Product Reviews

The Reason 4 Premium Edition is the ultimate version of Propellerheads' renowned virtual studio in a box. Taking Reason 4 and bundling it with all four Hypersampled ReFill sound libraries - Abbey Road Keyboards, Reason Drum Kits 2, Reason Electric Bass and Reason Pianos - this is a version created solely to entice wavering purchasers. If you've ever toyed with the idea of buying Reason, then your ship just came in.

The headline application in the bundle, Reason 4, has a hugely improved sequencer with vector and tempo automation, and multiple lanes for each track, separating out note, performance and automation data. Other features include the ReGroove 'unquantizer' mixer, the deceptively addictive RPG-8 arpeggiator and Propellerhead's synth to end all synths, Thor.

On the downside, we still have the complex single-rack setup, which gives scrolling fingers a gruelling workout. Being able to split the rack halfway for a parallel view on widescreen laptops would be a real breakthrough. There are also no new effects, the main mixer is the same, there's no audio-in option and no external plug-in support.

All four ReFills are superb sample collections. Abbey Road Keyboards is the sound of Abbey Road Studios' famous instruments - pianos, mellotrons, harmoniums and more - all recorded through the original mics, outboard and vintage

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mixing desk from Abbey Road's Studio Two.

Reason Pianos features three acoustic pianos: two grands (a Steinway D and a Yamaha C7) and an upright (a Steinway K), each captured using six different sets of microphones - four stereo pairs and two mono mics, all of which show up separately in Reason's mixer, to facilitate the optimum blend.

Reason Drum Kits 2 delivers exactly what you might expect in spades: 58 multi-output Combinator drum kits, played with sticks, mallets and brushes, plus 96 additional ReDrum sets, organised according to musical style. Again, the multiple mic signals are routed to individual channels, and kit pieces can be mixed and matched. With about 70 samples per single Midi key, the level of detail and velocity expression is a treat.

Reason Electric Bass features eight famous bass guitars: a Fender Jazz Bass, two Fender Precision Basses, a Gibson Les Paul, a Rickenbacker 4001, a Gibson EB-0, a Kay Hollowbody and a MusicMan Stingray Fretless, with appropriate string types (roundwound or flatwound) and playing styles (fingered or picked), according to common real-world usage. Thus, the rock-orientated Rickenbacker is picked, but the Jazz Bass is fingered. The bass samples sound very good - complemented by samples of ghost notes, glissandos and finger noises - and you can clearly hear the sonic character of each instrument.

All four ReFills are great and work well together, stuffed full of inspiring presets and patches. The host app, Reason, is a tempting proposition in its own right as a self-contained studio par excellence - integrating perfectly with its contemporaries via ReWire - even before everything was brought together to create this Premium Edition. While the price may be a trifle too high, and this will be of dubious value or comfort to existing owners of Reason, as a siren song to new users, it's hard to see how Propellerheads could have pitched this Edition any sweeter.