Current reading list:

Queen of Candesce, by Karl Schroeder The Neddiad, by Daniel Pinkwater Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter Gofun-go no Sekai, by Ryu Murakami 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

More music soon, I hope, when things stop getting in the way.

I think Propellerheads protest far too much about the usability problems with most DAWs. In fact, the interface for Record looks like a lot more clutter than I’m used to in Logic, as others have noted already. I used Reason for quite a while and liked it, but I did find its interface inflexible in some ways, notably its vertical tallness; with wider screens becoming the norm I often found myself wanting a double-width rack instead of just the single column. Record looks like a step backward in terms of clutter. For one thing, if its mixing desk is always that size it would drive me batshit. I barely use Logic’s mixer; I find myself tweaking levels, panning and effects by track rather than messing with multiple tracks at once.

The timestretching is useful, yes, but the comping feature (for putting together vocal takes etc.) doesn’t seem to me to be very different from the way that Logic does it.

And what this bullshit is about it not being a DAW, I have no idea. I can see the distinction they’re trying to make, but it amounts to little more than spin in the real world. It comes across as an attempt to avoid disadvantageous comparisons with competing products.

None of which goes to say that I wouldn’t give it and Reason a go again; in fact, I’d been dithering about upgrading to Reason 4 recently anyway, the ability to use effects like the Scream on audio, and the modular tricks you can do in Reason using Combinators and chained effects would also be interesting.

But the closed nature of the system turns me off somewhat. Having to run three applications (Record, Reason and Logic) just to use an AU plugin on one channel strikes me as utterly absurd. And I think by delaying the addition of audio recording to Reason for so long they may have talked themselves into over-egging it when they did add it.

I’ll gloss over the radio silence around these parts recently, if you don’t mind, since “normal service now resumes” posts are, for the most part, tedious. Suffice it to say that I’ve had a slightly difficult couple of weeks.

As for progress, I have one new song 99.5% written (I literally need to fix the tune for the last line) and am battling an unduly complex arrangement and trying to get the vocal right because the tune is, I now realise, incredibly hard to sing. This one’s called “Last trains,” alluded to previously.

I also have a polite little ditty called “Baby steps” that is written—I think—but may need the key bumping up a notch from the demo and a bit of arrangement work. This one, finally, is the “use all the old analogue gear” approach that I originally started out with; it’s mostly played on a Roland RS-09, SH-101, x0xb0x and MFB 503. I was listening to The Smiths again recently and thinking on the fact that some of their songs were better for not overextending a simple idea, so “Baby steps” is essentially two verses, a chorus and an outro. The “I think” above is because I can’t hear the outro in my head yet, and I want to have an idea before I start noodling away.

From next week things should assume a more level course, so the pace at which I’m able to finish and upload stuff should pick up rapidly. As will, no doubt, the twittering and tumbling and audiobooing. Bear with me.