Dance music producing/recording problems

Did you mean doing synths with MIDI just to get the feel for it, and then recording live for the final version? Any recommendations on which program to use for synth sounds?

And as for drum sounds from the Korg, it's entirely doable. Unless you want super-real drum sounds, then you might want to go with store-bought samples.

First things first, however: if you want to make decent dance music, learning how to program your synthesizer should come first.

Here's what I'd do to get started:

1.) Lay down a drum track--you can do this two ways. Start with a Redrum in Reason (load a drum set) and plot down some notes in the virtual drum machine, start with Rexx in Reason (load a drum set) and play some beats live, or start with a loop in Ableton. You can either drop in your fav mp3 into Ableton or cobble one together.

2.) Lay down a bassline. Start with a preset sound if you like, either in Reason or in Live or Garageband, and just play one. Try to do like a 4 bar loop or whatever.

3.) Listen to your creation and smile. And start cutting and pasting and modifying it.

4.) Add some new synths on top if you want--you can start with the preset sounds and modify them, or you can drop in some samples too. Both Reason and Live have lots of samples built-in or you can find them on the Interweb.

5.) Start messing with effects and layering different synths.

We used to use Reason a lot with Reaktor because Reason is really low processing requirements and you can really abuse effects and synths in terms of piling them on. Now we use Ableton Live--it's fun to chop sounds in Ableton and reverse things and so forth, but you don't have to start that way. But either way, you'll have a great time!

And considering your influences, you MUST learn side chain compression. http://youtube.com/watch?v=O5eep4inXYs

to anyone - do you recommend using any of the built in synths/instruments in live? or should i stick to reason and my own synth for that?

-I neglected to mention that I own a Mexican Fender Strat, hence the guitar amps... I may experiment with putting it through my vocoder

-When recording live synth, does it need to be fed through an amp first, or should it be ok on it's own? I have mixed experiences either way

HOWEVER: Since you have Ableton, one good way to do this is to run Reason through Ableton, with rewire. This way you can basically sit there and work in Reason, but output each line to different tracks in Ableton -- meaning you can put VST effects on them, or record bits onto the track to mess with later, etc. (That's basically the way I work these days -- programming everything in Reason, and then pushing the outputs into Ableton for processing and mixing.)

Reason and Ableton are great tools for creating forty billion 32-bar loops and sample scraps waiting for people to learn how to put them together into a song or at least a DJ tool. Getting over that hump and making a whole project from start to finish is the hardest thing, I think.

If you don't have a riff in mind already then you might as well start with programming a backbeat at 120. Building blocks.

Hahaha. See: my hard drive.

In case it helps, I'll post a song in the "What do we sound like" that we made all in Live with a cheap USB "internet chat" mic, an acoustic guitar, a Peavey bass, and a little 5 watt Magnatone amp. We then chopped it up in Live, added a few beats from some samples we collected, and played with some of Live's el-cheapo sounds.

It's not great, but it sounds like you have a similar set of equipment, and you can hear what some others do with it.