Well, the “5 Days of Reason 5″ is over. I think one of the more exciting announcements is one that they have not highlighted:
Reason 5 and Record 1.5 lets you use multiple MIDI keyboards, pads, and controllers for playing and recording your instruments. Lock a 16-pad controller to a Kong, and use a keyboard to play your synths. Or use two keyboards on stage for controlling different Reason instruments.
Record Notes on Multiple Tracks - Reason 5 and Record 1.5 lets you use multiple MIDI keyboards, pads, and controllers for playing and recording your instruments. Lock a 16-pad controller to a Kong, and use a keyboard to play your synths. Or use two keyboards on stage for controlling different Reason instruments.
A friend of mine has been jonesin’ for this for years.
Below are the movies they posted for each highlighted feature.?(I’ll list the other “less celebrated” changes after the movies.)?’Course the truly interesting deal with all of these is this: Given all of the connections possible betwixt and between the Reason modules, what really weird and wonderful stuff can you do patching this stuff together in unexpected ways?
Dr. OctoRex – This is one of the cooler additions in my book.
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Blocks – This is extremely cool. On the surface, it seems a bit “Ableton-esque”, but it is probably closer in concept to Cubase’s Arranger mode or DP’s Song mode (or going further back, sequences and subsequences from Opcode’s venerable StudioVision). This however, looks to be a lot easier to deal with.
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Neptune – Dear lord I hope this isn’t just another abusable auto tune….
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Live Sampling – There was a time this may have excited me, but I’m ho-hum on it. Given all of the other software tools at my disposal, and considering that on the rare occasions I do sample something these days it is outside of the studio, I doubt if I’ll use this much.
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Kong Drum Designer – Lots of stuff like this out there these days. Looks capable and I guess it’s nice to have one in the Reason toolbox if this is your thing.
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Apart from the big feature additions, there are of course tons of smaller additions and changes to Reason 5 and Record 1.5.
- Automatic Self-Contain of Samples (incl from ReFills) - Make your songs self-contained by embedding samples and even ReFill sounds in your file. Reason 5′s self-contained song format makes collaborating with your friends a breeze. Even breezier than before actually.
- Record Notes on Multiple Tracks - Reason 5 and Record 1.5 lets you use multiple MIDI keyboards, pads, and controllers for playing and recording your instruments. Lock a 16-pad controller to a Kong, and use a keyboard to play your synths. Or use two keyboards on stage for controlling different Reason instruments.
- Scale Clips by Resizing - By pressing the alt or option key, Record 1.5 lets you timestretch individual clips. Now you can stretch loops to match your song’s tempo, or expand samples to eight times the length for completely new sounds.
- Mute Tool - The new Mute tool lets you click to mute and unmute clips. Use it to mute sections, or create variations in your Blocks.
- Set and move loop functions - Select a clip and press L to immediately set the loop points to the selection. Use the new Remote parameters for real-time control of the loop points from your MIDI controller.
- Tap Tempo - New in the transport panel is the Tap Tempo button.
- Improved key commands for laptop use - Reason 5 and Record 1.5 works even better on your laptop – or any keyboard missing a numeric pad. The new key commands lets you control play, loop, record and more from your keyboard.
- Hierarchical menus in Combinator programmer - A sound designer favorite, the Combinator’s programmer window is now even easier to use with hierarchical menus for fast patching.
- Additional CV inputs on Combinator - The Combinator in Reason 5 is expanded with new CV inputs on the back. The four new CV inputs can be used to control any parameter on the contained devices, providing even more options and possibilities for sound designers.
- Updated Help system (incl Help on Mac) - Reason 5 and Record 1.5 comes with a new and better built-in help system, on both Mac and Windows.
- Normalize and reverse audio clips – In Record 1.5 you can normalize and reverse your recorded audio clips.
- Bounce clip to sample - When using Reason & Record, you can now bounce audio recordings to samples, so you can use them in Reason devices such as Kong, Redrum, NN-XT and NN-19.
- Reason 5 updates - In Reason 5 there are tons of changes to bring Reason up to speed with Record. These changes include advanced multi core support, improved cable management in the rack, faster sample loading, on-screen piano keyboard, sequencer usability improvements and much much more.
How much will it cost? Upgrade to Reason 5 from any version of Reason is $129. The Record upgrade is free to owners of Record 1.0. Other pricing is below.
- Record for Reason Owners (includes Reason 5 upgrade): EUR €149 / USD $169
- Reason 5 Upgrade from any version of Reason or Record Reason Duo: EUR € 99 / USD $129
- Record 1.5 Upgrade from any version: free download
- Record Reason Duo: EUR €405 / USD $449
- Reason 5: EUR €305 / USD $349
- Record 1.5: EUR €279 / USD $299
