5 stars (My favorite program) - I won't reiterate other raves about the product, but I do want to say that Propellerheads has [have?] shown great integrity in producing a really clean, reliable program.
4 stars (The amateur perspective) - I need to begin this review with an important disclaimer: I am an armchair musician, the kind of person who played an instrument in high school but hasn't been serious about music in a long time. I am also a person who loves gadgets, including musical ones like synths. I was bitten by the synth bug in the late '80s when I discovered techno music and the great analog masters of the '70s like Isao Tomita. (I remember having great times listening to Tomita and trying arrangements of 'The Planets' suite with a buddy from high school who had an Oberheim analog synth and a sequencer. Good times!)
In other words, I am . . . a dabbler. So this review is from a technophile, music-loving amateur's perspective.
It was actually Propellerhead's demo software that inspired me to take another crack at music as a hobby after many years away. I got myself a nice M-Audio keyboard and the full version of Reason and dived in. In short, I am in hog heaven.
Whether you are a dabbler or a pro, I suspect the first thing you will feel upon firing up Reason 3.0 is, "holy cow, there is a LOT of stuff here." The software is just insanely packed with features. Synths, effects modules, samplers, and more... It is literally like having a room full of hardware. And when you hit Tab the rack turns around so you can use virtual patch cords to wire everything up. And oh yeah -- it sounds great!
Reason has so many features, in fact, that it's intimidating for a new user. You'll quickly be making some good sounds, but getting the sound you had in mind to BEGIN WITH is where the skill comes in. It's like going from a Yugo to a race car: now you can adjust the suspension in 10 different ways, but how do you know what you want to do unless you are already a gearhead?
And this is why I mark Reason down from 5 to 4 stars: I wish it held my hand more. The manual isn't bad, but the program is so rich that I am going to have to invest in a tutorial package to get the most out of it. I can't blame Propellerhead TOO much, for admittedly I am a dabbler in a pro's world, but I suspect I am not alone in this feeling judging from the amount of 3rd party Reason products out there.
One thing for actual keyboard players to be aware of: since Reason uses your computer's CPU to generate sound, there is a small amount of latency between a key hit and the sound being produced. On my system, an Athlon 64 3000+, this delay is 34 milliseconds. That is hardly perceptible, but anyone used to a real hardware synth could find it annoying.
If you are a hardware junkie, get a keyboard controller with as many hardware inputs as possible. I am using a Radium M49, which has 9 sliders, 8 knobs, one foot pedal jack, plus the pitch and modulation wheel -- and when I am playing with the Reason synths, I wish I had more knobs. Of course you can twiddle all the virtual knobs with the mouse, but sometimes there is no substitute for the real thing.
Lastly, be sure to visit the publisher's web site. They have a lot of cool free downloads and user forums.
I hope this has been useful to other musical dabblers!
5 stars (An excellent program) - Propellerheads have done it again with his upgrade. The introduction of the Combinator is a superb addition that solves many problems. Most DAW's will only load 16 reason devices in rewire, what the Combinator does is enable one to essentially group modules together to be treated as a single instrument, enabling one to effectively break that barrier. The combinator can also be used to load full performance patches at the click of a mouse, with full key mapping, and the abilty to route device controls to the combinator front panel. I load a template of a 14:2 mixer and 14 combinators into my DAW, and I'm ready to roll, I can rewire as many Reason devices as I want, and either bring them into the daw as a stereo input, or I can bring them in to be mixed down in the DAW, in up to 62 channels.
One thing that sold me with Reason was the patch bay. I'm an old hardware hound, and I love the idea of being able to patch up any number of devices in numerous ways. Hit the tab button, and the devices are flipped around to reveal full CV, Gate, and audio patching, just as in a hardware rack. With 14:2, 6:2 mixers, and cv and audio mergers and splitters, which can be used in any combination and any number, anything can essentially be hooked up in any way, enabling numerous layerings of sound.
IMO, Reason's strength is it's flexibility. It can be used to make numerous genres of music. I frequently compose cross-genre, and Reason fills that bill perfectly. I've been able to successfully create works from trippy ambient, to neo-classical instrumental, to psychobilly. The orchestral samples are very good, but one needs to remember that these samples are recorded dry, so they need some TLC to shine. Reason has plenty to offer in that way, with excellent reverb, delay, distortion, and the like. The new M-Class mastering devices have solved the previous probs with Reason tracks sounding thin. I found out quite quickly that it is now possible to create a track with enough punch to blow a monitor if one isn't careful, (no, no tears in that way, but I came close).
I've always had trouble putting together a good, distorted guitar patch. With Reason, I pulled a clean Les Paul soundfont into the NN-XT sampler, used their scream 4 distortion on it, with some reverb, and voila! A distorted guitar patch that my friends can't distinguish from real!
On top of all this, I've found the program to be rock solid stable, with such low processor overhead that I've been able to load a dozen or more devices with very a low processor hit, (do note though, that this is on a machine with an athlon 2800+ processor, still, the low system requirements do amaze). This enables it to be run without choking your DAW when you rewire it. Too sum up, a friend of mine checked out the program when he came over for a visit, his words: "Someone put a lot of work into this program." |
