Let’s be honest – days are dark in the wrong ways now. Here are some free Halloween sound packs and a software update for Reason to give you some inspiration – plus a pumpkin carving game, just because.
ReFill your Halloween spirit(s)
The folks at Prope–uaahhh Reason Studios (still have to catch myself) have a nice pair of user-created Reason ReFills, in the Halloween spirit. I love these downloads, in that they’re great motivation to help you start your own stuff. Poking around someone else’s ReFill is a bit like stopping by someone’s studio.
Free creepy Sound Packs for Halloween ?
Update your Reason for music making
As it happens, Reason Studios released a really cool update to their software lately. 11.3.4 is not a major update, but it fixes some important bugs (VST undo, Maschine), and it includes a bunch of stuff for Beat Map (for Reason / Reason Suite).
Beat Map is just spectacular, a unique way of navigating rhythms organically. And in these times when it can be hard to just get started or feel musically inspired, it’s exactly the tool you need. Plus this being Reason, you can quickly connect Beat Map to some unexpected instrument and get wild results. (Try it with some modular patches, for instance – ah, I love Complex-1 – or that Friction instrument, just to name the two things I’m entirely obsessed with. Or output MIDI to your DAW, or hardware. Various possibilities here… and it is way less depressing than getting stuck with a single x0x or one-bar loop, which is just what you need to make you forget what music is.)
Here’s how to get started with it:
What’s new in 11.3.4 is, Beat Map is significantly improved. There are new patches for devices and Combinator, and new maps – Arctic and Tharsis – for more variety.
Crucially, they’ve also added quick Reset Step buttons to 16, 32, and 64. That gives you the chance to rein in the wild patterns you’ve made and return to some sense of where the beat is.
There are a number of ways to use this performatively, and I find it’s also great to run Beat Map while you’re designing new kits or patches – might be worth revisiting.
See release notes, as Reason has seen loads of updates lately, especially as they support compatibility across a variety of OSes and plug-in formats.
https://www.reasonstudios.com/en/reason/updates/release-notes
And carve a pumpkin
I am a great believer in taking breaks. And as you know, I’m also a great believer in indie games, 3D environments and design, and online interactions.
What I’m trying to say here is, there’s this cute game that lets you carve your own pumpkins, and probably it’s a good way to take a few minutes off from trying to make your snare sound just so.
https://adamgryu.itch.io/pumpkin-carver
Obviously, if CDMers could get some kind of pumpkins carved, I’ll be glad to feature them so – hit me on Twitter @peterkirn / Instagram pkirn.
I’m sure we can make a pumpkin with the face of a TR-606. (Or, to be really scary in the Halloween spirit, a TR-606 clone that’s evil.)
Spotted via the fabulous Rock Paper Shotgun