We’ve shared several beatmaking video tutorials before. This video, though, by Zachary Bennoui Taibi explores the challenges and opportunities of blind beatmaking with Propellerhead Reason.
Taibi takes you through the steps of composing music with the free screen reader System Access and Propellerhead Reason 6 software by:
- Laying the foundation of your track by creating a chord progression for keyboard with the Reason Soul School Refill
- Adding percussion loops with Dr. Octo Rex Loop Player
- Tweaking your sounds with a Novation SLK MKII Automap controller
- Playing in drums with the free Reason Drum Kits 2.0 Refill
- Applying Compression with the M-Class Compressor to make sounds louder
- Playing a Guitar solo onto your composition using the NN-XT Advanced Sampler
- Creating and sampling sounds from scratch using the free audio editor Wavepad
- Applying Combinator effects presets
via BeatshopLabs
Like WHOAH.
Very impressive movie right there, awesome stuff. On both accounts; being a die hard Reason user myself I obviously like to see how Reason can fully manage in such an environment and despite its sometimes “difficult interface” still manages to produce good stuff “out of the box”. (in all honesty I discovered that quite a few weeks ago when I discovered that Reason is my gf number one “sound program” which she likes to use to play stuff using my keyboard).
But I also think its very impressive that this guy can find his way around Reason the way he does. Not to mention the “easy” part of being able to play the thing without being able to see what you’re doing (no offense).
For me this is yet more proof that Reason is all about music and sound making and has an interface which can truly be used by a wide variety of people.
This is awesome! His blindness doesn’t stop him at all, he’s a better piano player then I’ll ever be.
Impressive! This guy knows his way around the reason commands. i cant even remember where half the stuff he accessed is located with out a visual aid. This is a very impressive demonstration of a successful user interface that im sure the company has worked hard to establish. That text to speech app looks really cool too.
Hi I’m a blind user and I also have reason and I use with the jaws for windows screen reading software. I would like to make it more accessible but I’m not sure where to start because the jaws scripting language is very complicated to learn. I loved this video and thought that it was awesome. I don’t know much of the keyboard shortcuts since I’m primarly a Sonar user with the Jaws script package called CakeTalking from Dancing Dots. Awesome job!
Greg
You might want to contact Zachary via his YouTube page:
http://www.youtube.com/user/zmusicool
If other readers have suggestions, please leave them for Greg!
This guy is actually blind? This is incredible! I had a nasty eye infection (shingles) and found out if it had gotten worse I could have lost the eye. The thing that popped into my head was “Will I still be able to use Reason”? I know it sounds dumb but if I were blind I would not want to have to give up music (I do most of my song writing on Reason). This is seriously cool.
-Rick
Publisher, NashvilleBros.com
I am also a blind user I would like to download reason but th fre version can someone pleas help?