Blog 5

I'm kind of going to shoot from the hip on this one, but there's a bunch of different things I wanted to talk about.

Having spent the semester working with music production software, I was surprised with how well the different components work together. It appears that from the beginning, the designers of music production software have kept this point in mind. When it comes to the higher-end products such as Reason and Logic Pro, the ability to run them through other programs sound engines is a huge advantage in music production. In my opinion, Logic is a fantastic program that pays incredible attention to all aspects of music production, and includes an extremely powerful group of synthesizers and samplers with which to create a vast array of instruments. Yet, Reason contains another extremely good set of instruments and the ability to have access to all of these within Logic is an incredibly powerful tool.

What I'm most impressed with is the judgment on the side of the software designers to allow such inter-connectivity between programs for the sake of music production. Beyond the example I have given above, other examples abound; take for example the proliferation of .rex files or as far as inter-connectivity is once again concerned, the ability of programs like Logic and Reason to synchronize with Ableton Live, one of the premier live electronic tools.

On another and completely unrelated note, I also wanted to comment on how impressed I was with the discussion of the trip-hop genre. Trip-hop was one of the genres we covered this semester that I had never really heard (or at least realized I had heard), and I was especially drawn to the Massive Attack body of work. I was able to see how it had partially influenced a lot of the Ratatat I listen to now. I loved the dark feeling of tension building as typified by the song "Angel" and how the drum beats conveyed a feeling of their own.

--X