Music • Sound • Video • Art

(The following is from Mick Karn’s Website.)

“With great sadness we regret to inform you that Mick has recently been diagnosed with advanced stages of cancer. Mick is currently in a positive mood and undergoing further tests and treatment. His family and friends are close with him, supporting him in practical ways, and surrounding him with their love, friendship and care.

Mick has been struggling financially for some considerable time now and we are hoping that this appeal may help to raise funds for any necessary treatment and perhaps go some way towards providing a small degree of financial support whilst Mick’s immediate family provide the care and comfort we would all wish for him. We are hoping that his friends, fans and musical colleagues will, over the coming months, offer any support they feel capable of giving. Quite aside from the sheer brunt of daunting medically-related costs, Mick’s clear and major concern is for the security and well being of his wife and young son.

If you would like to make a donation whether as an individual or as a group, you can do so via the paypal link below which has been set up for this sole and express purpose. Any support you are able to give, no matter how small, could make a difference in helping Mick cope during this difficult period. His friends will be looking at a variety of ways to raise funds.

If you would simply like to leave your kind messages of support for Mick, please do so, here: Messages

We will keep you all updated as often as we can.

Please do note that news is released with Mick’s full approval.

Posted: 3rd June 2010″

I wish Mick and his family the best. Please contribute whatever you can.

Well, the “5 Days of Reason 5″ is over. I think one of the more exciting announcements is one that they have not highlighted:

Record Notes on Multiple Tracks - Reason 5 and Record 1.5 lets you use multiple MIDI keyboards, pads, and controllers for playing and recording your instruments. Lock a 16-pad controller to a Kong, and use a keyboard to play your synths. Or use two keyboards on stage for controlling different Reason instruments.

A friend of mine has been jonesin’ for this for years.

Below are the movies they posted for each highlighted feature.?(I’ll list the other “less celebrated” changes after the movies.)?’Course the truly interesting deal with all of these is this: Given all of the connections possible betwixt and between the Reason modules, what really weird and wonderful stuff can you do patching this stuff together in unexpected ways?

Dr. OctoRex – This is one of the cooler additions in my book.

embedded by Embedded Video

Blocks – This is extremely cool. On the surface, it seems a bit “Ableton-esque”, but it is probably closer in concept to Cubase’s Arranger mode or DP’s Song mode (or going further back, sequences and subsequences from Opcode’s venerable StudioVision). This however, looks to be a lot easier to deal with.

embedded by Embedded Video

I’ve been using the new Presonus StudioOne Pro 1.5 update a bit more lately. I have to say this DAW is coming along really, really nicely. There are some very cool productivity features and the fact that it has a modern code base shows. The Presonus team is also really helpful and responsive and the online community has a really nice vibe. I encourage folks to check out the free demo. (Coming from traditional DAWs one may be looking for more traditional and “complicated” ways of doing things, so check out the built-in tutorials when you do.)

There are also a ton of Presonus and user demonstration and help videos on the web.

embedded by Embedded Video