Reason 4

Not Just for Techno Anymore

Had I not been queueing up for this review for over a year it probably would have been difficult to find someone who could do this review as a new user. Reason began as a beginners tool, but people quickly found out that professional like things that are easy to use as well. It seemed everybody from rap producers to singer/songwriters were using Reason to build their tracks, often bringing them into Pro Tools for recording and mixing. I thought of Reason as a tool for dance producers, but as I quickly saw that other musicians who were not so closed-minded as I were using it too I began to feel like I had possibly missed out on something good. And having suffered a bit of creative ennui of late, I was seeking tools that didn't mind putting "fun" in their descriptions as my musical life was severely lacking in any semblance of "playing" music. I was past my musical snobbery and just looking to make some good music.

Beginners Mind

So while I have played with and worked with more music software than most people as part of my job, I was really approaching Reason as a beginner, and I really enjoyed it. Thus this review is directed not just towards the computer music beginner, whether you are new to music or not, but for anyone looking for an easy to use, easy to learn, intuitive and fun tool to make music with. If you just want to hear about the new stuff, skip ahead to the section entitled "The New Stuff".

History of the "Virtual Studio"

Around 2000, there was a sort of technological and metaphysical coalescence going on in the music software world. Software synthesizers were starting to sound good, computers were getting powerful enough to run them, and many of the music software makers were not keeping up with the shift. While many sequencers could also record audio their emphasis was still on MIDI and external MIDI synths. What's more, they all involved a level of abstraction that many new users found very unmusical. Dealing with dots and lines on the screen felt very little like being in a real studio and more like computer programming. Creating music on a computer was a complicated processing involving sophisticated setups and inevitable calls to tech support. While "electronica" as a discrete genre was still going strong, the tools were not keeping up with the desires of a new wave of young producers who just wanted to make music, not learn hex codes.

While I can't say that Reason was the first "Virtual Studio" it certainly was the first popular one.

The Virtual Studio

Reason was different from other programs on the market because, besides an audio interface and a MIDI keyboard, it required nothing else to make music. In it were synths, samplers, effects, and mixers; all the elements of a real studio minus recording. But since Reason was initially targeted at dance musicians, and dance music at the time was largely instrumental, the lack of recording was not a huge deal, and cut down the complexity of the setup significantly. You could just purchase the one program and be done, you had everything you needed to make music. Empty canvas - Open Reason - Make Music - Finished song, couldn't be simpler.

The other thing revolutionary about Reason was the look of it. It looked like real instruments. The mixer in Reason bore a striking resemblance to the near ubiquitous Mackie 1604 including scrawled upon artist's tape marking each track. The synth and sampler had realistic looking knobs, and they were all housed within a virtual "rack", making the metaphorical leap from real studio to virtual one that much easier. Even to musicians not familiar with traditional recording studios, the means of routing via "virtual cables" by turning the rack around just made sense. Finally making music on a computer was accessible to people who weren't computer people, and Reason was a huge success, spawning a series of imitators and changing the way people looked at designing music software.

Okay, Enough About You

So how does Reason fare now, several years and light years in terms of software development later? Well for me it went like this....

Reason 4 comes boxed with a CD in a cardboard case and a slim Getting Started manual. Your serial number comes on a credit-card sized piece of thin plastic which ones supposedly keeps in your wallet to flash to get into secret meetings of Reason users or possibly to procure morphine. Not sure, but either way this doesn't seem like a very practical way of keeping your serial number, easy to get lost in a drawer or file folder, but it does have that "secret decoder ring" quality to it. One can easily imagine flashing it from your wallet and announcing "Reason user ma'am. Now let's go over again why your music sucks." While registration is not required, the docs and "Read Me First" cards in the packaging seem to equate it with getting a measles vaccine and so I quickly did and it was easy and painless, despite the smallish type on my secret agent serial number card.

On my first launch of Reason it ran me through a Setup Wizard which asked me which audio interface to use and which keyboard I was using. It seemed odd that my M-Audio Axiom 61 and EMU X-Board 25 weren't on the list on preset controllers since these are both very popular keyboards that have been out for a while but they weren't and I picked a generic equivalent and moved ahead. Within 6-10 clicks I was setup and ready to make music. Defying my normal process of "poke at stuff until you are confused" method, I began straight away with the Getting Started manual, which did in fact, get me started. Just as an exercise I went about making an actual song in my first use of Reason and was able to do just that. Presets are provided for all the synths as well as loops for the Dr-Rex player and I was able to cobble together something with a reasonably coherent structure from just the stuff that came with Reason, render it to disk, burn it to CD (I did have to use a separate program to do that, although I could have just used the built in functionality of XP or OSX). Started out nobody, and there I was, a recording artist. Not a particularly good or original one, but one with something I could play for my friends to their polite smiles or possibly make a million dollars, or perhaps somewhere in between.

A Tour Around My Virtual Studio

Browsing around the product page for Reason 4 will give you list of the tools in Reason 4, but let me introduce you to them personally and how I related to them.

Redrum

Redrum is a simple drum sample player that bears a visual similarity to the Roland 808 and almost no similarity to its functionality. Redrum is all sampling, no synthesis, but it does resemble the 808 in its simple, analog-style sequencing method. In its most basic form you get sixteen buttons that are either lit or unlit, each representing a note and whether it will play or not for the currently selected sample. You can select whole kits or individual samples and Redrum is great for mocking up a simple beat in no time and little effort. Again, the presets out of the box are top notch and ready to use and for electronic music or for any music that uses a simple, static beat Redrum is the way to go with the ability to individually route each note to different effects. But if you are looking for realistic-sounding multi-sampled drums, you are going to need to use the NN-XT. No worry though, that wasn't what Redrum was ever for, and it succeeds perfectly in doing what it means to do, be a simple, easy-to-use drum sample player/sequencer.

Subtractor

Subtractor is your virtual analog synth in your virtual studio. It uses a straight ahead Oscillator - Envelope - Filter setup that is easy to learn and easy to get a variety of sounds from, while still being easy on the CPU. That being said, Subtractor is one of the substandard things about Reason for me. I have never heard anything that really impressed me from Subtractor. Usable, yes, but impressive, no. It always sounds decidedly wimpy to me and as someone who has spent the equivalent of a college education on analog synths, never had the gusto I require. However for a lot of people in other genres or styles they may find Subtractor meets their needs, since its just that certain quality that it lacks, but its simple-yet-flexible layout and design make it a great synth to just mock up something quickly with and come back to later, and using the effects that have come with later versions of Reason, a lot can be done to give the sound more grit and girth.

Dr. Rex

Propellerheads invented the REX file, so its no surprise that they have made it a big part of Reason. And while the instrument is still pretty simple, combined with the REX-editing mode in the sequencer, it is the best REX player I have ever used, making it easy to manipulate and mix up loops beyond all recognition. Deconstructed REX loops began to become the large part of my compositions. Why did I find it surprising that I like Dr. Rex so much? Because after using a million other REX players I figured that the largely unchanged Dr. Rex must now be a pale comparison, but I was very wrong. The one downside the Dr. Rex is that it only PLAYS REX files, it will not make them. How do you make them? Well you will need a little product called ReCycle made by the same company as Reason. However with most sample manufacturers offering REX as a standard format, you may never find the need to make your own REX files.

Maelstrom

Maelstrom is certainly the odd man out here, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most of the other instruments/effects are not so much going for the most unique thing in the world but the most practical and useful, while Maelstrom heads right out into the cutting edge into Granular synthesis creating a new type of synthesis that Propellerheads calls "GrainTable" which is a mix of Granular and Wavetable synthesis. This makes sense from a user profile sort of view. The younger generation of producers were embracing the "digital" sound of their music and sub-genres such as Glitch were created that focused on the type of rips and tears that digital manipulation leaves in sound. However Granular synthesis can be quite abstract and getting something other than a pile of noise out of it can be a challenge. Granular synthesis is not something somebody who just tentatively started up their computer and is making music on it for the first time wants to start learning about. Fortunately, Maelstrom does bring its unique take on Granular synthesis and make it very user friendly, plus provides a wealth of usable presets that make it easy to not ever know what your grain size is and still get cutting edge sounds out of it. Maelstrom was when I begin to get Reason envy. Granular synthesis was for us tweakers only, not for regular people. Now it was. And since my knowledge of Granular synthesis didn't really translate into using Maelstrom, I did what most people do and mostly used presets and tweaked, normally not an allowed part of my usual process, but if it sounded this good (weird) then why worry?

NN-XT

Fatboy Slim said that everybody needs a 303 but what everybody making computer-based music really needs is a sampler, and thus the NN-XT and its simpler little cousin, the NN-19. The NN-19 is good for your simpler sampling tasks and it is comparable in many ways to the old Akai S900 that was a hip-hop producer standard issue. It allows you to map samples across the keyboard, one sample per key and has synthesis features similar to Subtractor. It's perfect for something like an expanded drum library that is too large for ReDrum but is not layered. Its simple easy-to-use layout makes it the go to sampler unless you need anything but straight ahead sampling. If you need that then you go to the NN-XT which gives you multi-layers and splits and all the other bells and whistles of a full-blown sampler. The NN-XT is so widely used that it has become a standard sampling format and many sample libraries come in a version just for the NN-XT. While there is nothing extraordinary about the NN-XT, it's not designed to be, it just gets the job done and folds down to one "rack space" if you aren't tweaking the parameters so it doesn't take up a lot of screen real estate.

The New Stuff (Welcome Reason 3 users who skipped ahead)

Thor

Thor perfectly fills the gap between the ordinariness of Subtrator and the edginess of Maelstom. Billing itself as "semi-modular" it completely lives up to the hype. Combining multiple synthesis methods and multiple filters types, its the sort of flexibility that your average VST synth user dreams of. Comb filtering, multiple filters run in series or parallel, pretty much anything the synthesis guru wants is there in spades. But flexibility can sometimes go by another name "complexity". Fleshing out Thor's features requires more time and effort because everything is not right up front and the Reason design rule would seem to normally suggest, which was necessary because if every possibility was made visible you would a daunting, screen real estate sucking monster. As usual Propellerheads has provided you with a wealth of usable presets plus another entire set of of "designer" presets created by well known sound designers. Just moving through the presets and watching what Thor can do works as a sort of tutorial of the various features. But even if you never care to learn a whit about how Thor works, no doubt it covers a tremendous amount of territory and it just sounds good.

ReGroove

Often new users are properly cautioned against quantizing to avoid sucking the life out of their music. On the other hand hardware sequencers like the MPC series are known for their quantization giving the tracks a certain groove. A lot of sequencers have a "swing" function but often these are ham-handed, giving you the choice between Kraftwerk or Duke Ellington with nothing left between. The ReGroove takes this to the next level allowing you to apply quantization, shuffle, and groove templates to different tracks or groups of tracks. What may not seem like a big deal is actually a big step forward in terms of flexibility and power. Even the best musicians can use the ReGroove Mixer to make their parts fit the groove of other loops or parts while still maintaining some of their own flavor by quantizing to a certain percentage (in fairness, Logic's quantization is quite extensible and flexible, but not this easy to use). Producers with little keyboard skills can get their parts correct without everything sounding like it was done by Robbie the Robot. Especially for hip-hop producers this kind of quantization will make the transition from hardware to software even easier.

The Sequencer

As Reason has evolved from dance production tool to general music production, it needed to grow beyond its somewhat limited (and thus simple) MIDI editing capabilities, and the Sequencer has underwent a major overhaul but maintaining an easy-to-use, slick looking flavor. I can't really compare it to previous version, but I certainly can compare it to every other sequencer out there and it packs a lot of features without getting too complex or taking you out of the music making process. Its implementation of automation tracks is very slick and the dedicated REX editing mode made the already great Dr. REX even easier to push the limits of loop manipulation. An extra nice feature was the ability to "detach" the sequencer to its own window. With a two monitor configuration this allows you to work with sequencer and rack on different screens, keeping everything in front of you without a lot of clicking around. As I used it I found myself having to reference the manual a few times but rarely. This is due to both good UI design and an excellent manual. Included in the demo songs is one orchestral piece, no doubt to drive home the "it's not just for techno anymore" point, and it shows how the newly revamped sequencer can be used to do some serious MIDI manipulation. But Reason has made its name on being the "Just Make Music" piece of software so it has kept its eye on the ball in terms of keeping, not alienating, its base of customers and its reputation as the tool of the everyman.

What It Doesn't Have

No doubt, every time someone who works at Propellerheads is at a cocktail party and runs into someone who uses Reason they hear, "You guys should really add support for VST plug-ins" or "You guys just need to add audio, then I could do my whole production in Reason". I think their steadfastness in not adding these features must come from a particular mindset, which is "Keep It Simple". The two quickest ways to destabilize your system is to throw in a bunch of free VST plug-ins or try to record in real-time with sequenced tracks. The with real-time recording you have to get into delay compensation and routing and monitoring schemes. All more things that are likely to make the software much more complicated and much more likely to crash. The beauty in Reason is it completely self-contained and solid, less susceptible to the kind of computer shenanigans that the rest of us are susceptible to, and the kind of thing that scares people away from making music on computers. Nobody wants to pour out their soul into the mic and then discover that their recording program has frozen. No, the people who designed Reason designed ReWire, the de-facto standard for inter-application communication and left how people want to record and mix up to them. A common application combination is Reason and Pro Tools which in many ways gives you the best of both worlds without sacrificing anything. And with Thor along with the other already included instruments, there is less and less reason to ever need any sort of outside plug-in, Thor pretty much covers the rest of the synthesis spectrum. So keeping it simple means keeping it stable and there is a lot to be said for that.

In Conclusion

Propellerheads chose their two largest points of weakness: their underwhelming choices in synthesis, and a sophisticated sequencer and addressed them completely. Thor is a soft synth dream and the new sequencer could teach many programs how to be both flexible and simple. Even though I have never been a Reason user, I often recommend it to people just getting into computer-based music making. Because they will get the fun of making music right away and it will take them a long way before they run out of rope, if they ever do. For both beginners and pros Reason can often be the shortest route between you and the music in your head. If you are just getting into computer-based music you should definitely be giving it a look. While other products run off following the feature train, Reason remains steadfast in keep ease-of-use and stability paramount, with Reason 4 also undergoing some smooth, natural evolution. Overall it's a great product and a great upgrade.

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