Newbie on ReWire

logic-8.jpgOK, ReWire has been been around for ages. Fine. I get it, I’m a Johnny-Come-Lately. Whatever. This is both a rant and a rave.

RAVE: I’m using Logic 8 and Reason 4 together in a recent song for my yet-unnamed super secret music project. Overall, I am very happy with it. I have a set of badass patches that I have previously only been able to use within Reason. Specifically my fine-tuned custom drum patch that I use to make scratch tracks come alive.

So my process for drums would be, for example:

  1. Write out the drums in MIDI using my sequencer and facsimile drum samples.
  2. Export the MIDI.
  3. Import the MIDI into Reason.
  4. Rewrite some of the MIDI by hand to map rolls and accent beats to the appropriate keys
  5. Save the file to the project DIR.
  6. Export the audio from Reason
  7. Import the now-pimpy drum scratch back into the sequencer for instant badassery.

So in that respect, ReWire saves me a lot of hassle, especially if I jump the gun and do that whole process preemptively before the song is fully incubated.

Here is something ReWire fails me on:

RANT: I just want to be able to open a project and go. With ReWire, I have to open a project, then open the rewire application, then open the song file in the ReWire application, reset the tempo (because Reason is too dumb to remember that I keep telling it the correct tempo) and THEN go. Bit of a pain in my ass. But, because the drum samples I use within Reason are so spectacularly badass, I don’t want to reprogram them within Logic.

So.

I like ReWire, but I think it fell short of my hopeful mark. Is it impossible to send openapp, openfile, closeapp commands from the host application?

ALSO…

Maybe this is just something to do with my own lack of knowledge with Logic 8, but why can’t I use Logic’s sequencer to control Reason’s tracks? I have two sequencers going side-by-side… and while I love Reason’s MIDI sequencer, it makes more sense to me to have all my project data (audio and MIDI) housed in one sequencer.