I'm looking to expand my sound palette and enhance Logic's capabilities, and I was wondering if Reason 5 would be a good way to go. Do Logic and Reason work well together? Are there other softwares that would be a better combination? Thanks.

Hi Mory, Reason is a great way to expand your sound palette. You can use technology called "rewire" to sync Logic and Reason on the same machine - and essentially run them together. But, whether this is right for you depends very much on the type of music you are making. For orchestral, look at 3rd party samplers and plugins, while for electronica, Reason is a good bet... though still you might want to consider other 3rd party plugins first... again depends on the type of music and instrumentation you are looking for. :)

I think Melodyne is under rated as a complimentary DAW. I use it not just for timing, tuning and various specialties needed for working on tracks, but I have used it as my first place I do my tracking and make my project foundations. It can be used as a sound design tool as well and harnesses all of Logics EFX through the mixer plug ins. I will say Melodyne has a nice track color and display but over all, the GUI is totally bare bones and colorless. The mixer is almost to colorless for my taste, but less code, less drag on the CPU. This is one of the most comprehensive software products as DAW plug-ins and in my case, I have Melodyne Studio so I can do those things. The editor comes with it so your able to do both instantiate the editor in logic or use Rewire to get the Studio arrange page up and benefit form the super cool platform they have for handing audio much more like midi. Whenever I beat map, I do it in Melodyne. It's ability to manipulate time and pitch are what make it so valuable. I also find it is good for most any genre of music so a good choice to add on a multiple of levels.

I do mostly rock/pop/country/folk. Not much electronica. I've looked at Spectrasonics Atmosphere as well as a few others, some that Steve H used in one of the videos. One of the plusses about Reason, though, is that it is affordable for me right now. I have just over $300 to spend, and Reason looks like the only one that is in that price range. But is reason pretty much an electronica thing, or are there useful sounds for what I'm doing? Thanks for your help. I really appreciate it. M

Hi, in terms of rock/pop/country/folk - that's quite a broad spectrum... It might be helpful to look at this in a different way: 1. What is lacking in Logic studio for you? (e.g. realistic drums/choirs/orchestral/etc, etc.) 2. What instrumentation would you like more of? (If you want more synths and electronica sounds then Reason is a great place to go - if you're looking for excellent drums, then that's a whole new ball game!) Hope this helps Rounik

Thanks, yes, it does help.

OK. Let me know if you have any more questions... :) Rounik