Key Of Grey

June 2nd, 2010 – In case you’re one of the three people left out there that hasn’t heard the news, Propellerhead has posted teaser videos for the forthcoming Reason 5. I didn’t post about it last week because they were releasing a feature each day and I figured it’d be best to just post about it when all the info was out.

Reason 5 adds many features that users have been asking for. The Dr. Rex player has been upgraded to the Dr. OctoRex that, as the name implies, allows you to load 8 loops at once. Neptune is a new pitch correction and modification plugin that allows effects from subtle to T-Pain. Before Record, this would have been a useless feature, but as you can now record long vocal sections with Record, it’s a welcome feature that almost all other DAWs include out of the box.

Reason 5 also adds Kong, a drum designer that merges all the features you’d expect from hardware like the MPC with the tweakability that software allows. Reason and Record have some organizational changes as well, with the added ability to create song chunks and move around the whole arrangement easily. This feature is also found in most other DAWs. Perhaps the most talked about feature of the new Reason is its sampling abilities. To many Propellerhead fans, this feature should have been implemented from version one, so they are understandably elated.

To be honest, I only use Reason as a ReWire slave to Logic. In my set up, Reason’s fantastic sounding synths become a rack in Logic’s more fully-featured environment. I tried the Record beta but I wasn’t able to use its full functionality so I didn’t explore it beyond some light tinkering. Now that Record is coming up to version 1.5, it’s adding “DAW” capabilities to Reason’s awesome instruments, making the pair more enticing as a standalone solution. I dig the direction Propellerhead is going with Reason and Record with all the features coming in Reason 5 and Record 1.5, I’ll have to give the pair a closer look.

Propellerhead