cooo
October 11, 2008

Rating: 10/10

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Michal
October 4, 2008

Rating: 10/10

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Ben Hodgson
January 31, 2007

Rating: 8/10

Reason is the brain-child of Swedish music software developers Propellerhead. And while it\'s true that other people\'s children are always disgusting, Propellerhead\'s baby is definitely the exception to the rule.

While most babies are very odd (they drool, suck their feet and throw up), Reason presents you with something recognisable. You have a synth rack sitting in front of you. That\'s not odd. You already know the score from your years of experience with real synthesizers. Within moments, you are creating mixers, samplers, effects devices and loop players. Reason fits anyone like a glove from the offset (not that you should use babies as gloves). It\'s familiar. It makes sense.

This familiarity doesn\'t, however, come at the expense of power. In fact, they go perfectly hand in hand. The synthesizers you create with a moment\'s notice can produce a very rich, full sound. Even the basic wavetable synth, the Subtractor, can produce extremely varied sounds: from a warm, acoustic trance sound to a noisy, dirty bass to buzzy, clinky electronica noises. While Reason comes packaged with thousands of patches to produce nearly every sound imaginable, it\'s not long before you find yourself tweaking these and creating your own instruments.

So by nature, Reason\'s learning curve is very flexible for each user. Some people are happy with the supplied patches, others download thousands of \'refills\' from the Internet, some only use sounds they\'ve tailored to the song, and there\'s room for everyone along the spectrum.

Where Reason really comes into its own, however, is the innovative wiring feature that sets it well apart from the pack of other soft-synths. At the touch of a button, you can turn your studio rack around to inspect the way your devices are connected. Adding effects devices in different combinations and hearing the result is a very creative technique. This is complemented by the ability to transmit non-audio signals like LFO (automatically fluctuating signals) to destinations like the mod wheels on the synths and samplers.

New to Reason 3 is the Combinator. This is possibly the most powerful device of all, because it is not a device in the traditional sense. It is as many devices as you like, wired the way you like, brought together into one instrument. You can assign key ranges to instruments in the Combinator (much as you assign keys to samples in a sampler) and create a kind of split-range effect. The devices in your Combinator can be saved exactly as you left them in a patch (called a \'combi\') and reload that sound whenever you like.
The Combinator is an effects device too. You can load effects into the Combi, wire them the way you like, either in a line or in a variable send/return combination using the new Line Mixer, and then connect the inputs and outputs to the relevant plugs on the Combinator itself. The combinator will then treat any sound sent into it in exactly the same way as if the effects had been wired outside of the Combinator, except that it acts as if it were one device. These effects can be saved in a Combi too, and the Combinator has four knobs and switches on the front that can be assigned to control the variables on any of the hundreds of devices you can load into the Combinator in an up-front manner.

And when I say there are hundreds of devices, I mean hundreds. To begin with, there are two different synthesizers, each with filters, envelopes and LFOs, each with their own endearing nuances. There\'s a loop player that can play audio files treated with Propellerhead’s Recycle utility (sold separately, worse luck), which can vary the tempo and pitch of a loop to an astonishing degree.
There are also two samplers. The NN-XT is the flagship of these, and rightly so. You can load hundreds of samples and assign them to keys, and play different samples for different velocities. On top of this you have 2 multifunctional LFO utilities, a modulator envelope and an amplifier envelope (a kind of one-shot automated effects modulator), a filter, and myriad other functions.
There\'s also a simple drum sequencer, and several effects devices. Most of these are simple yet customisable effects: a phaser, a chorus, a digital delay. Three of the effects are more advanced. There\'s a distortion which also functions as a 3-band EQ and a resonance emulator, a very advanced reverb device that includes an EQ and a gate-signal, and best of all a powerful vocoder.

The vocoder is brilliant. It does a vocoder\'s job very well, useful for modulating drum patterns, loops and other audio signals into another. Whether you want the traditional \'robot-voice\', a melodic drum loop or a chordalised bass, the vocoder is very good at its job. It doubles up as a multi-band EQ, which can be used to balance the sound, cut certain frequencies, shape and mutate the sound or fade bands in and out like a DJ doing a mix. The number of bands is variable between 4 and 32 which makes it very multifunctional. Sound \'bleeds\' between bands which makes for a thick, rich sound. The bands can also be isolated into 32 distinct faders that is useful for a traditional \'clean\' EQ. Each band can transmit and receive non-audio signals, from a pattern sequencer or LFO, or to a fader or knob.
As well as the effects devices, you get a pattern sequencer (mentioned above) that works in much the same way as the drum machine, and audio and signal mergers and splitters that can make for very creative use of the wiring feature. Reason also has a built in MIDI sequencer that\'s responsible for automating things like notes, volumes and buttons, and can function as a ReWire synth for programs like Cubase and Sonar.

So why did I give the product 9, not 10? There are several small quirks that build a wall between you and Reason. The most notable of these is the lack of audio recording functionality. At the moment, you can only play audio loops treated in Recycle. These sounds can\'t be quantised like in Pro Tools or Sonar, so if you want to use Reason along with full audio functionality it\'s best to use it as a ReWire device.
Thing is, ReWire lacks certain desirable functions too. The 64 audio-out channels that can be assigned to any device are a much-appreciated addition, but you can\'t run more than one copy of Reason (while ReWired) in the unlikely event that you need more than 64 synthesizers. More importantly, you can\'t use the effects devices on audio tracks in your main sequencer (though you can for MIDI sent through your Reason synths), so this very important part of Reason is wasted if you are only going to use it as a ReWire synth. As well as that, running Reason in ReWire mode is quite tough on your computers brains - you are, after all, running two audio engines at once - so it\'s best to keep Reason\'s ReWire functionality in its box unless you have a fast computer.
But the sequencer within Reason is rubbish. Reason 3.0 was designed to add uses when using it as a synth in a live performance, so improvements to the frankly dire sequencer fell by the wayside somewhat. It\'s nothing like clear enough, it\'s all primary colours and ambiguous dots. It also doesn\'t follow the simple multi-window design of today\'s industry-leaders, instead plumping for a complicated, illogical system of tabs.

However, these are minor complaints. When you remember that Reason is no more than a very powerful, automatable synthesizer, such problems fall right by the wayside. Reason does what it does - make very powerful, rich, varied sounds - very well and nothing should deter you from buying this top-notch piece of software.