
back too much, but... Reason has literally changed my life, getting me back
in the studio and enjoying it all again. It's taken the monotony out of
music making and put it into a format where music should be these days - no
big deal, just something that should be fun to do. Creation is always
painful, but this is the least painful way I know of.
What do you think it was in the old days that ultimately sucked the life out
of creativity?
- It was all so time consuming back then, we were all bogged down in
cumbersome processes. I'm not very technical - I come from a hip hop sort of
cut-and-paste background and I'm not this big studio guy, it's just all in
my head. The technology available now frees the mind in the creative sense;
I'm able to think about the actual song a lot more, rather than just going
"it's gonna take me an hour to do this or that". Music for me these days is
quite punk rock, it's very DIY, very throwaway. I know I'm not creating
something that's gonna be around forever. For me and for Prodigy it's all
about the quick punch in the face, you know?
So, Reason is pretty much the meat of the sound on the new album?
- Literally everything you'll hear on the new album has been written on
Reason. Everything starts there. Eventually we get to a stage where the song
is written, and then we - that's my producer Neil McClennan and I - move it
into 'Tools where we finish off everything, and that works great since
Reason integrates with ProTools really well. Everything that comes out of
Reason sounds really good, it's got this sound, I think - a kind of
certain... everything sounds like it "locks in" really good, you know? And
that sound we got out of Reason is something that we now and again had to go
back to Reason to duplicate; sometimes we'd do a thing in ProTools and it
just didn't rock it like Reason did, so we'd take it out of ProTools and try
to duplicate it in Reason instead.
What are your favorite Reason devices?
- That would have to be the drum machine and the Dr. REX. I use the REX
player all over the place and I just love the way you can mess around with a
loop, and I love the way you can sync the LFO to tempo and route it to the
filter, we use that on the album a lot. As for the effects, the Scream 4
unit is just the best thing for the type of music I'm writing. Definitely
the high point of version 2.5 for me. The tape distortion is very good for
bass, to give it the edge, it's warm...
What, specifically, don't you use Reason for?
- When it comes to bass sounds, I'm pure analog and I don't use soft synths
for bass at all. There's just no substitute for analog. Instead, I'll take
an Oberheim, Moog, Korg MS-20 or something, sample a sequence of it playing,
rex it up and then bring that back in Reason and lock it in there. I do
occasionally use the softsynths to put melodies down - I'd say maybe 50% of
the synths, the top line and high end stuff, is Reason. I can't as of yet
use it for everything - obviously you can't record vocals into it - but
ultimately, what Reason does have by way of limitations is also one of its
strong points. It forces your imagination to be more on the board, you have
to dig it out of your head rather than just going "well, I just can't do
that in there". I never saw it that way, I mean if something you want to do
is completely off limits then just use another program, no big deal.
Liam has a wish list for things he'd like to see in future versions of
Reason. One would be the ability to automap non-tonal samples to individual
key zones in the NN-XT, for creating drum maps on the fly.
- My end note on Reason is, it's got this humour about it, it's like - when
somebody showed it to me the first time and said "you can keep on building
the rack up..." I was all, "what rack, what're you on about?" I couldn't
believe it, it was just such a simple and genius idea. It's so obvious now,
isn't it? Love it.
The new Prodigy album "Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned" is slated for a
spring/summer 2004 release. |
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| Looney4Clooney |
| way to be on the edge. |
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| Juan Paulino |
| i;m not reading all that |
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| atxbigballer1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
way to be on the edge. |
Of your bad side?
I just think it's good reading for the Production Studio forum.
Hell it's about the Prodigy. |
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| Looney4Clooney |
From 2004.
Album mixed in protools FYI |
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| atxbigballer1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
From 2004.
Album mixed in protocols FYI |
Yep It's old.
I just want it to share this article. |
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| mistermerlin |
| quote: | Originally posted by Juan Paulino
i;m not reading all that |
I read 10 sentences, reason sucks. |
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| derail |
| quote: | Originally posted by atxbigballer1
Yep It's old.
I just want it to share this article. |
Really really old, I remember reading this so many years ago, and remember him way backtracking from endorsing Reason a bit later - he basically called it a decent scratch pad, but never mixed an album on it. It seemed he resented the attention his comments caused, probably wishes he never opened his mouth. |
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| clay |
| i remember reading this in a random magazine when i was stuck at an airport around 2006 i think. he later claims he had to replace all the instruments with hardware in order to get the powerfull sound he like, so actually he just used Reason for a short amount of time for some brainstorming, not to mention its the badest album he ever released. He later turned to Ableton, especially for its live ability. |
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| MSZ |
It takes many many years to get great at reason. The modularity, cohesion and hardware emulation is pretty unparalleled, maybe not now, but for such a long time. It is also very satisfying -- which is why he probably wrote this partially. I have 2 friends that are absolutely ridiculous in reason, think Noisia. The skill they have is outstanding though.
Some of the great handy plugins of today were not doubt inspired by the system. I know Steve Duda is very fond of it im sure. |
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| Evolve140 |
| Sounds like OP trying to make himself feel better about using Reason. Well, there are other "reasons" than this one, that's for sure, if that's what you're looking for. |
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