Reason 10 Review

I had this mental picture of me rubbing my hands together and bearing a sinister grin on my face in anticipation for writing this post. I might be giddy with excitement because I'm a Reason nut, but I can't say a lot of producers and mix engineers in Naija share my enthusiasm. If you're wondering why this is so, well here are some of the reasons:

- Reason is too manual - you will need audio engineering skills.
- It has a steep learning curve - most people just want to make fire beats ASAP.
- It is more suited for makers of electronic music - afro beats is more percussive than synth based.

But the most important reason why it's not favoured by many is it's lack of VST support.

So the big question is, can Reason 10 steer some people away from the hate divide into love? We'll have to wait and see but in the meantime let's look at some of its strengths and weaknesses.

PROS

Still Limitless Routing: Probably the reason why most people fell in love with the program in the first place. Reason is second to none when it comes to routing flexibility, you can literally connect anything to...well...anything. This gives room for creativity and if you're into digital sound synthesis, this is a priceless feature.

Virtual Instruments: Reason 10 ships with a couple of great sounding virtual instruments from Sound Iron and two synthesizers. The virtual instruments (Humana, Klang and Pangea) are organically sampled voice, percussion and ethnic instruments housed in a modular synth for tweaking and effects.

However, where the Propellerhead guys really outdid themselves is in the synthesizers, Europa and Grain. Grain, a big brother to the Mälstrom graintable synthesizer and Europa, a whole new shape-shifting synth are modern looking instruments that produce the coolest to weirdest sounds. I'll need another post for these two but in all honesty they are out of this world!

Radical Piano and Synchronus, formerly rack extensions* now ship with Reason 10 contents.

VST Support: This feature was actually introduced with version 9.5 but version 10 came out only few months after so it's still worth noting as a new feature. Now you can enjoy your favourite vst's in Reason.

Combine this with Reason's extensive routing capabilities and you've got an application that is somewhat only limited to the processing power of your PC or Mac.

CONS

Weak Audio Editing: If you want to become that DAW that encourages people not to leave it's environment, your audio editing functions have to be up to par. Users will most likely need to leave Reason to perform detailed audio editing functions.

The key word here is "detailed" because simple audio functions like gain, cut, fade and the likes are done pretty easily in Reason 10, but when it's time to get surgical, you'll probably be disappointed.

Mixer Mess: Mixing a song with a lot of mixer channels without the ability to hide some you don't need at that moment or group them in folder tracks can be cumbersome and in fact overwhelming.

Reason's mixer is very intuitive and modelled after standard hardware mixing consoles, the 'hide mixer tracks' function could have easily made it one of the best out there.

32 bit VST's Won't Work: In all fairness this isn't just unique to Reason 10 as any 64-bit DAW won't allow 32-bit plugs work. Although there are applications called 'VST bridges' that allow you run 32-bit plugs on 64-bit DAW's but there are just a couple out there for now.

Other Little Things
No video support, so you still can't score a movie. You can't export as mp3 and I feel their file extension name ".reason" is a bit too long. Also, their content downloader will frustrate you if your internet connection isn't fast; prepare to start all over if network fails you at 99%.

But come on, quantizing audio is as easy as ABC, workflow is amazing and intuitive once you get the hang of it, the program looks good plus you have thousands of rack extensions and VST's at your disposal.

One of the not so popular strengths of Reason lies in its software coding. Reason is probably the most stable DAW I know, plus it uses minimal CPU resources for a program that does so much. It will hardly freeze abruptly or act abnormally when performing tasking jobs. This has been the case since its earlier versions.

In General
Propellerhead's Reason is still one of the most powerful DAWs out there, you might never really use up to 10 percent of its potential but the results will amaze you. If you don't mind using the Rewire protocol (which they created) you'll get the best of both worlds, the host software (e.g. Cubase) for recording/audio editing and Reason for making those fire beats.

Yes it's not a DAW for everybody, but ask anyone who is a believer and they'll tell you how addictive it can get once you start using it.

* Rack extensions (.Re) are Reason's proprietary format open to 3rd party software developers.

Written by
Chidi "Tite" Nnadi