Propellerheads Reason 7 Review - By What's The Buzz

Reason 7 In Depth Review

By WTB

Propellerhead’s Reason has come quite a long way since version 4. What's The Buzz gets stuck in and is surprised by the mixer and sound!

The Brief

Russ’ brief from Editor : “Check out the mixer in the new Reason 7”. Somewhat confused as my role at Andertons Blog is for the recording and standard audio things, I wondered what was going on. So reluctantly I thought I’d better check it out…

Right, time for some honesty. There was a time back in the 90s and just into the naughties when I was writing an awful lot of (bad, I think) dance music for both me and the band I was in, but also for the production libraries. I have to admit, Reason was, then, a godsend.

Transform yourself back to a time when the MIDI protocol was more over the hood rather than under it! In those days it was almost essential to know your control change numbers by heart.  Regardless, the Akai sampler ruled my set up: a beast of a S3200xl with all the added trimmings (not cheap!). Whichever sequencer I used (Cubase or Logic) was to some extent immaterial as they mostly offered the same thing: the ability to sequence and some small ability to play with a few tracks of audio. Quite limiting by today’s standards, but thinking back very good for getting creative. As so many have suggested – restrictions make creativity flourish.

Then Reason popped out of nowhere with all this cool stuff. Not just one plug in, but a multitude of synths, basic FX and even a mixer of sorts in version 1. It was phenomenal, and not as processor hungry as you thought it might have been meaning it could run alongside, concurrently with Logic. In those days of limited computing power this was quite amazing.

One criticism I had at the time was its audio engine. Things sounded like Reason rather than the synths they were trying to emulate. Phew – enter ReWire – the ability to inject the audio directly into your sequencer (later renamed DAW) and use the mixer and bussing there and things were slightly improved.

Over time I just moved away from the writing for libraries to dedicating my time to mastering. So for someone who once loved Reason, this will be an interesting journey, especially to see how the audio side has progressed.

Mixing It Up

Crikey, I’d been primed that the mixer in Reason 7 might look like something I’d been used to, but I really wasn’t expecting what I saw! “Have they really squeezed an SSL into Reason”. Now I understand what my editor was thinking.

Surely, I thought, making a comparison between a sub £300 piece of software to and SSL desk (of any generation) is crazy. We’ve become so emulation-numb that I wonder whether we ever remember the hardware that is being modelled. However, I was pleasantly surprised. This is not half bad at all. I wonder whether I could ReWire logic through Reason instead!

I fumbled about getting to grips with Reason once more, and loving every minute of it. Being honest I was too busy knocking up some substandard Trance that even the naughties would have been ashamed of, to notice the mixer, but something was different. Very different. It sounded larger, warmer and more detailed than I remember. Ok, I hear you say it has been many years and you have new monitors surely (sadly no – still got the same excellent pair!). Once I’d made a cup of tea and stopped reminiscing about those days I dreamt of writing tunes I’d like to have heard in The Fridge back in the day, I got to the matter in hand – what of this mixer then?

The mixer is uncannily organised in the same way as the SSL and has many aspects that feel familiar. However there is a graphical Reason/Propellerhead sheen to things. This is not a bad thing as the light grey really makes for seeing things on screen quick, decisive and bright. Logic, by contrast, could seem more dull under version X.

The first thing that hit me is the ability to phase reverse in the Reason mixer, just like a physical board. How brilliant is that. In many software DAWs these staple tricks need to be done by an offline process or elsewhere. Similarly with the Insert Pre and Dynamics Post EQ buttons. Very refreshing! Then there’s the Filters to Dynamics Side Chain, all features that I now wish were copied to other DAWs as standard.

The dynamics section is organised in a way that makes me feel right at home. Mixing with dynamics on every channel is something many console manufacturers soon noted would be excellent for their customers and really useful. No other DAW manufacturer places them in automatically like this do they? I like this feature in Reason.

As to how it sounds, well it is fantastic. The speed of the compressor under the fast mode seems almost a little too fast at times, but the processor reacts just like the real thing to me, although I’ve not got an SSL here to AB test it to. For bringing each element of your mix together, the channel strip compressor is the kit for the job. The LED indicators really do the job well and are responsive too. Similarly the gate/expander works well and will aid those mixing jobs we used to do like cutting out background noise fairly quickly without stripping out the silence from a track.

Next up is the EQ and I have to say this is excellent and is exactly what it should be – a good four band semi-parametric EQ (although the LF and HF can be switchable to a bell curve) with additional LF and HF filters. These can be switchable to create the key filters for the dynamics section.

To the top of the EQ area is a button with a waveform on. Clicking this show the rather traditional DAW window for an EQ and it behaves as such. A key difference is the Constant Q feature on the EQ, known as Equalizer E mode which sticks the Q at a standard width and is ace for quick fixing in your mixes.

Sonically this is a great EQ that will have you blending your mixes well in no time at all. The pin point accuracy is there if you need it to shape issues, but too are the large shelfs if you want to brighten up your top end for example.

Moving down the mixer, the Insert section is good in Reason 7. You insert your device by selecting it from the file icon at the bottom. Neatly, Reason maps four of the key controls to the four ‘soft’ knobs and buttons in the channel strip which is good and certainly can make things quick on the editing front.

The Send section consists of eight Auxiliaries all switchable pre and post fader. The rest of the channel strip is, as you’d expect, adorning the usual fader, pan, mute and solo. Additionally is a width knob which restricts the width of the left and right channels equally. This means that a stereo signal can be shifted to the right or left and still maintain a modicum of stereo width as seen in the ReDrum channel strip image.

One key feature of the SSL desk has always been its Master Buss and the associated dynamics. Propellerhead have gone to town here and included a dedicated master buss which begins with a Master Compressor which is absolutely beautiful in operation. To my ears this works quite faithfully to the iconic British console providing a glue I’d be usually looking for from some other form of buss compressor  or limiter.

The Default Mastering Suite is also something that is a fantastic feature for me coming back to reason. If I’m working in Reason, and not in my mastering studio, I could get cracking using the MClass products Propellerhead provide. These are good sounding plug ins which are very usable for the kinds of productions I’d be working within Reason.

Now what’s new to Version 7’s audio capabilities?

New to Reason 7 is the ability to quickly create a bus channel and to not only gain a fader to control say all your synth parts in one fell swoop, but also the bus channel is adorned with the usual EQ and dynamics you’d expect.

In a similar vein, you can also now set up parallel tracks. These permit you to then get on top of Parallel compression, or parallel anything you might wish to put your chops to.

Coming back to Reason

Essentially whilst only a slight upgrade mixer-wise to that of version 6, to me this has been a fantastic development from the Reason I left behind. The audio quality is light years ahead of version 4 for me and my memories the last time I used it. Also in terms of programming and usability, there’s a learning curve that is so shallow my six year old son could work it out almost! Reason is not only powerful, inspirational, but certainly great fun to use and write with. In no time at all I had a great tune pumping… I wonder if I should finish it off and send it to the library again…. Oh come to think about it, they’ve moved on to something called Dubstep!