There’s a long road of learning ahead of beginning computer musicians and home studio engineers as they begin to merge what they’ve been taught about music and song structure with the way digital audio workstations handle those same things. When you’re playing music with yourself or even other musicians, you can change the tempo or time signature as you go, but it’s a little more complicated to get your computer to follow along. Here’s how to make sure it does in Reason 4.

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The ability to split and merge different sources of audio using the Spider Audio unit is useful indeed, but it’s the Spider CV unit that really allows users to explore new ideas and ways of manipulating sound. Let’s take a look at using this device to totally change the sound of our instrument devices.

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Being a musician seems glamorous to the outsider. The truth is, there is paperwork to be done and legal precautions to take, just like in any other business—whether you’re selling millions of tracks on iTunes every week, or you’re losing money.

Here are five forms and contracts that every musician needs; some you should have ready and printed, on hand around the office (or studio or bedroom…) and others aren’t used so frequently but you should have a document ready to be printed and put into use.

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Tucked away in the Reason device list is the Spider Audio Merger & Splitter, a small utility device that is infinitely useful to any Reason user. But it often lies dormant even when it could be useful, because very few users of the software actually know what the Spider Audio device does. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use this simple but powerful device.

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Reason’s Mixer is one of the most important devices in the software, but most home musicians don’t pay much attention to it. It’s simple enough to get your head around the basics of leveling devices with a bit of experimentation, but in this tutorial we’re going to go further into the breadth of features this essential and under-appreciated device offers.

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For many audio writers, the basics of production sometimes seem so trivial that they’re overlooked as topics for sites like Audiotuts+. A piece on setting up send/return effects has been a request of readers for a while now, and today I’ll teach you how to create — and use — this handy method of routing audio through effects processors.

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As a rocker at heart, I was never much interested in music theory. I picked it up as a matter of requirement throughout my education in bits and dribbles, though it seemed at the end of the day all I could do was read notes off a staff—a musical technology that’s not even really used in my genre.

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When you’re working with loops, particularly drum loops, to form the rhythmic basis of a composition, you often find yourself wishing you could do more to customize the track. Logic Pro 9 has a few tools that allow us to work with audio as if it were MIDI–such as the flex time features–but what about turning the audio into a MIDI-controlled sampler instrument track?

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When it comes to the role of the manager in the studio, the first question to ask is: should managers be in the studio at all?

At the end of the day, it depends on whether the artist is comfortable with their presence. Forgetting the manager’s professional role for a moment, an artist’s good performance in the studio depends on many factors and that includes whether they feel comfortable expressing their creativity in front of those certain individuals they’re with at the time. This is a personal matter, not a professional one.

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Until version 8, Pro Tools didn’t offer any effective comping tools to its users. Now, that’s changed, and you can throw out the old convoluted comping workflows and do it this (much easier) way.

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