Mix Magazine interview with Todd Rundgren says, "On his latest album, Arena, not only did Todd Rundgren make it completely alone, using no other players or assistants, but he didn't even use a studio. The actual recording, mostly at his home in Hawaii, was done using RiffWorks, which locks to Propellerheads Reason using ReWire. That's quite a feat when one considers that the title of the album refers to the "arena rock" genre, with all its bombast, booming drums, screaming guitars and everything else that term implies."

Read below to see what Todd Rundgren has to say about recording with RiffWorks.

"In the spring of 2008 I was starting a new record and went to boot up ProTools. The system wouldn't come up and would take a couple of weeks to repair, so I started working in Reason. While Reason is able to produce sampled sounds, if you want to record voice or guitar, you have to figure out a way to capture it. As a solution, I found a program called RiffWorks that allowed me to connect through ReWire to Reason.

I could set up a loop and grab takes, then continually loop over that section until I was satisfied. I'd export the takes that I wanted from RiffWorks and clean them up in a simple audio editor. I discovered I had a lot of flexibility with this system that would have been much more difficult in ProTools.

Using RiffWorks was a fairly easy and straightforward way to get things done. Since then I've had interaction with Sonoma Wire Works, the developers of RiffWorks, and I've given them some feedback. They were incredibly receptive [and have since upgraded RiffWorks based on my suggestions]. While I haven't had a project come up since then, I'm anxious to get back and see what changes have happened in the program, probably all of which will make the job more streamlined.

The one advantage of recording this way was is that I was able to carry my production set up wherever I wanted - my studio, hotel room and even on a plane. It was quite an interesting discovery for me and one I wish to exploit more in the future. If you want to hear the result, look for the Arena album."
                        
Watch Todd Rundgren's Riffworks video interview.

Read the Mix Magazine article about how Rundgren recorded "Arena."

Read Rundgren's blog posting about recording "Arena", his latest album.