Allthough I'm not BigRush with an excess of platina on my wall (I like to keep it simple hehe) I'll try answer some of your questions here. People tend to say that Reason sound too digital and has no feel to it. To counterweight this you would have to introduce some "degrading" to your music. See, back in the days when they had huge set ups with hardware synths, 3000 miles of cables and unpredictable drum machines it all sounded a bit more "human". I mean that in the sense that we're not perfect so the music wasn't either. A Great example is that for instance in Reason you play a substractor/Malstrøm saw waveform, you'd get excactly that...a saw waveform. But hardware solutions and old analog equipment had a certain wear and tear as well. This means that a saw waveform sort of had the "principles of a saw waveform" but it had anomalies (please correct my spelling hehe) to it as well. This is lacking in Reason, if you're just picking a patch and leave it at that. You've got to work more with the patches. Create minor "disfunctions", layer the synths, add some eq, some distortion, some compression, see what I'm getting at? Make it less than perfect, cause that's the way it all used to be.
Another thing worthy of concideration is that you should play things into reason with
a midiboard instead of "step sequencing" in all your individuall notes. What drummer these days always hit with a perfect timing? what piano player always hit the notes when they should? No one...so when computer music came along we overdid this just a tad, by "over quantising" our midi parts. This makes it all sound cold, neutral and...computerish...cause it's all perfect. If you don't have a midiboard you should concider to turn of the "snap" function in reason so that you'll get hits that atleast could be human. When it comes to doing this with the dr machine there's a few "rules of engagement" to this. First off, what's keeping the beat steady? The Kicks...they need to be as close to perfect as possible, as well goes for the snares. These to together creates a groove that has to be tight. but the other parts has room for tiny "errors", it's not even an error in the dr programming, I would say it's more of a personal feel and touch.
The Reason units.
I use different ones depending on what style I would want my music in. All though Bigrush and I don't see a 100% eye to eye on the upcoming subject it's all about personal touches and I don't respect him any less for it hehe Just kidding Big
EQ and compression. It's important to learn those, cause they will help you to render the best results from your track. BUT! It all depends as well. Let's say you want to make something modern stuff. Something that's gonna be blasted out the speakers to sound loud and full. Here you would probably compress every god damn thing you have in your track. I've used this technique on some beats. I compress everything from the kicks to the snares to the hihats to the....to the....just to milk her for all she got hehe Same thing goes for the bass and all the other elements. EQ...same thing...there's no point in having much bass in the higher register of the piano/violin etc etc.
To put it simple, old school techniques would involve NOT doing the things you can do to day, but simply set yourself back to days when they produced and then mimic their techniques. I don't want to say to much about this cause unlike alot of others I'm smart enough to keep my holy production secrets for myself hehe.
Final tip. You can't go wrong with a bit of compression over the whole mix. Not everybody would agree with me on that...but that's just a matter of opinion.
Be carefull though, cause in the hands of the ignorant it can F up the track and create some less than desirable "sucktion/pumping" effect.
Music or equipment made by humans isn't perfect, so therefor don't make it perfect. Make it close to perfect, but not superhuman. We're not driven by algorithms, so there's always gonna be less than perfect.
The rewire thing.
Not a bad option. I don't use it alot personally, I'd rather take it all in Cubase instead of splitting it up into 2 programs. Other than that I do use some VSTs in my production, just not in the way everybody else does hehe
I hope this was helpfull in some way.
-Nito
