Reason is my best friend. It does have millions of sound libraries. I'm not familiar with the program you currently use. It can be used for any genre. I use it for acoustic pop. Death Cab for Cutie, for example, uses Reason. Black-eyed Peas also use it. The Crystal Method use it for all of their drums. It emulates hardware devices like synths, drum machines, loop machines, and tons of effects (phaser, delay, reverb, and lots more). It also has a suite of mastering devices. Very powerful, because you can visually route your cables to where ever you want. http://www.propellerhead.se They have great explanations of it, and a free demo to download.

Listen to the links in headchem's signature. He does some very impressive stuff with Reason, and it will kind of give you an idea of what can be done.

Sonar can do a lot of similar things, but you would have to buy a lot of virtual intruments and sample libraries to go with it. Reason has it all packaged up very nicely. I don't know how Reason handles multitrack recording, so you may want to look into how many tracks it can record at once. Sonar and Cubase are geared a little more toward multitrack audio recording & editing. Try demos of them and see what you like.

The one thing Reason doesn't do is record audio input... It's always been designed as an auxilary program to run through Rewire in tracking apps like ProTools, Cubase etc... Thanks for the props, Reggie! All my guitar and vocals were recorded in ProTools, but everything else is Reason.

Reason is everything that everyone has said and more. It is basically a sequencer that plays or triggers several (as much as your hardware supports it) samplers, drum modules, synths, etc. Plus, you can actually mixdown directly in it, of course, if you want to work with audio files as well, you might consider to link tit o almost every Multitrack recording software, say Protools, Sonar, Cubase, etc. using rewire technology. With this feature you will be able to retrieve audio directly to the mixer in protools for example, and gives you the ability to use plugins, etc. Certainly it does come with lots of sound libraries, but you can upgrade the quality of how it sounds by using external libraries, or you can make libraries on your own, it depends in what kind of music are you planning to work. I can say, for hip-hop, and related styles, most of the sounds that comes right out of the box will be enough. If you are planning to buy it, check out for the demo files that comes with the original CD. There´s one particulary amazing called "One More Reason" it is a latin jazz style song, that shows you how good could it sound. Drum sounds are almost real. That´s the other thing: You can record an electronic drum using a Alesis DM5 or similar triggering device, and make it sound via Redrum (Reason´s drum module) and using the sound bank you want. It´s really versatile. And if you are one of those who likes to "tweak" every button on a device, you will find in reason a paradise, since every button, fader, control can be automatized, and every cable can be connected in many different ways. You actually see the cables connecting all the gear, like a giant rack....

Hope that this will help you to have a better idea, but try to look at it in action, to see what i mean.

good luck!

Juan

To my knowledge you cannot record audio in reason it is therefore crap for any 'real music'. On its own it is not in my opinion a serious bit of kit, as an addition to Logic/Protools/Cubase it is powerful, particularly if you want to get (formulaic) ideas together quickly. But it is crap, its all 16 bit, its oscillators sound dreadful, its LFO's can't be retriggred, no proper verbs etc. etc. etc.

Cunningly designed and very easy to use, making millions- good luck to 'em. It is capable of some powerful and creative song writing if you scratch the surface of it which many reason users do not do because they use it because its easy and they are lazy.

Thanks for the opinions and information. It's a lot clearer what reason is now.

jahtao wrote: To my knowledge you cannot record audio in reason it is therefore crap for any 'real music'. On its own it is not in my opinion a serious bit of kit, as an addition to Logic/Protools/Cubase it is powerful, particularly if you want to get (formulaic) ideas together quickly. But it is crap, its all 16 bit, its oscillators sound dreadful, its LFO's can't be retriggred, no proper verbs etc. etc. etc.

Cunningly designed and very easy to use, making millions- good luck to 'em. It is capable of some powerful and creative song writing if you scratch the surface of it which many reason users do not do because they use it because its easy and they are lazy.

Having said all this, do prefer a different all-in-one sequencer program? I know you can get better quality by going out and buying different virtual instruments and samples and stuff separately, but I am just curious.

Me? I'm a logic man.

For the type of music reason is designed for i can't believe you can't retrigger the LFO's, 'mods' in reason-speak, (controlling filter cutoff for eg) on subtractor or malstron. Am i wrong?

jahtao wrote: Am i wrong?

Not as far as I know. I have been getting info to make recommendations to a friend wanting to get into sequencing on a computer. He was thinking either Mac--in which case I may recommend Logic if he can swing it--, or PC--in which case I recommended Reason.

He'll probably need to record a vocal track or guitar track, so does anybody know if any of the freeby recording softwares can do rewire?
Am I hijacking this thread? Yes I think so. :-?

Reason 2.0 and above can play 24 bit samples in 24 bit quality and does not truncate 24 bit samples - some sounds, especially refills include 24 bit and 16 bit sounds.

Reason is la rack of virtual instruments (propeellerhead never siad it was a digital recording studio) - it includes synthesizers, loop player and drum machine - this does not make it 'crap' - it has some great sounding samples of pianos, strings, woodwinds, rhodes etc. plus some very effective analog sounds in subtractor with a lot of flexibility and changeable parameters and a great quirky graintable synth in malmstrom.

Yes, it does not record audio - however, no-one ever tried to market it as a DAW like Cubase or Sonar etc. The quality of the effects units has improved considerably in version 2.5 and 3.0 and the reverbs, delays and distortion etc. are usable and effective.

Reason may not be as good as owning a bunch of top of the range hardware synths or a standalone vst sampler, vst analog, vst drums etc but to buy all of those stand alone apps would cost a lot more than buying Reason.

I use it a lot for a variety of sounds and I mostly play pop rock/indie stuff. If you like the effects and mixing capabilities of Sonar, Logic, Cubase etc. rewire the sounds and control it your DAW's mixer. It is great for that, things like Redrum allowing each sound to be individually output on it's own rewire channel is great (many drum machines only allow stereo out or 4 outputs)

It is one of the most widely misunderstood products on the market and although The Prodigy etc. use it religiously on dance/trance/hip hop a creative mind can make it useful for any genre of music. It has a wide variety of sounds that do sound great and if that's not enough then by all means get what you need, but as a general sound device you won't find anything else as versatile in one application at the price...

P.S.

Jahtao - is music only real if you play a guitar or a real piano???

I play everything by hand into reason - it is not just a plaything for a bored kid who doesn't know how to play - just like in cubase, logic etc you can cut and paste midi but it is not designed like Acid to just be a loop player and cut and paste 4 or 8 bar sampled chord sequences or basslines etc. It is not an ideal lazy man's tool at all. It is mostly a collection of decent (maybe not kurzweil quality etc but for 99% of the population it's sounds are authentic and good) keyboard and drum sounds that can be mixed and effected in Reason's mixer or rewired to Cubase, Logic etc's mixer for processing.

You can record the music in reason and then use a freeware like audacity to dub vocals on top and still sound great. I am a guitar player and run Cubase SX as my DAW but rewire Reason's drums and often stuff from NNXT like the pianos, strings etc. which people often overlook in Reason - the piano might not be as good as a standalone like 'The Grand' etc. but it is still decent and useable.

You make a lot of generalizations and judgements - if you spent a couple of weeks really working out the program you would realize Reason has a lot of depth to it but like Fruity Loops, it is often misused or underused by people with limited talent but any tool is only as good as the workman !!!