Propellerhead Software (propellerheads.se) is a well known company to musicians, especially ones who work with software synthesizers. Why? They produced Reason, a powerful program that emulates a rack full of synthesizers. Not only does it do that, it also emulates a mixer and plenty of effects.
I bought Reason because I heard lots of good things about it, especially in Reason 3.0, which has a lot of good features and improvements. In this article I will tell you about Reason and its features, what I like and dislike, and finally an overview.
Installation
When I put the program CD in my computer I was greeted with an installer. I proceeded with the installation after I accepted the Terms and Conditions. Overall it took 16 minutes to install. It seemed like a while to me mainly because I had to sit at the computer, waiting for it to ask for the next CD (There are three CDs total). But as you will see later on, it’s worth it.
The Program
Let me start by saying that this is my number one recommended choice for either intermediate musicians, or people planning to use it in Rewire with Cubase (steinberg.net), as it is easy to use (compared to FL Studio), yet advanced enough to sound great. With effort and skill, you can make great Electronica and other types of music with Reason.
First, unless you are planning to use one instrument, you have to create a mixer into your virtual rack. Then you can start putting in samplers, synthesizers, effects, even a vocoder! Some musicians complain that you can’t expand your choices of synthesizers via VST, like FL Studio. My recommendation is to use Cubase in ReWire mode with Reason. Cubase is also a wonderful sequencer and VST host, so you can only imagine how powerful Reason would be with it.
After you’re done with that, you can either drag and drop the notes into a sequencer, or alternately you can record with a MIDI keyboard. They both have their upsides and downsides. If you drag and drop the notes, you get perfect sync and the notes will all be equal, which is perfect for Electronic music, but bad for other types of music, because it would sound too mechanical. If you record the notes using a keyboard, it would sound a lot more natural, but in order to get the notes on sync, you have to quantitize them, which is sometimes a pain to do.
The sound quality is very good. You can export to a maximum of 192000 Hz and 24 bits, which is very good quality. You can also download Refills for Reason to further expand your library of samples. The synthesizers have a lot of unique sounds, and you can even program your own presets for them! The samplers are compatible with Soundfonts and .wav files, so you can put any sample you want (if you have the right converter).
Overview
I give Reason a 5 out of 5. Reason is a great tool for musicians who want to produce their own music, but can’t afford or don’t want to buy a rack full of synthesizers. With Reason and Cubase in Rewire mode, you would have a very powerful setup for producing music! I recommend buying a Photon X25 keyboard for use in Reason because it was built for software synthesis and it can plug in via USB. No MIDI port required!
Kudos to Propellerhead for making such a great program!
