New Technical Review: Reason 4 Premium Edition

Ah Reason. Me and her have had a love affair for a few years now! Reason coupled with a MIDI controller is simply put all you would ever need to create your own music. If you are billy no mates you can still make music with Reason. All done using MIDI you can perform a synth line and then convert it to another sound later if you don’t like it. You can use it with or without a controller and it features the ability to lay down drums, bass, synths strings and whatever else you can imagine. My band Bleed Electric are releasing our debut album and a grand majority of it was crafted in Reason. Go to the Myspace Page and listen to “IV. Birds as High as Planes” and all the instrumentation and sound effects that you hear were done in Reason.

The Reason 4 Premium Edition that I have is the ultimate Reason’s “studio in a box”. So what is different between regular Reason and the Pemium Edition? The premium edition not only includes the Reason software but bundles of Refills Sound Libraries (additional instruments and sounds). Included Refills are:

• Abbey Road Keyboards,
• Reason Drum Kits 2,
• Reason Electric Bass and
• Reason Pianos

This version has blatantly been put together for the waivering purchaser or the hardcore user that has crafted so much material in Reason that the Refills will be a god send in ensuring their compositions always remain up to date and fresh. I know the refills have really been good for me, particularly the Reason Drum Kits 2.

Reason 4 sees some slight interface differences although from a far it looks fairly similar. There is a new Synthesizer Thor which the name aptly describes very well - a beast of a synth. Each track now has multiple sub tracks (lanes) allowing you to easily layer tracks with one instrument. This is a nice new feature and a godsend for me who, previously would have to double the instrument and would end up with 9000 different instruments running at the same time. You can now Quantize drums and synth lines you play as you record them too which is fairly nifty, the RPG-8 Arpeggiator and there are all sorts of new automation settings and a Re-Groove “unquantize” feature.

All four Refills contained within the premium edition are top notch and really help someone like myself to build their sound arsenal. Reason Drum Kits 2 is my personal favourite as I found after producing a lot of work with Reason that the drum-kits included with it became very old and boring very quickly. By that I mean it would be hard to get fresh sounds because you had already used a particular kit. Included in Reason Drum Kits 2 are 96 Re-drum kits that like before are organized by musical style i.e. “Hip Hop”. Each kit piece has it’s own channel and kits can be mixed and matched easily to make your own custom kits. Velocity and detail in these kits are great and with this alone I found myself back in to Producing with Reason and making brand new, fresh and original beats again. Abbey Road Keyboards does what it says on the tin and features a shed load of keyboard based instruments from Abbey Road studios. There are Pianos, Harmouniums, Mellotrons and more and they were all sampled using the Abbey Road microphone collection, which is disputedly the best microphone collection of any studio in the world. As you can imagine the quality is perfect and again I am loving this Refill.

Reason Pianos extends the piano functionality of Reason and includes two grands (Yamaha C7 and Steinway D). Each of these grands were miced using 6 different microphones and placements (some stereo, some mono) all of which show up in Reason seperately so you can get the perfect mixes you want from them. Reason Electric Bass adds functionality to Reason that was not really there in too much detail before and that is the ability to have real sounding bass. There are eight of the worlds most famous bass guitars sampled, some plucked and some fingered, with different string types and a plethora of other options allowing you to truly find the optimum real bass sound for your song. The samples are excellent quality and even include things like ghost notes and finger slides to give the real feel of a human bass player.

All of that is packed into one nice little bundle that is a worthwhile buy for anyone. Some of the previous bugs and jitters I hated about Reason still exist though unfortunately, hopefully they will take heed to this and make these changes in Reason 5! The window still can’t be maximized and as such sits oddly on your screen. Songs cannot be exported as individual WAV files and, although you can acheive this using Re-Wire it would be nice to be able to have a multiple WAV file output for your finished songs. YOu can’t bounce down directly to MP3 either which is a pain too. I still love the wiring ability and functionality you can get from Reason by pressing TAB. It literally allows you to see the back of all the instruments and to route anything you want to anywhere, this allows for some great new Combinations of instruments and effects to make new sounds.

If Reason could be graphically scaled to work over multiple monitors it would be the greatest “studio in a box” product on the market at the moment. Even without it Reason is the best but with a few little flaw fixes and I would be recommending the whole world go out and get this so they can start making their own music in their house, shed, boat or wherever else a real full fledged studio won’t fit. Hell, you could do like I do and use it in a real recording studio!

Reason 4 is the best version of Reason so far and continues to get used daily. If you are serious about making electronic music then you should just go and buy a copy of the software right now and get moving. I do find however that from a mixing standpoint I do need to use another sequencer (Sonar for example) so that I can also add on some 3rd party effects to each Reason track. If Propellerhead were to concentrate on this aspect of Reason a little more they would be able to better their product. That being said though, with the functionality they introduce through Re-wire this can be done anyway but relies on you having another sequencer and as with everything in life that means more $$ you need to spend to get the full functionality.

I would recommend that you get both a keyboard based MIDI controller and a pad based one so that you can use one to put in synth lines and the other to slam down some beats and, although you can do both without any MIDI controller at all, you will likely be ripping your hair out or going blind if you try to do so.

I can’t say enough how much I love and recommend Propellerhead’s Reason 4 and although I have laid down some flaws don’t mis-intepret that. I am merely a power user and certain things frustrate me so my moaning here is more an attempt at getting the developers to start considering my moas as features. Not one of these moans stops you from working either which is blatantly where Propellerhead’s develeopment priority lies.

Did I say how much I love Reason 4 and how much you should buy it?? I did? Oh ok.

Go and buy Reason 4 now. You WILL NOT be dissapointed although you have to be prepared to spend a bunch of hours learning the software properlly before you can get some gold out of it. If you put the time in, the results will follow.

Propellerhead Reason 4 Premium Edition Bundle Specifications:
Reason 4

Windows:

• Windows XP or Vista
• Processor: Intel P4 / AMD Athlon XP or better
• Memory: 512 MB RAM minimum 1 GB recommended
• Screen resolution: 1024 x 768
• 2GB free hard disk space
• DVD reader
• 16-bit windows compatible audio card preferably with DirectX or ASIO drivers
• Recommended: MIDI keyboard with built-in MIDI interface or MIDI keyboard and MIDI interface

Mac OS:

• Mac OS X 10.4
• Processor: G4 1GHz and up or Intel Mac
• Memory: 512 MB RAM minimum 1 GB recommended
• Screen resolution: 1024×768
• 2GB free hard disk space
• DVD reader
• Recommended: MIDI keyboard with built-in MIDI interface or MIDI keyboard and MIDI interface

Preminum Edition requirements
System requirements

Minimum

• Windows:
• Intel P4 1.4GHz/AMD Athlon XP
• 1GB RAM
• DVD driveMacOS:
• Macintosh Intel
• 1GB RAM
• DVD drive

Recommended

• Windows:
• Intel P4 2.4GHz
• 2GB RAM
• Low-latency ASIO compatible soundcard
• DVD drive
• 4-octave MIDI controller capable of transmitting aftertouch
• Sustain pedalMacOS:
• Macintosh Intel
• 2GB RAM
• DVD drive
• 4-octave MIDI controller capable of transmitting aftertouch
• Sustain pedal

Propellerhead Reason 4 Premium Edition Bundle Features:

• Package includes 7 DVDs which give you Reason 4 and 4 Reason ReFills: Reason Drum Kits 2 Reason Pianos Abbey Road Keyboards Reason Electric Bass
• ReFills come in both 16- and 24-bit versionsReason 4
• Sound Modules
• Thor Polysonic Synthesizer
• NN19 basic sampler
• NN-XT advanced sampler
• Malstrom granular synthesizer
• Dr. Rex loop player
• Redrum pattern-based drum machine
• Subtractor analog subtractive synthesizer
• Combinator unit for building chains of instruments effects and pattern sequencersEffects units
• RV-7 digital reverb
• DDL-1 digital delay line
• D-11 foldback distortion
• ECF-42 envelope-controlled filter
• DF-101 chorus/flanger
• PH-90 phaser
• COMP-01 compressor
• PEQ2 2-band EQ
• RV7000 advanced reverb
• Scream 4 Sound Destruction Unit
• BV512 vocoder with 4 to 512 bands and equalization
• UN16 unisonSequencer Mixer and Utility modules
• RPG-8 Monophonic Arpeggiator
• ReGroove Mixer real-time groove console
• Matrix pattern-based sequencer
• Fully featured high precision multitrack sequencer
• 14 x 2 mixer w/ EQ and effects send/return
• 6:2 channel stereo line mixer
• Spider Audio Merger & Splitter
• Spider Control Voltage Merger & Splitter
• Remote mapping to external MIDI controllers and hardware control surfaces
• Enhanced browser for searching previewing and loading sounds and patchesMastering tools
• 4-band professional-level mastering EQ
• Stereo imager control with independent high and low band control
• Stereo compressor with sidechain input, soft-knee mode, and CV out
• Loudness maximizer with switchable look-ahead and soft clip controls