Reason user: an introduction

The Reason user series of articles carries on. The name pretty much says it all; every now and then, we will interview people who we think use our products to do cool things. Hopefully, their experiences, ideas and methods will inspire and enthuse you. A list of all published Reason user interviews can be found at the bottom of the page.

Reason user: DJDM

The truth behind DJ Drunken Master

by Marsha Vdovin

Our user stories are beginning to become popular. I am going to have to come up with trickier questions. This month candidate is another user that is very popular on the boards. So now you are about to find out all about DJ Drunken Master, perhaps more than you'd like to know (grin).

Where does the name DJ Drunken Master come from?

The name DJ Drunken Master came from a couple of unlikely places. I was working in radio back in 2001 as the co-producer of a nationally syndicated country music radio show. As the producer I was in charge of various things including setting up and playing the music. Hence 'DJ' stands for the more traditional Disk Jockey. So unless people want to count a friends wedding that I DJ'd in 1998 I am not now nor have I ever been a DJ in the club spinning sense of the word. 'Drunken Master' came from a love of Jackie Chan movies that my girlfriend and I share. My all time favorite Jackie Chan movie is The Legend of Drunken Master that had just been released on DVD earlier that year so the name was floating around. One night after a drink she said something like 'you're being such a drunken master'. Exactly how the 'DJ' moniker got stuck in front of that title is a bit of a mystery but shortly after that 'DJ' got stuck on 'Drunken Master' and the two have been wedged together ever since. I think you'd have to ask the bartender at the club for the specifics if you catch my drift.

How long have you been making music on Computers?

I composed my first music on a Commodore 64 in the late 70s early 80s. It used a program called Composer that was really unappealing. It basically had two flavors of 'beep' and I think you could do sustained notes. My parents had found out that I was interested in electronic music and were trying to help me with some tools. I do have to give them credit for trying!

How did you get started?

I started out as a musician playing classical trumpet from the time I was about 10 in 1978. I was in orchestra/band in school and was taking private lessons from the time I started till I was in about the second year of High School. When I was about 11 I happened to hear Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene (PartIV) in a movie theater before the feature and was so excited that I rushed out and asked one of the ushers who it was. He told me and I went out and bought the album that day. I was hooked. I started to get into mostly Jarre, Tangerine Dream and some other artists by trial and error. I would go to the 'Electronic Music' section of Tower Records and just buy stuff. I discovered a lot of interesting music that way. Mark Isham, Vangelis, Morton Subotnick, Wendy Carlos, Larry Fast and later (once I had embraced pop music) Thomas Dolby, Devo, Flock of Seagulls etc. I was also dabbling on piano a lot during that time. We had a beat up grand piano for a while at the house but that went away eventually and I started bugging people at school by just going to the music rooms and playing until I had taught myself the basics. Eventually I got to where I had a system of working on parts and writing my own music. I just sort of gravitated towards composing. As for synthesis? I bought my first actual synthesizer when I was 16. It was a Juno 106 and it cost me all the money I had saved that year doing odd jobs. I loved playing that thing for hours and hours. I still have it and I will never let it go willingly.

My first experience with serious computer based audio was in 1997 when I was working on a remix for a song called Nocturnal by my old band Meat Distributors. The engineer Eddy Sams was using a Windows machine and we would lift tracks from my ADATs and transfer them to his computer (he was running Cubasis if I recall) and to an additional sampler. I loved working on that mix! I eventually developed my own DAW in 2001 when I bought Reason 1.0 and Cubase. After a little time learning about latency and computers for audio I had my Windows 2000 machine cranking out material. I had almost no trouble working with Reason's interface as it used the same paradigm, as my rack in the basement and most if not all of the equipment in the Reason setup was parallel to the hardware in my studio.

Do you think that working in the computer enhances or inhibits your creativity?

Enhances! For me computers do this by minimizing the time technical processes required to make and record music. In my hardware studio there were lots of labor intensive jobs like managing files, finding loop points, plugging in gear, checking wiring etc. To me setting up audio files on samplers and creating sounds on my synths for tracks in a traditional hardware environment was extremely time consuming and not always very inspiring as compared to the actual playing or mixing. Now the way I am able to manage new samples, sounds and loops quickly in Reason and ReCycle as well as create new outboard gear and devices without stopping for twenty minutes to hook it up is undeniably the single greatest benefit the software revolution has brought to my work flow.

My favorite thing of all is 'Ctrl - S'. I know it's simple but it totally rocks! I can set up an entire studio, simply hit 'save' and walk away. Instead of the old protocol of spending hours writing down settings and then, later, having to listen to my existing recordings in an effort to level match them. I can recall and manipulate an entire Reason rack in seconds, which leaves me a vast amount of time to face the muse instead of deadheading into some exploratory configuration that may or may not work out in hardware world. Now if I have an idea I can implement it in seconds and if it doesn't sound right I can hit 'Ctrl - Z'. That's utterly fantastic if you think about it.

Do you make a living making music?

I do. For better or for worse I am a full-time freelance composer and occasional producer/audio guy. Much of my work comes in the form of backgrounds and beds for various media projects. I also subsidize by picking odd jobs doing general audio and I have been lucky enough to work on a few indie film projects as well.

How do you get started working on a song?

If I know what I want before I go into it (as in the case of a track for a client that has some ideas at the get go) I tend to think it through a bit at the beginning. What sounds and what instruments would work best for said track? Then I just start noodling away on my controller keyboard with the various sounds and instruments I have selected for the arrangement.

If I am working on my own with no outside influences there are several starting points I tend to work from: 1) I will often sit down with a piano sound or pads and work up some basic ideas that I then arrange around that. 2) I will go in with a preconceived notion about what kind of track I want to compose and I will work towards that. 3) Some tracks start with sound design. I will be messing around with a Subtractor or a Malström or something and I will come up with a really cool effect or sound or combination of elements for a sound and start working up a track around that.

The fastest and most efficient of these seems to be path #2. Knowing roughly where I want a track to go is a big helper. On the other hand starting points #1 and #3 are always getting me into trouble. I will get carried away with a piano part that I have to then take a lot of time playing all of the supporting instruments around. Since I subscribe to the notion that elaborate mixes are better (god help me) this can be a very involved process. Or I will work up an effect that is so elaborate or odd that it becomes difficult to get it to play nice or be functional in a fleshed out arrangement. But the big advantage to these two strategies is that sometimes I come up with more inspired material than if I had approached it from a more focused perspective and it's always a challenge to head off into the unknown.

Then there are the tracks that just flow out. Sometimes I don't know what I am going to do when I sit down but I load up some modules and away I go. I have written songs in as little as three hours this way whereas other tracks in a similar vein have taken days to fully realize.

Most often it's the arranging and mixing that take the majority of time. A couple of examples:

Selena Walks is a track that took a very short time to write and complete. Despite there being quite a few string parts working independently they are arranged in a fairly simple way. There are no rhythm parts to worry about and the sound selections are pretty typical string ensemble setups that I use a lot.

Then there are tracks like Chopper Pumps that take days to fully come together. "Chopper" has a much simpler musical structure but the arrangement and configuration are far more grandiose. I put a handful of long days into that one.

What are your favorite Reason Modules?

The Malström: It does things on an audio level that just blow me away every time I sit down and work with it. That and I created some of the stock presets for it, which is still exciting to me.

Matrix: The tool that allows me to do things in a way that I may not have considered by just moving some cv cables around and messing with some visual tools.

The Subtractor: It's a classic and was the first thing that made me want to get Reason. Its interface is similar to but better laid out than my old trusty MKS-80. And it has always been the secret weapon in the Reason rack for getting the best bass sounds.

What are your favorite Reason effects?

RV7000: My god that thing sounds good!

Scream 4: So addictive that you can't really stop using it on everything. It has been known to get me into some fascinating audio messes.

CF-101: The other secret to amazing bass, some weird effects and super fat synths.

Do you program patches from scratch or mostly modify pre-sets?

It varies. I do tend to create a lot of my own patches but I have no compunction about grabbing a sound that falls into the range or category that suits the song I am working on and manipulating it. So, a little of both. It also depends on what kind of time I have. If I need to kick something out in a hurry there may be a few presets in it but overall I tend to manipulate almost everything in a given track to the point where they are not really recognizable any more.

Do you do much 'back panel' re-patching for CV filter mods, FX triggering, etc.? Do you have any special tricks to share?

I'm very fond of automating the devices to get evolving, strange and or really unusual results. By that I mean I will play the various knobs on a reverb or any one of the various other effects to create linear sound treatments. One example is this whacked out mod from my track Mr. Pieces that was written in 2001 on Reason 1. It uses a CF-101, a COMP-01, a DDL-1 and a Matrix pattern sequencer along with some mouse tracking and a little (vast) reverb to really mess with one of the stock rex loops from the Factory Sound Bank.

Since you do most of your work via Reason/DAW...do you archive your 'sessions' (program set-ups) so you can supply/offer 'modified' custom versions if necessary? (i.e.: tempo change, re-orchestration/voicing, hit point adjustment/re-sync, etc..)?

I archive everything! This comes in handy if the track needs alteration in some form or another. And the Reason files are so small that it hardly takes up any room on my drives. The most common request that usually sends me to the archive revolves around getting rid of some element or another that is clashing with the end mix in some form of media project. Vocal type parts or samples tend to be the major culprits on that count.

Do you have pre-made templates for Reason for different genres, approaches - as kind of style specific starter sketchpads or do you approach most from (empty) scratch??

I do have a standard template that opens as my basicsetup.rns file but it is not genre specific. It just has a set of effects that I use a lot (reverb, delay and chorus) as well as three mixers. The first mixer is dedicated to Dr:Rex players, the second to ReDrums and the last to all of the various synths. This does get blurred a bit but I try to stick to it as it makes finding things months later (for the aforementioned alterations) quite a bit faster.

Do you tend to use (print) the Reason FX? Or do you usually process the mix via your Master program?

I do print the FX. I used to use some of the VST effects in Cubase but with the updates in 2.5 it's just not necessary anymore. That being said I do 'finalize' my mixes in Sound Forge, as I don't think the Reason environment is really set up for mastering type applications.

So you don't have any tuning / sync problems when running (especially samplers) in Reason at 48k for media work? Or do you still work at 44.1K and then up sample the exported mix??

I use Vegas Video for media applications but since Vegas doesn't support ReWire implementation yet my workaround is to connect it to Reason via MIDI. This is not optimal but it works pretty well and I don't have any tuning issues but there is drift with this treatment. The drift is substantial enough with this process that it really only gives me some guidelines that I then take back to Reason without Vegas running and flesh out in more detail. That is unless the video material does not call for tight time dependency in the music. When that is the case I run Reason full through and just export the audio at the end of the writing process. The final process from either instance is 48k outputs from Reason that I import into Vegas and nudge until they fit. Any position fine-tuning is done in Vegas or in combination with Sound Forge. And all of the dialog and other audio elements that come from the shoot/production are run from Vegas.

Do you work in (or mix to) 24bit for media work?

In my own studio I usually output 24 bit 48K wav or aif files for placement that I then dither down at the very end of the production. This is just in case there is some dickering that has to happen as the files are being placed.

Do you usually supply separate stems? (for remix options on the Mixing stage)

Not for the finished work I send out. Part of the problem is that my tracks tend to be composed of a multitude of samples, synths and various FX configurations that are pretty highly integrated and that are a little non-standard in form and function. This results in a situation where a client can't just say 'take out the guitar solo' or 'turn up the strings' as there may be four or five elements working in conjunction to create an overall sound that bears little or no relation to any traditional instrument set. Or they are so layered that pulling one thing down would take other things with it that the engineer did not intend to loose in the mix. Usually if a client wants a variation of the mix of a track then I am asked to create it and send it. That is not to say that I would not create stems if the situation or a client called for it but up till now it has just been easier for everyone to let me handle the mixes.

Ever supply surround stems?

Not yet.

Can you go into detail about production and process start to finish on a track?

Here Be Tigers is a track I wrote back in 2002 that can currently be found in The Matrix Reloaded DVD that came out this past March in the bonus materials. It is in an Easter egg so you will have to look for a bit but it's there.

It was originally the track that I did for Andrew Rothman's (Drew) 'Reason Challenge' here on the Props board back in 2002.

These were the stock patches and there were no other Refills or patches allowed:

1 ReDrum - Dublab BrushKit3

1 DR Rex - Drb_25_64th_170_eLab.rx2

1 NN-XT - Rhodes+Angels

1 NN-19 - KalimbaWood

1 Malström - Screaming Wheel

1 Subtractor – ResonBass

Drew's rules allowed you to mod the output sound pretty much as you wished but you had to use the basic patches. You could also use as many effects as you liked. It was fun having to work with a limited pallet instead of the unlimited instances you can create with Reason without restrictions.

The process

I started by loading up all of the sounds into my standard rack, which at the time always consisted of a mixer and a set of outboard effects plugged into the mixer. The effects were a delay set to about 80 MS with a setting of 1 on the feedback with the output over to full 'wet' chained to a Reverb that had one of the large halls on it. That turned up in more of my tracks than any other device combination until the RV7000 came out. Now I use that instead but I employ the same principles. I like a bit of predelay on a nice big reverb setting that I can tap into for a little or a lot of ambience when I need it. The predelay keeps the reverb from becoming too connected to the sound and causing an audio bottleneck.

The song and manipulations

I decided that I wanted to do a drum 'n bass treatment. First I created a very simple part with the KalimbaWood sound on the NN-19. I think that everyone had figured that it would be the hardest thing to place in a track because... well... it's a Kalimba sound. They are not known for their usefulness in most arrangements. I figured if I got that sorted then the rest would be a bit easier to work into. I came up with a simple part that was not sequenced in time with the track and then quantized it to 16th arbitrarily. Messed with the envelop filters, AMP attack times and what not on the NN-19 until it had a 'metallic with a little crystal' sounding quality. Added some compression, rolled off the low-end with a parametric and added delay. Voila! It was haunting and interesting. Not bad.

Then came the bass line on the Subtractor, which I pretty much worked up in under a minute. I figured that I would change it up later but later never came and the bass line stayed. It is a really simple but it works very well for the track. In fact while the whole song was very simple on a musical level to me this process was more about having fun with the sounds than writing an elaborate track.

Next I worked on the Malström and that was pretty easy. I copied the bass line over and added a compressor plus a Phaser. Now the PH-90 gets knocked a lot but it really kicks big ass in my humble opinion. I still use it quite a bit but the key is to use it very sparingly. You can't just hook it up and walk away. It needs a bit of massaging, as it is pretty powerful. Particularly on it's stock setting. Spend a little time with it and it shines. Next a little delay panned to the right and some mixer pan to the left and there you have it.

Up till then I had the stock rex loop as the only drum part playing in the background. So I needed more drums. I was not deterred by the fact that the only drum sounds besides the rex loop were a ReDrum brush kit with a weak bass drum. So I started in at half speed on my controller keyboard playing along with the kit in multiple takes. Then the bass drum would not do at all, too thin and small. So I started to mess with some EQ that boosted the low-end dramatically. But while it was fatter it still a little short so I did what I consider the coolest manipulation in this set up: I added a DDL-1 set to 1 ms and added feedback until it was fuller and had a longer decay. Then from there to compression. The overall drums (minus the bass drum) at output are compressed a bit as well.

I then played a couple of slices from the rex loop and kept that in as an additional set of drum noise.

The last thing I did was use the Rhodes+Angels patch on the NNXT. I had learned a long time ago from my old music partner Dan Dale that choir sounds actually make pretty good distortion subjects and I wanted the Cocteau Twins to come in on guitar and give the whole thing a My Bloody Valentine treatment. The chain wound up including two compressors, two distortions, a delay and two choruses with one EQ set up to roll off the grit that was happening once the choir ran through all of that and another that was 'played' to get a low pass roll up effect as the song progressed.

The last thing to be added was the ECF-42 at the top of the rack. I wanted a cool low pass filter effect to take over the entire track and then have it smoothly work back out so I designed some settings that were sort of all or nothing frequency roll off and I moused the 'frequency' knob while recording.

I still like listening to this track loud.

How about some details on your National Geographic piece?

This gig came in through my composers collective and I think the most interesting thing for me about this job is that one track in particular always seemed like a National Geo piece! As I worked on We have Begun Our Descent, which started out as a simple excursion into funk and world styles, I began to think of all of the great music from the National Geographic specials and the image never left my mind. Obviously it's just dumb luck that the production team working on the special contacted us but you still begin to think of providence when something like this happens. And while I always liked the song I'm just sort of amazed that it will be used in a way I had approximately envisioned while working on it. We Have... was created exclusively in Reason 2.5 with some finalization in Sound Forge.

What advice can you offer to aspiring musician who wants to make a living in the music business?

Learn all you can, work as hard/smart as you can and be a little flexible except when it comes to your vision. Try your best not to compromise that. I can also say get out and find somewhere to apply your vision. I have benefited greatly by venturing into things which at the time I thought would have no direct impact on my career but turned out to be quite useful as experiences in the long run. But the best advice I can give anyone is to see the movie Rushmore. Then strive to be Max Fischer. ;-)

Songs featured in this interview

Selena Walks

Chopper Pumps

Mr. Pieces

Here Be Tigers

We have Begun Our Descent