🆒Music make you lose control

Happy Tuesday! This past week I dove down into audio stuff and just haven’t come back up. Most of what I’ve been researching has been tutorials, tips & tricks, and other little known facts for how to make cool sounds. I’m not going to post any tutorials but this is going to be heavily focused on audio things. But before all that, pour one out for Daft Punk🍺.

In this issue

🎛 My favorite DAW goes with subscriptions so I had to sign up.

🎹 The prosumer keyboard that I most recommend.

🌲 A website that lets you listen to forest sounds from all over the world.

Reason+

This is my DAW. There are many like it, but this one is mine. If you don’t know, a DAW stands for digital audio workstation. It’s a fancy word for a program that lets you record and edit sounds. I’ve used A LOT of DAWs over the years, but I’ve always loved the aesthetic of Reason. I know most people prefer Logic Pro, Fruity Loops, or Ableton which are all great and powerfull programs, but I always prefferred Reason.

The problem is that buying Reason has always been pretty pricey to own it. Then last week I saw that the company moved to a subscription model for $19/month with Reason+. Many Reason diehards hate this move for good reason, but it’s exactly what I wanted. Not only do I have my DAW of choice back on my computer but the subscription also gives you access to tons of sounds to play with. Let the fun begin.

Arturia Keystep

Sticking with production a bit, let me introduce you to my newest keyboard: the Arturia Keystep. In order to use a DAW like Reason, chances are you’re going to need a USB keyboard to play sounds. You can always use your computer keyboard to play music too but plugging in something like this makes it so much easier.

The real reason I got this particular model though is because it also seamlessly works with hardware synths over MIDI. I still haven’t figured out the setup to go completely DAWless (making music without a software program typically done by connecting multiple instruments together) but the Keystep is the first step to doing so. In the meantime though, it works perfectly with Reason which is all I need.

Tree.fm

This has been pretty heavy on home audio production, so if you really don’t care and just want to be more relaxed check out this cool site. Tree.fm is a chill website that lets you listen to recordings of different forests around the world. They pull the audio from Sounds of the Forest, which is another project where people submit their own recordings of forests.

Sounds of the Forest is fun to explore but Tree.fm lets you be really hands off since it randomly selects a forest every time you click next. Definitely check it out if you want to relax.