About Reason 1.0: «"Is Reason still as jaw-droppingly cool as it first seemed when it was introduced almost a year ago at Winter NAMM 2000?"
The Answer: Your jaw is about to come completely off!
I'll even go as far to say that Reason is as much of a milestone event in the development of electronic music as the ADAT and the VS-880 were for personal recording.»
Eheheh ^^
About the Subtractor: «This is a great synth in the analog modeling mode. It has a clear character that is a bit Nord-like, but it is actually much more versatile. It is also slightly reminiscent of the Roland Jupiters, Junos and SH series. It isn't as beefy or aggressive as the Moog or Virus sound, but it still works well for Basses and Leads. [...] Subtractor has a couple of trick little things that dramatically increase its sound creation possibilities. One is a huge array of waveforms that go far beyond the standard analog waves, deep into PPG territory and beyond. It even does some very convincing DX-like FM synth colors. Another innovation is that the phase of each Oscillator can be modulated. This doesn't seem that sexy until you hear it. It's like having PWM on steroids for every wave! Very interesting possibilities are there for combining this with Ring Mod and FM techniques.» =D
About the Reason 1.0 Effects: «The reverb, delay, distortion, chorus/flanger, phaser, envelope filter and compressor units are ALL as good or better than any Pro Tools or VST/Logic plugs I've used! They are simply excellent and highly musical sounding. [...]. Reason's FX units are of course much more powerful than any of the standard plug-in FX, simply because they can be quickly patched in a myriad of clever ways that haven't been possible before.»
To put in perspective, all this relates to what was available in 2001 ;)
About the Matrix: «This is a terrific software version of the old Moog/Arp modular analog step sequencers that put Giorgio Moroder, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk on the map. It can be used for many applications including modulating parameters in numerous Reason modules too.» =)
About the NN-19 Sample player: «This is the weakest and most disappointing of all the devices in Reason for a couple of key points:
1. No Velocity Switching at all. (ouch!....forget about any realistic instrument sounds...even the old Akai S-900 and the Roland Sound Canvas have velocity switching!)
2. Reason's sampler doesn't read any of the industry-standard sound library formats like Akai or Roland. For right now, it's just garden variety basic AIFF and Wave support.
3. Nothing too inspiring in the factory sample-set. The included sample library is serviceable, and nothing is blatantly bad sounding, but it's not too exciting either.....(admittedly, we're pretty biased and picky about sampled sounds since that's our business!)
4. Auto-mapping of samples is not as good as in EXS24, GIGA or Unity. The Octave shift parameter is also implemented incorrectly (Reason shifts the map's tuning instead of the MIDI Transposition) and coarse tuning is only adjustable in positive values.....weird...
So basically, this is a sampler for a Techno guy, not for a Composer-type guy. It's fine for loops and phrases and some very basic instrument sounds. But contrary to the claims made at the 2000 Winter NAMM demo, Reason's sampler is not even close to a replacement for something like Unity, EXS24, Gigastudio or a pro-level hardware sampler.....at least that's the case in version 1.0 of Reason.
In fairness, there are some very good points, too. The Legato and Portamento modes work perfectly (exactly like the Roland XV-5080), the multimode filters sound excellent, the Spread panning feature is very useful and like all of the Reason devices, the sampler is extremely easy to use.
Unfortunately, this is the only area where it seems that a poor tradeoff was made towards user-friendliness INSTEAD of power features that are absolutely necessary for developing and using high-quality sampled sounds. Sadly, you currently can't use any of our Spectrasonics CD-ROMs with it :-(» :>
Now I'm curious to see a review of NN-XT made by the same person ;P
And now for the traditional VST complain: «[...] It's a shame that the Propheads didn't use the well-accepted and easy to use VST 2.0 standard in addition to Rewire. It would sure make life easier now with all of the OMS headaches on the newer Macs. [...] None of the LFOs will sync to clock. This is an odd omission considering that this feature is always requested by technoheads and the Props are gods in technoland. Hopefully this can be updated as it would open up a lot of cool possibilities. (BTW, this is another great feature of the Emagic EXS24 sampler)»
Again, I would love to see a Reason 4 or at least a Thor review from the same person who wrote this in 2001, to see how the 2009 context would play with the comparisons with what's available now, both in software and in hardware :)
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