Propellerhead Reason Premium Edition
Mark Jenkins looks at a powerful sequencer package and its new keyboard sounds.
Choosing a sequencer is a major undertaking in the process of moving over to computer-based music, and whether you go for Cubase or Logic, Mac or PC systems and loop or timeline based software will make a major difference to the way you work on your next compositions or arrangements.
Reason has always been seen as a loop-style sequencer; it never had the same tape-based approach as Logic or Cubase, but put a lot more emphasis on providing very flexible racks of instruments which could be programmed exactly as you desired before starting a composition.
That’s why the main display of Reason never looked like an elaborate tape machine as did those of Logic and Cubase. No, Reason in operation looks more like a 19-inch rack of studio equipment and synth modules, with the actual composition area reduced to a very small display across the bottom of the screen, if present at all. So why is Reason of any interest to keyboard players?
Well, the different approach to its screen layout doesn’t prevent Reason from creating some very complex compositions, and in its latest incarnation, Reason Premium Edition, there are four new instrumnt packages included of which two are completely keyboard based. Reason Pianos records three different pianos from multiple angles using six sets of microphones, while Abbey Road Keyboards was recorded on location and features electric keyboards such as pianos and Mellotrons. Reason Pianos plays through a software module known as the Combinator, so let’s take a look at this and some of the other modules available in the package.
Rack ‘Em Up
As mentioned above, Reason’s screen display takes the form of a simulated 19-inch rack of sound generation and effects units, and you can add these and push them around on the screen to arrange your rack any way you want. The sound generation modules including analog-style synths and sample players, effects units include delays, reverbs and distortion, and controllers including step sequencers and simple tape-style sequencers. The Premium Edition also includes Reason Drum Kits, set of sampled sounds known as a ReFill, and Reason Electric Bass, which includes the sounds of eight different bass guitars. It’s possible to save a whole setup along with any composing you’ve done, so the appearance of the system is completely customisable from one job to the next.
As with a real 19-inch rack, the system has to be wried up at the back depending on what controllers you want to link to what sounds sources, and what effects you want to use to process them. Spinning the display around causes the virtual patch cables to flop around in an entertaining manner, but as soon as they’ve settled down you can quickly connect or disconnect any modules you require, and of course many of them operate in stereo or with multiple channel which can be patched in different directions.
So for example you could play your new Reason Pianos sounds through a phaser module and an echo delay module directly from your master keyboard, while running drums from a tape-style sequencer through a bit of reverb, and bass guitar from a repeating step sequencer adding some auto-wah and flanging effects.
There are lots of other synth-style modules to choose from with wacky names like Thor, Subtractor and Malstrom, including one referred to as “graintable” which is really a wavetable synth with much more control over the content of the basic waveform, plus basic analog synths, the drum machines ReDrum and Dr Rex, samplers including NNXT and NN19 which can load anything from sound effects to orchestral instrument sounds to loops, and various sequencers and arpeggiators to control them. In terms of effects there are vocoders so you can use your voice to modulate keyboard or other sounds, compressors, equalisation and much more, and of course there’s an overall mixer to finally balance the sounds.
Install and Enjoy
Reason Premium Edition arrives as a set of DVD’s which will install on Mac or on PC’s including Vista operating systems, and some of the sounds are available in 24-bit or more compact 16-bit versions, so you don’t have to install both if you want to save hard disk space. There’s no dongle, but you do need to license the package on the internet for continued operation, and recommended systems are Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM on a PC, or Intel Macs with 2GB RAM, though lower specified systems will work also.
In Version 4 of Reason, which is what you’re getting in the Premium Edition package, the tape-style sequencer is “fully grown and matured” as they say, and rather than a simple strip of events now presents a multitrack display of every instrumental part. The styling is somewhere between that of Cubase and Ableton Live, allowing the use to get at MIDI events and edit bar-by-bar, or change volumes and effects levels at will (or automate them). Its step edit mode presents a piano roll display vertically down the left hand side, and bar graph displays of velocity and other parameters along the bottom, just like most other tape-style sequencers. The only problem is that if you open the sequencer display up to fill a very large part of the screen, then you can no longer see the 19-inch rack modules which are Reason’s main point of appeal, but there’s no getting over that on a single display – maybe a dual monitor setup would help.
But what type of keyboard player would enjoy using Reason? Well, in its earlier incarnations the package was very much oriented towards loop-based dance music and experimental soundscapes, since the sequencers were rudimentary and the emphasis was very much on the synth modules and very extensive sound processing. But now the sequencer is quite complex – a halfway house between Cubase and Ableton Live, both of which are capable of long and complex compositions as well as more spontaneous, jamming-style work – and the Abbey Road Keyboards, piano, drums and bass packages are available as part of the deal, then Reason is looking like a more direct contender for Cubase, Logic and other more studio-oritned composition packages.
The Propellerheads website has some excellent demos of Reason in action, so it’s worth checking out to see whether its style of working would suit your temperament. Certainly if you enjoy sonic exploration, chaining effects together in random orders just to see what they’ll do, then the fascination afforded by playing with Reason’s rack and its virtual patch cables can be endless. And if you’re into more conventional composition – well, the package has now been tamed a little by its inclusion of a more conventional sequencer and a wider library of more bread and butter sounds, so may well be your solution of choice even if you’re not all that daring.
Reason’s Premium Edition is currently priced at 499 Euros and can be ordered directly from the company’s website. Versions of Reason 4 and upgrades from earlier versions are also available.
www.propellerheads.se
Filed under: Music Software
