Propellerhead Reason 3
Propellerhead's Reason 3 Music Creation
Propellerhead's Reason is cool - always has been. Reason 3 however, seamlessly bridges the gap between creative music-maker through to the mixing and mastering process all within an easy-to-use graphical interface modelled on the actual hardware equivalents.
What is Reason 3?
Reason, you quickly discover, has built its friendly interface around what you'd expect to find on real hardware racks, putting the emphasis on using the hardware rather than numerous drop-down menus and right-clicking.
This basic reasoning with design philosophy (geddit... reasoning! Pah!) actually makes it both extremely intuitive and, more importanly, fun to use! So much fun that Liam Howlett, music-masher behind Prodigy, recently said:
"If Reason hadn't come along, I would probably still be sitting in my studio, depressed, going, 'Aw, bloody 'ell, don't know what I'm gonna do', you know? Reason has literally changed my life, getting me back in the studio and enjoying it all again."
Liam Howlett, Prodigy
The rear of Reason 3
The racks within Reason 3, like their real-life counterparts, can, by hitting the TAB button, be flipped around to show you the back thus allowing you to visually connect the various instruments and effects units together with cables... as you would in the real world really, simple!
Reason Instruments (Synths, Samplers...)
The Malstrom Synth
Reason's instrument racks include:
- Redrum - Drum machine
- NNXT and NN19 - virtual sampler units
- Subtractor and Malstrom - Synthesisers
- Dr Rex - Loop player
Reason Effects Units
Reason 3 has all the effects you'd expect to find in any professional studio environment such as:
- Vocoder effects unit (Think: "Believe", by Cher)
- Distortion unit
- Compression unit
- Reverb
The compressor found in Reason's MCLass Mastering Suite (see below).
Combinator - New!
The Combinator allows you to create and save complex combinations of both effects and sound source set-ups as one single patch (settings) file which can, of course, be swapped and/or downloaded by fellow Reason freaks.
MClass Mastering Suite - New!
MClass is the final piece which has been added to Reason v3, completing the music production cycle from initial song-creation and idea-experimentation, right through to the final production-quality release.
The MClass Stereo Imager.
MClass houses all the mastering muscle you need with pro-quality equaliser, compressor, loudness maximiser and stereo imager packed into one unit which allows for combined preset saves, as well as making each effect available as a seperate unit for use in your Reason track.
Matrix Step Sequencer
The Matrix Step Sequencer is for triggering acid-like bass patterns from the synths using its easy graphical interface.
ReCycle
With ReCycle, you can slice up loop samples, re-arrange slices into different positions or just do strange things to them, s'up to you really innit!
ReCycle does all this really easily - A very handy tool.
Rewire
ReWire steals the features you feel are missing from Reason but exist in other music software packages, like for instance, Cubase SX. Just plug Reason into Cubase by enabliing the ReWire host (within Cubase or any other music app with ReWire-Host-support) to make the unique features of Cubase SX available to you.
Need a reason to buy Reason? Check out the link below. There are over 1000 reviews from users who've given it an average rating of 8/10 at zZounds!
Buy Reason at the cheapest price now or simply learn more.
If you need even more reasons to buy Reason 3, then you're clearly not able to reason at all... that makes you a propellerhead! (Couldn't resist, had to be done. No apologies offered.) To cure: Engage the heart - Reason is for making music!
