humanliteshow

Comments such as your's upset me. "Quality of the guitar" is only a small part of what shapes a guitar's tone. You need to do some reading of the links below and stop telling people they are uninformed and making gross generalizations and oversimplifications like you know better than them. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guitar/Anatomy_of_a_Guitar http://www.penmachine.com/musicpages/guitartone.html http://www.catalinaguitars.com/guitar_tone.html

You probably have all three notes selected. Try clicking on the background first, then adjusting the velocity.

What does "very MIDI-ish" mean??

That's exactly what I'm saying. If you want to know the components of a certain sound, like a pad or lead, you have all the tools you need to explore it. Open up Reason, make a Subtractor, call up a pad patch, and look at the settings. There are so many different waveforms used for so many different categories of sounds, it's impossible for us to just give you a general list. Now as far as shaping the sound and making it, for example, a pad, there are some basic starting points, like turn up the attack and release to give it a smooth build up and fade out. Or do the same with the filter envelope to get a long filter sweep as you hold down a note. For more iin depth insight for synths (far more than we could ever write here!) go here: http://www.soundonsound.com/articles/Technique.php?session=73a25d4ace59ccebb0149ae343f04f57 They have a ton of articles called Synth Secrets that get down and dirty into synthesis techniques.

OK, go back and read what I wrote above. YOU have to decide what sounds good in your songs. If you aren't familiar with the sounds, then this will be by trial and error until you are familiar enough with synths to know ahead of time what you want in a song. No one here can tell you what sounds best in what part of a song. How do you become more familiar with synths? USE THEM! Just make some music, man. Don't worry about getting everything perfect. It takes a ton of time and effort to make good music. There are no shortcuts to developing talent and skill.

Sometimes it's just a matter of scrolling through presets to get some inspiration. Sometimes I know what sound I want and since I've used Reason for a while, I can pretty much tell what instrument/settings will get me closest to that sound. In the beginning , really it's all about experimenting and just making music with Reason until it becomes second nature. Just have fun and you won't even notice you're learning!

It supports any keyboard that can send midi out messages.

You did assign the sequencer track to "Mixer 1", right?

If you're using Cubase, you can use ReWire to synch up Reason and Cubase, control Reason from midi tracks in Cubase, and stream the audio from Reason into audio tracks in Cubase. Read the manuals for Reason and Cubase to get it up and going.

Download this:http://www.peff.com/reason/download/rps/gatinns.zip. It's an example Reason file from Peff.com showing you how to do "gating", the term for what you're talking about.

Exactly, tossy. The filter box should be hooked up so the Redrum output is going thru it, then to the mixer. Then it's just a matter of automating the filter itself. You do have a legit version with a manual, right??

If it's the filter effects box that you're using, you have to create a new sequencer track and assign it to the filter, then record in that track. Your manual should tell you how to assign empty seq tracks to effects.

Either of those ideas would work fine. Another possibility is what I typically use. I found a copy of Recycle Lite, a version that lets you save as .rcy, which is good enough to load into the Dr Rex and individual slices into the various sample loading machines. It's not warez, it came with my Soundblaster along with Cubasis and WaveLab Lite. See if you can find a copy of that on the cheap or free.

Try running it through Malstrom's filters and shapers, too, just to see what kind of results you can get from that.

Directly above the tracks in the sequencer window should be a label saying "Out". That column of dropdown menus in each sequencer track has options for all the instruments you've created. If all you have are, say, three midi tracks and no instruments, create a Subtractor, for example, and use the Out menu to link the melody track to the Subtractor. Do the same for all the rest.