Reason 9 arrives with no new synth shock
Propellerhead have just released a brand new version of their popular retro-synth-workstation-DAW Reason. But now that the dust from the cheers and celebrations has settled we find that’s there still no new sound generation devices.
In fact, version 7 was the last time a new synth, Thor, was introduced. I can remember there being a bit of fuss when version 8 arrived last year with nothing new in the synth department. It feels like Propellerhead are not really listening. It’s not that Reason is unequipped in the area of noise making. In fact, when armed with the Combinator you have a pretty limitless potential for generating new and interesting sounds. It’s more like you want something new and interesting to get excited about.
New Features?
Version 9 does bring in some cool new features (click here for more on the new features) such as Player devices which act like MIDI plug-ins for creating chords, sequences and arpeggios. It also has pitch correction on audio tracks and a load of workflow improvements. And they’ve included the Pulsar LFO which is very cool. But, there’s not a whole lot of goodies for your €129 upgrade price. Propellerhead are heavily pushing the 1000 new presets programmed by awesome people which you could see as a whole world of new sounds. They are probably excellent but it does feel a tiny bit like cheating.
Propellerhead are a wonderfully creative company and Reason is a DAW like no other so it’s just a bit disappointing. I mean, modular synthesis is all the rage at the moment and they would have knocked it out of the park by slipping in a bunch of single modules that utilise the existing wiring structure. Oh well, maybe they’re saving it all up for version 10. What do you think? Is there enough in there to warrant the upgrade? Let us know in the comments.
More information on Reason 9 on the Propellerhead website.
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