There’s a steep learning curve, even for someone such as myself who has been programming in Reason for years, there’s nothing in Reason 4 I can’t figure out, but the addition of the recording tracks within that rack has hugely complicated the process – but in a good way of course!

I’ve been playing with the realtime vocoder, so you can dial up your carrier track from Maelstrom or Thor or whatever, then just do your Herbie Hancock impressions with a microphone.

It recognises all the Reason refills, as you would expect, and I’ve had no problem with it instantly seeing my USB keyboard.

There’s a disclaimer when you fire up the Beta that it is slower than the final product will be, but I’ve noticed no sluggish action at all, no spinning pizza wheels here (I’m on Apple OSX, Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM Macbook Pro).

As someone who started way back in ‘88 working in Cubase on the Atari, I’ve seen nothing that has excited me this much (in terms of audio sequencing and recording!) since.

Anyone using Reason already will love this.

The downside is that I hear they will be protecting their software via the use of a USB dongle – having been ripped off by the majority of Reason users over the years, you can’t blame them.

I don’t like having to waste a precious USB port on a copy protection system, but at a recent seminar in London, out of a room of 150 people or so, only myself and my colleague put our hands up when the question was put to the room “how many people have a registered bought and paid for copy?”

So all those Reason users who have up to now been freeloading it will now have to pay up, it seems!!

The inclusion of the Pod series of guitar amp modelling is a good one, and there is also an ID8 series of simplified instruments, can’t see why yet, but it might just be a quick way of nailing ideas.

I’ve a lot to learn from this software, and I’m looking forward to getting properly stuck into it, but so far I can see very little to be critical of.

Reason and Propellerhead have answered their critics and provided a direct audio input system, sure, if you’re a Logic expert, or Cubase VST is your main sequencer, you may not want to make the switch, but for anyone who has been using the original solid state electronics for years – Reason/Record and the ability to go round the back and manually wire up weird and wonderful configurations just like the real thing – is for me unbeatable as a studio/sequencer.

pk

Then came version 4. They made the sequencer as advanced and complex as Cubase/Sonar/Logic and added an allround monster synth, instead of sticking with simple devices for specific purposes.

At last there is audio for Reason. But I guess it’s to late and to expensive: Reason 449, – Record 299, – makes 748, -. With such a price it has to compete with all the other DAW’s but I fail to see it’s edge… Record better has some tricks up it’s sleeve, but I found nothing special on the propellerheads website about it, yet…

Bottom line: this guy switched from Reaon to Logic because of Audio, but he certainely won’t be switching back to Reason for Record!

R

This software supports both Mac and Windows. I’m actually testing it on my Windows box.