The day was spent playing with Reason 7, Renoise and fixing some of my guitars. One of my 8 string guitars has a loose ground wire which makes it sound like radio static if I touch any of the strings, which is not very good for a string instrument.
Reason, Ableton Live and Pro-Tools are very good tools for recording music, though reason is missing a lot of features for working with live artists, and most of those tools that are available for live artists, are not available for reason because they do not support the most common plug-in architectures. Renoise is another tool for recording music, but is a lot different in that regard since you are working with these vertical tracks instead of the traditional horizontal ones you see in most recording software.
The main problem I have with writing music using these packages, is that they are not very good tools for that purpose. I am very comfortable playing the guitar, and can write music having a drummer just hammer out some beat and then lay something on top of it. But, you just end up with using the music itself as the source material, piecing together a whole from samples. This is good for creating demos, but creating large complicated pieces by endlessly looping them and listening to the same stuff for hours to adjust and author is a very backwards way of doing things, when composers had that problem solved centuries ago.
As a programmer, working from source is the best way to work.
I am looking at software such as Sibelius to actually write the music. But, will use Reason, Renoise or Ableton Live to record them when it is written. I used to love using Powertab when I was playing the guitar a lot, and I transcribed quite a few songs. Music notations are a lot more powerful than these matrix looking midi UI controls and do not tie you to a particular software. There is a language being lost by people not making the effort of learning basic music notations.
I will continue this adventure tomorrow, but tonight I intend to look at some Sibelius tutorials.
V 