Sharepiece 3/5: Making a Clonk Sound

Today I tried to export a sound from Reason 12. I have no idea how to create music with it, nor how to use its many synthesis and filtering modules. I had previously only used it to record podcasts in 2009.

The Goal

Make some kind of sound and save it!

⊕ show captionThe Reason 12 project which has a few MIDI notes scribbled into the sequencer.

I managed to use the MIDI Piano Roll to make a "clonk" noise out of a chord using the default patch for the "Parsec Synth" module. It was both frustrating and exhiliarting to see just how lost I was in the software, trying to intuit how to export a sound.

I had forgotten how time worked in Reason, but drew on old knowledge of timeline-based software like Adobe Premiere, Adobe Audition, and Macromedia Flash to puzzle it out. I managed to set a loop and export audio as the loop. I had to make the segment longer to handle the long decay of the sound so it wouldn't abruptly get cut off.

Sharepiece Evaluation!

The idea behing this Sharepiece Challenge is to pick something that helps get unstuck with one's creativity/productivity. It's an experiment to uncover what works for people and what does not. That said, there are just a few criteria: small scope, can see, can share.

Conformance to Sharepiece Spec

On the surface this may not seem like a sharepiece worth sharing, but not all sharepieces have to be impressive. The experience of pushing myself to make something was good. I had to butt my head up against a lot of unfamiliar things and try to find some path through to a "tangible, shareable result": an mp3 file that could be clicked. This is what slow progress looks like most of the time. Armed with the uncomfortable experience today, I can try a different approach tomorrow or decide that I should watch some tutorials or something because I have data I didn't have before.

I think it's important to share this kind of process to help normalize people's expectations, particularly between fellow creators.