uh-oh. LAPTOP.

On one hand, sacking my band and replacing them with the shiny silver box was the best decision that I ever made. On the other hand, it's been a different kind of hell.

However, I was dealing with a live bassist, drummer and keyboardist, not a huge setup of equipment.

Laptops are much easier to carry, to set-up, and, so long as you don't overload the sequence beyond your laptop's memory capability, Reason is fairly stable. Laptops, in my experience, don't break down any more or less than, say, vintage guitar amps and weird pedals. However, when they *do* break down, it tends to be more catastrophic, as you can limp through the rest of a gig with borrowed gear or minus one pedal, but if your laptop goes, you're fucked.

As K8 sez, redundancy is a mighty issue here. If one of my keyboards craps out we can still play ok. If I was using a laptop, we'd be dropped down to imnproving w/2 guitars and the modular. Actually, that sounds great, but would probably be really scary!

Anyone who thinks this has clearly never spent much time being creative with Reason.

Are you tweaking stuff live or just playing prerecorded tracks? If the latter, why not just run your background tracks from an ipod or something?

What I like about the idea of using "Reason" is that I can call up the entire backing in one go, and all the instruments will come up when I load it in. I doubt there'll be much tweaking going on, BUT playing at different venues & in different spaces in the past w/prerecorded & mixed backings has really not worked for me.

Obviously, I can use the laptop at home as a virtual synth rack, or soft sampler or whatever.

This all of course assumes I can get any more gigs lined up.

If you're primarily going to be using it for a live sequencer, how will you transition between songs? If you're planning to load up each song as you come to it, make sure before you buy it that the loading times aren't too excessive... also, the more samples and shit in your save files, the longer this will take.

Logic will do the same thing, but will be infinitly more flexible and upgradable... Plus you will also be able to use it to record and sequence tracks in future.

As for Reason - we actually pulled off a great sounding remix of one of our album tracks by dirtying the mainly Reason-based sounds through some dirty outboard processing. Otherwise, yeah, it's a great tool for composing and learning but too thin sounding for me. We only used it on said remix because I hadn't brought my computer to the studio that day and we needed to get to work. In a pinch, use what you got, I say.

Nonsense. The full version of Reason 3.0 comes with almost 2.0 GB of sounds. Moreover, there are a shitload of free user soundbanks available for download, ranging in quality from "okay" to "fucking excellent".

Exactly! Nothing is going to sound perfect straight out of the box - and if it does, well, chances are you're lazy and you're just going to end up using the same presets over and over and everything will sound the same anyway.