User reviews: PropellerHead Reason 3.0

12/01/11

yoTrakkz's review "Old but good, buy the updated version"

There weren't any compatibility issues when I was installing ReCycle.

The setup of ReCycle is confusing at first but it is easier if you understand waveforms and can identify where each beat is in the loop you are working with. The manual gets pretty hairy at times, it's easier to have somebody teach you how to use it. Fortunately that's how I learned how to use it. The basic functions of ReCycle are pretty easy to access. There isn't a lot of backtracking and changing settings involved with using the program.

Suitability/Performance

The software is designed to isolate each element in a drum loop. If a drum loop is put into ReCycle, the program isolates each note and allows you to set the tempo to a BPM of your choice. These loops can then be used in programs like Logic and Reason. Overall, the program itself identifies 90% of the notes played in each loop. It is up to the user to isolate each note from there. It actually can get pretty tricky if you are dealing with a complex loop, but overall, it's not too difficult. It allows you to work with an astonishing number of samples and loops that would be difficult, if not impossible, to work with otherwise. There's isn't a whole lot of gear necessary to run this program, so the configuration doesn't really provide any issues that need to be dealt with. I've used this program for about six months. After a few days I was really good at doing loops, which was helpful.

Overall Opinion

I feel as though I would use this program more than I do. Considering I prefer to record live instruments, and I'm more of a ProTools guy anyway, this isn't really as helpful as I would have hoped. That being said, if processing drum loops and using them for your own compositions is your thing, this is a pretty great program. You'd probably having a difficult time without this or a similar program. I did not try any other models; the studio I work at purchased this. I think most software is overpriced, but compared to most audio programs this one isn't too bad. I personally wouldn't unless I needed to use Logic and drum loops more. Currently I have no use for it.

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02/10/09

moosers's review

Getting Started

Propellerhead Reason 3.0 is a multi purpose electronic music sequencer. It works on its own for composing MIDI and virtual based instruments and also can be rewired into an audio sequencer like Pro Tools or Cubase. I was able to install Reason 3.0 easily on a number of different systems. It is easy to do as I've never had an compatibility issues. I don't have a manual for this software, but it could definitley come in handy as the program is pretty in depth.

Suitability/Performance

I am currently running Reason 3.0 on a Mac Book Pro with a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM. I used to run it on a Hewlett Packard lap top with a 3.0 Ghz processor and 2 GB of RAM. I have been able to run this smoothly on both systems both as a stand alone and running it through Pro Tools LE via rewire. Reason 3.0 has run smoothly since I installed it.

Overall Opinion

I've been using Reason 3.0 for about three or four years. I use it for programming drum beats to use as a scratch track. I use it with an M-Audio Keystation 49e to play the virtual instrument in the sequencer. I mostly use the redrum and looper sections of this program, but the synthesizers also sound great. I usually put the drum beat back into Pro Tools and record acoustic instruments over it. Reason is a powerful piece of software with a lot of capabilities. I don't know what other software I would compare this to other than Apple Logic as they are somewhat similar. I like both programs for different reasons and both work great in a number of different situations. I love using Reason 3.0 and hope I am able to upgrade to Reason 4 as I have heard great things about it!

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10/31/08

FP User Reviews's review

Getting Started

I love the workflow of Reason, I can change things on the fly. For instance Reason allows me to change the cabling real quick from one one module into another. I love how it doesn't take that much cpu power, which is great.

$400 plus tax

At first it was pretty challenging however after a couple hours I figured out the concept of how everything worked.

Suitability/Performance

Since reason does not support vst, they "force" the users to create their own unique sounds, thus making the users more creative. Other than that, the stock sounds are good but needed to be eq'ed for that fatter/fuller sound.

I've never had any problems, propellerheads are great because they allow the users to download patches for glitches and such.

Overall Opinion

Reason is my arsenal, it is the center piece of my studio.

Originally posted on FutureProducers.com

Posted by: phenombeats ( 3-, 2006)

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10/31/08

FP User Reviews's review

Getting Started

Every single feature in reason is hot! The only thing they should have incorporated is a way to pitch a sample without changing its speed and length like in FL Studio's sampler.

Price paid

$200

Alot of features but really simple to understand and use. Great Stuff!!

Suitability/Performance

The sound quality is awsome, great built in samples!

The quality is awsome, no crashes as yet.

Overall Opinion

I absolutely love it! it's a real studio!

Originally posted on FutureProducers.com

Posted by: cyptm ( 3-, 2006)

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10/31/08

FP User Reviews's review

Getting Started

I wish there was an onboard chopper other than that Im very very satisfied.

Price paid

$130

very easy to use.

Suitability/Performance

Reason has great sounds out of the box. Its a sound designers dream as well offering great tools for tweaking and saving sounds. My only problem with it is its standalone mixer which for some reason dampens the output but that can be worked around via rewire.

sound quality is excellent except for the mixer

Overall Opinion

Im never leaving reason

Originally posted on FutureProducers.com

Posted by: Xabiton ( 3-, 2006)

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10/31/08

FP User Reviews's review

Getting Started

I really liked reason at first, I thought it was amazing as i was switching from FL Studio to Reason, the intial jump in quality was pretty astonding. After about 1 1/2-2 years of using the program, however, i am wishing it had vsti support and/or audio recording, and more synths and/or effects. The cable routing however helps to remedy this (with the combinator you can practically piece together new instruments). The sound library it comes with is pretty good and has a good variety but i wouldn't say the quality is spectacular. If you like using samples you will probably love reason, but if you like programming more of your sounds, with only 2 different synths to chose from (and the malstrom sounds pretty poor) you will feel pretty limited in what you can do.

Price paid

450$ usd

If you are familar with other sequencer programs its pretty easy to learn. The routing is pretty straightforward and doesn't take long to get the hang of it. Its a bit daunting at first since there is a lot it can do but if you read the manual or tutorials it makes a lot of sense quickly. The sequencer is a bit quirky though and I feel like my work doesn't go as smoothly as it did with fruity- a big dissapointment as it really affects the quality of the pieces i do or the amount that never get finished.

Suitability/Performance

Sound quality is good. Its very easy to make your tracks thump via the scream 4 and the new mastering suite, which really brings the volume up a couple notches and makes your tracks sound tight.

Never really have had a problem with it. Its definately stable, and it doesn't use much cpu power. It does what its supposed to do flawlessly.

Overall Opinion

I'm really starting to dislike reason as I feel pretty limited to what i can do. It's a little awkward to work with and my songs really show the discomfort. No matter what kind of sound im after im always using the same set ups. Rewiring is an option but it leads to compatibility issues, more cpu use, crashes etc- if you like using patches/presets, and/or samples, you will probably love reason if you are considering buying it. If you are like me and like making your own sounds on some of the incredible vsti softsynths out there, you probably won't. Lots of potential, but it leaves out some huge features.

Originally posted on FutureProducers.com

Posted by: omgznub ( 3-, 2006)

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10/31/08

FP User Reviews's review

Getting Started

Reason is unique in that it makes patching things together in various ways very, very intuitive and encourages inventive thinking. I've found many times while using this program, I'll be at work and I think of a great way I could make an incredible sound happen, by routing a synth through some modules in a certain way, or getting a synth envelope to control a drum's pitch in the drum module or something, and Reason makes that all super-easy. The next best thing is Reaktor, which offers much more in the way of modular possibilities, but much less in terms of sequencing. When trying to use Cubase and Live after using Reason, I often get frustrated with not being able to route things the way I want. The feature that Reason really lacks is how it addresses audio files. You can't record audio in or put audio tracks through effects, unless you want to bring the audio through sampling-style, through the loop sampler, drum machine, or one of the keyboard samplers. You can do it, and I've made songs with vocoded lyrics (did I mention the vocoder is amazing?), samples of people talking dropped in, and cut-up guitar. But working with audio in Reason is hard, and it's never going to get easier, because of a strict agreement that propellerheads has with Steinberg: Steinberg releases Reason, and Propellerheads stays away from audio tracks. You can always drag reason in as a rewire slave, but I always find that to be a big pain in the butt. I know a lot of people who use Reason just for generating amazing sounds, and then record them and manipulate them in Cubase or Live. This is what I do a lot of the time as well. Overall Reason has a very interesting and unique feature set, perfect for making almsot any kind of electronic music, but not so great for making music that requires lots of audio tracks.

Price paid

$400

Reason is a total cinch to use. Once you figure out the basics of how it works, it's easy to learn more and more about it, and the process of learning how to use Reason is basically just learning about how electronic music works. If you've ever used a midi-controlled synth, a midi sequencer, a drum machine and some effects pedals before, Reason will be no problem, and if you start your electronic music adventure with Reason (as I did), you can walk up to pretty much any old piece of hardware and figure it out almost immediately. Sequencing out tracks is simple, using the envelopes (with which you can control anything except for the song tempo, which is unadjustable for some reason), is super-simple, and it all makes a lot of sense. Unlike Cubase.

Suitability/Performance

Not the best synth sounds. The SubTractor subtractive analog-style synth can make sounds that are as interesting, crazy, abrasive, smooth, dreamy, and whatever else as you can imagine, but none of it has the warmth and thickness of Arturia's line of vst softsynths, like the minimoog, moog modular or arp 2600. I think this is mainly because it only supports one oscillator per voice, so there's no unison, and the synth outputs in mono, so there's no stereo separation. The Malstrom has stereo output, but again no unison, and the unison effect box doesn't come close to reproducing the sound of real unison. That said, the NN-XT sampler, on the other hand, has a great sound. The reverb is solid and can be very smooth and expansive, atmospheric etc. The Scream 4 distortion box also offers really high-quality distortion effects, and the little family of mastering units is useful. Also worth mentioning is the vocoder, which in my opinion rivals Native Instruments Vokator in terms of sound.

Reason just doesn't crash, unless you really mess with it, like if you feed back the mixer into itself in some crazy way, I forget how I've done it, but by really trying, I can make it crash somehow. But in regular use, it's easy to forget to save, because it's super-stable. Mostly because it's all completely proprietary, so there's no VSTs or DXis or RTAS plugins to mess with it. It's also really good on your CPU - you can write a big, thick song without crackling out your chip.

Overall Opinion

I guess I kind of started out with Reason. I've started using all the craziest software out there, using Live with all those rad arturia synths, which sound better than Reason, and I can technically get a better sound out of Live, but I still fire up Reason when I've got an idea for an electronic song, and I still make amazing songs in it, because it's easy to get to know, and it's easy to make weird and amazing patches with it and get really custom, which is what I like, so for me Reason gets the most love of any of my software.

Originally posted on FutureProducers.com

Posted by: agreatwhitebird ( 2-, 2006)

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10/31/08

FP User Reviews's review

Getting Started

Lot's of features in the package, some hard to work with, some aren't. Beginner, advanced, it doesn't matter. Refills are very fine to work with, really making the production sound better. But at the other side, there is a lack of VST/VSTi support..

Price paid

369 Euro

In the beginning: No. But that's just a matter of time.

Suitability/Performance

Sounding good. Redrum is really fine to work with, same as the NN-XT sampler within the package. Most of them sound good, some of them cheap, but that is just a matter of tuning them.

Had to get the disc to Feedback again (Dutch music shop), something was wrong with it, but got another, and things are all fine.

Overall Opinion

More a hardware fan myself, but this is going to be a standard in my production process. For sure.

Originally posted on FutureProducers.com

Posted by: 989NL (January 2-, 2005)

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10/31/08

FP User Reviews's review

Getting Started

Good features, every software has some features that others don't. Reason lacks midi out and vst support though.

Price paid

$399.98

I began with FL Studio and picked it up within the first couple hours. Reason takes a little bit longer to get the hang of. But it is still much easier to figure out than progs such as cubase.

Suitability/Performance

The sound quality from the refills that come with reason are simply amazing. wow. You can achieve excellent sound quality with most of the stuff in reason if you know what you're doing... If you want a simple solution to sound quality you can achieve it in other programs more easily using plugins.

No problems or unexpected error, thereve' been a lot of bugs in other software i've used. haven't found any yet here.

Overall Opinion

I love the way everything looks in reason, the layout is nice and I really like that fact that you can learn a little about harware while using it. I think that's very innovative.

Originally posted on FutureProducers.com

Posted by: Esthetix ( 9-, 2005)

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10/31/08

FP User Reviews's review

Getting Started

As far as final production is concerned the Mastering suite units, 4-Band Parametric EQ with low cut, compressor, limiter & stereo imager provide the possiblity of giving it the "fat" sound it was lacking before.(though it was tediously possible and fun only in a geeky kind of way) The Combinator unit allows creating new instrument/fx presets out of multiple units. There are four knobs and buttons that can be assigned the any of the controls of the units contained within. Two freely assignable slots in the Cobinator's Programmer allow one knob to be linked to three controls(eg. cutoff, resonance, output level). There's keymapping as well and more. I'll stop here before I get carried away into all the functions and other units. But I think this highlights the main bits. An option to switch the outputs of the knobs of the Combinator between linear and logarithmic would be nice. Together with the new line mixer(simple, six stereo channels) and audio/cv merger/splitters, setups only theoretically possible in a studio with a 19" hardware rack can be created - "the cpu's the limit". Also new is a growing list of directly suported controllers (including motorised faders) so it saves a lot of time not having to create custom mappings. There still is need for an external audio editor and I recommend the use of ReCycle. I wouldn't want to see audio editing functions within Reason though. Something could be incorporated though to make the inclusion of long audio files (eg. vocal tracks) easier. I would also like to see a realtime clock to make the production for specific purposes (eg videos) easier and also a spectral analyzer for the mastering. At that price (I think it's great value for money) they can't expect everyone who buys it to also be able to afford studio qulity amps, monitors and room. Some keyboard shortcuts for use within the sequencer would be nice. Most "missing" features can added by using the ReWire function to combine Reason with software such as Ableton Live, Cakewalk Sonar, Cubase, Fruity Loops... .

Price paid

$460USD

Anyone with some experience in sequencing and soft- or hardware- synths should have no problems using Reason. There are good tutorials on the Propellerhead website. The possibilty to route audio and cv can be little confusing if you don't know what the controls on the units do. Yet cool things can be created accidentally ;) The sequencer although allowing almost all functions to be controlled requires a lot of moving the mouse about and clicking to select different tools and views. I find this can disrupt the workflow unless one has the speed and precison of an experienced CS-player. It would be nice to be able to set points and tangents for the controller curves instead of having to draw them with the mouse.

Suitability/Performance

Excellent sound quality possible. Has become much easier with the introduction of mastering units and Combinator device(see features) in 3.0. Only reason some of the out of the box sounds are thin is because there are no fx on them.

Although the last update to Reason 3.0.4 was actually a whole new installation, it was released so fast that I didn't have the time to encounter any of the bugs mentioned in 3.0 and 3.0.3. I find the soundquality to cpu load very high compared to other solutions. ie a synth within in Reason produces less cpu load than most other softsynths if they are set up to produce the same sound. If wasn't for the issues with the usability of the sequencer, I'd give Reson higher ratings for overall quality.

Overall Opinion

Lots!!! I haven't heard any single software soltution capable of producing such a sound at a practical cpu load. I'll give a ten out of ten whe they incorporate the features I mentioned in "Features" and "Usability".

Originally posted on FutureProducers.com

Posted by: mousejunkie ( 9-, 2005)

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PropellerHead Reason 3.0

PropellerHead Reason 3.0 user reviews ( 7/10) - 40 user reviews