OT: Anybody excited for Reason v4?

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 5:57 pm

headquest wrote:
nebulae wrote:no
I think that one area where Reason/Propellerhead really score high is on CONTENT... and as that seems to be an area where Ableton are less good at, it underscores the fact that they can be a useful pair.

I agree, content is nice. But I checked out Thor and to my ears, it pales in comparison to VSTi like Sytrus and Zero Vector, both of which are 3+ years old, and let's not even talk about Sylenth1 or Zebra.

To me, Reason has some nice positives going for it...stability and the ability to pile on assloads of synths and fx. But the negatives are huge...closed system, rewire is a bitch, and the sound isn't as good as current VSTs (my opinion, disagree if you wish, but you won't change my mind). While the positives may have warranted $400 five years ago, these days, I just don't think it's worth the asking price, especially since VSTs have come such a long way.

But again, this is just my take. If Reason floats your boat, do use it, and make some music that makes me eat my words.

jb61264 · Post by **jb61264** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 7:32 pm

nebulae wrote:
headquest wrote:
nebulae wrote:no
I agree, content is nice. But I checked out Thor and to my ears, it pales in comparison to VSTi like Sytrus and Zero Vector, both of which are 3+ years old, and let's not even talk about Sylenth1 or Zebra.

You're such a Sytrus fanboy!

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 7:37 pm

jb61264 wrote:
nebulae wrote:
headquest wrote: I agree, content is nice. But I checked out Thor and to my ears, it pales in comparison to VSTi like Sytrus and Zero Vector, both of which are 3+ years old, and let's not even talk about Sylenth1 or Zebra.

You're such a Sytrus fanboy!

eat me, thor-boy

headquest · Post by **headquest** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 7:57 pm

I'll happily get both Sytrus AND thor - very different, and both outstanding synths

(although I do find sytrus fairly cpu heavy)

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:01 pm

That's funny, Sytrus is among the lightest on my CPU...I wonder if your patches have long releases on even LFO envelopes, which could increase CPU cycles. Sytrus is definitely a synth that rewards when you know how to program it.

headquest · Post by **headquest** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:07 pm

I'm sure it is (and I'm also sure it sounds better than Operator...).

I only used preset patches while demoing, so that's what I have to go on. As for comparissons with other VSTs, well I find a lot of them very heavy compared to Reason, which I am more used to. People often claim Reason's CPU efficient compared to VST synths, and from my experiences trying a few I would say that is true.

But damn - there's some really fine stuff being produced none the less! Sytrus and Zebra are certainly near the top of my personal wish list

jb61264 · Post by **jb61264** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:13 pm

nebulae wrote:
jb61264 wrote:
nebulae wrote: You're such a Sytrus fanboy!
eat me, thor-boy

Take that you little lemon vst lover

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:14 pm

I can see that they've got you real busy at work...

sparklepuff · Post by **sparklepuff** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:16 pm

nebulae wrote:I can see that they've got you real busy at work...

Pot, kettle, some blackness, hmm?

jb61264 · Post by **jb61264** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:17 pm

nebulae wrote:I can see that they've got you real busy at work...

Hey...had to sharpen up my Photoshop skills...that qualifies for IT work doesn't it?

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:24 pm

sparklepuff wrote:
nebulae wrote:I can see that they've got you real busy at work...
Pot, kettle, some blackness, hmm?

dude, no need to get all racial...geez, you freakin' white people

jlgrimes · Post by **jlgrimes** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 11:00 pm

aqua_tek wrote:i used to swear by reason, but over the past couple months i've used it less and less.

I'll keep it around, for old projects' sake, and for a couple decent refills i have here, but I'll stick to vers. 3. Not really feeling very tempted to upgrade to 4.

Reason 4 is nice. The sequencer is a big improvement.

Reason's Quantize functions now are pretty complete.

Sequencer is the biggest improvement. I made 4 tracks during the weekend with it. I haven't did that many tracks in a while.

Thor is definitely better sounding than Subtractor and Malstrom for some sounds but it isn't like the best softsynth out. It is nice sounding for the most part though and does overall pretty convincing analog emulations and comes with great presets.

Regroove Mixer is very innovative too. The one thing I hate about in Live is having only one global groove quantize setting to effect each track (unless you are counting swing 8ths and swing 16ths as different settings). Well now Reason allows you to use 32 different groove settings with individual swing + 1 global swing setting. And it comes with all of the mpc 60 swing settings plus settings from famous albums.

RPG8 is nice too. Its a simple to use arpegiattor.

For $129 I thought the upgrade was a no brainer.

jlgrimes · Post by **jlgrimes** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 11:11 pm

Khazul wrote:Reason is possibly the most frustrating application ever invented - on its own its excellent, immensely powerful. And if that all you need then good for you.

For the rest of us who use audio tracks, hardware synths, other plugins etc - its a complete f****** pain in the arse, the user experience is utterly horrible, its a total CPU hog - hence the frustration. It was was just crap on its own as well - noone would give a damn.

But the reality is there seems to be alot of us who used to use it, then for one reason or another needed to use a DAW as well and evntually gave up with reason completely because it was too much of a pain and you could reuse its effects other than by messing around choppnig and loading samples into it etc - bleh!

I wish the props would repackage the damn thing in a way that lets us wrap combinators up as VST/VSTi etc.

Until then - its a waste of HD space.

One of the joys of Reason is not having to worry about CPU overload. It is not a total pain in the arse. It's routing makes sense, has a nice drum machine, and has pretty much good total recall.

Its main drawbacks to me is,

Lack of audio in (for no direct sampling)

Lack of Rex file editor (If Recycle was integrated into Reason, Reason would be super sick.).

Lack of "live like" session style sequencing.

Other than that Reason has all of the effects I need for writing a song.

aisling · Post by **aisling** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 11:32 pm

jlgrimes wrote:
Khazul wrote:Reason is possibly the most frustrating application ever invented - on its own its excellent, immensely powerful. And if that all you need then good for you.

For the rest of us who use audio tracks, hardware synths, other plugins etc - its a complete f****** pain in the arse, the user experience is utterly horrible, its a total CPU hog - hence the frustration. It was was just crap on its own as well - noone would give a damn.

But the reality is there seems to be alot of us who used to use it, then for one reason or another needed to use a DAW as well and evntually gave up with reason completely because it was too much of a pain and you could reuse its effects other than by messing around choppnig and loading samples into it etc - bleh!

I wish the props would repackage the damn thing in a way that lets us wrap combinators up as VST/VSTi etc.

Until then - its a waste of HD space.

One of the joys of Reason is not having to worry about CPU overload. It is not a total pain in the arse. It's routing makes sense, has a nice drum machine, and has pretty much good total recall.

Its main drawbacks to me is,

Lack of audio in (for no direct sampling)

Lack of Rex file editor (If Recycle was integrated into Reason, Reason would be super sick.).

Lack of "live like" session style sequencing.

Other than that Reason has all of the effects I need for writing a song.

yeah recycle should be part of it I agree!

jb61264 · Post by **jb61264** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:46 am

Received my v4 upgrade from Mr. UPS delivery guy this afternoon and have been tweaking around with it since.

The sequencer is a huge improvement and the RPG-8 appegiator is cool too. I've also been toying around with the built-in ReGroove Mixer and these additions alone are well worth the $129 upgrade cost...then throw in Thor and begin able to string all of that together into a Combinator...excuse me while I wipe the drool off of my keyboard.

I'm sure some had legit gripes about previous versions of Reason but I find it hard to believe anybody wouldn't want to have this in their arsenal now...I'm sure the Props and/or Abes will figure out the latency (ReWire) issues before too long (fingers crossed)