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Hey guys, in this song how can i make my synth/pads choppy like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uB0Xc9ZK0c
i use Reason 4 and don't know how to go about making a noise similar to the beginning of this song. thanks.

I don't know about Reason in particular, but you could try applying a sinusoidal wave automation curve to the volume of the track, synchronized to the beat; it has to be softer than a square wave that'd produce a trance gate effect.

In that piece you linked, you can also find another kind of sweep; if you need that too, you'd have to automate the frequency cutoff (and/or resonance)

I see that the search engines have quite a few results on reason automation, maybe you can find good info on how to properly do it in Reason.

In GarageBand this is accomplished by creating your melody with either thirty-second (if you're using 60 BPM) or sixteenth (if you're using 120 BPM, depending on your timing) notes that are then shortened, by switching from measure view to time view, and shortened just a few small fractions of a second. Then a phaser is layer over it.

I'm not sure if Reason allows these same capabilities or what the Reason equivalent might be, but I hope this helps.

A tremolo effect with control over frequency would do this easily. All Audio programs have such a feature.

Anything which varies amplitude will be what you need.

But to do it more like the example a filter with a slow moving low frequency oscillator (LFO) will provide the rest of the effect over time. It was only the choppy effect I originally read into the question.

As the comments here can attest to, there are usually going to be plenty of different ways to accomplish the same thing. That could be an internal arpeggiator on the synth itself modulating amplitude, or a square wav LFO modding the same either internally to the synth or from an outside source, or a gate in the FX chain being triggered by another source, or a "chopper gate" plugin that is BPM synced, or from any of the other examples listed here.

I recommend CamelAudio's plug ins: CamelPhat and CamelSpace

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgs570W-9s