Product Reviews

With the release of version 2.5, Reason's developer, Propellerheads, has made a good fist of felling any lingering criticisms about the program. While this update doesn't answer every musician's grumble, it does make Reason considerably more powerful and flexible and shoves the program much further towards the promised all-in-one virtual studio nirvana.

Billed as 'Reason in full effect', the main attractions are the new reverb, vocoder, distortion and unison effects, plus the merger and splitter utilities. There have been useful tweaks behind the scenes as well, but it's the effects that dominate the show.

Reverbal abuse

Reason 2.5 now has a professional reverb unit - the RV7000 Advanced Reverb is a fully featured stereo solution with a neat, fold-out editing section. Nine different algorithms are included: small space, room, hall, arena, plate, spring, echo, multitap and reverse, each with dedicated parameters. There's no denying the RV7000 sounds impressively smooth. There's a reverb type for every situation and, given the detailed controls and parametric EQ, there's endless flexibility to sculpt the precise shade required. A nice touch is the separate Gate section, which can be applied to any reverb type.

Another new box is equally welcome: the Scream 4 Sound Destruction Unit is a superb addition to the Reason rack, and is much more than a distortion box. True, it'll happily shred any signal sent through it on an extreme setting such as Scream, but it can also be subtle, for example by adding a little Tube simulation to put some warmth back into digital signals.

Each of the 10 distortion types has two parameters, such as Tone and Presence or Bit Resolution and Sample Rate, while the Damage Control knob determines the intensity. There are also Cut and Body sections, akin to EQ and speaker

Propellerheads is particularly excited about the BV512 Digital Vocoder. Whatever your thoughts on the proliferation of the vocoder sound in modern music, used sparingly it always sounds pretty cool, as does the BV512.

Normally, a vocoder takes two inputs, generally a synth sound as the carrier and a vocal as the modulator. This being Reason, any two signals can be routed through the BV512 and combined for effects as weird as you want to make them. Drums modulated by guitars? Why not? Further, while most vocoders deal with around 16 frequency bands, the BV512 offers a mind-blowing 512 bands for a gleaming vocoded performance. If it sounds too smooth, simply downgrade it until it sounds right for your mix. The BV512 also doubles as a 512-band equaliser and total automation is standard.

The other three devices are also noteworthy. The UN16 Unison beefs up sounds by incrementally detuning the original signal four, eight or 16 times and multiplying the signal accordingly. Like any effect, heavy-handed use usually sounds bizarre, but subtle use on many signal types adds muscle.

The final two devices are the Spider Audio and Spider CV utilities, which bring welcome new functionality to Reason. Spider Audio merges or splits audio, while Spider CV does the same for control voltage and gate signals. What this means with Spider Audio is that tracks can be grouped and treated by one effect or one signal split and sent to different effects, while the Spider CV allows you to trigger several synths from the same Matrix pattern, for instance.

Reason to be cheerful

Reason 2.5 is hard to beat: the new effects sound excellent, the RV700 and Scream 4 presets are ideal starting points, there are more options than you need and virtually everything can be wired to everything else.

You still can't record live audio, there's no provision for resampling on the fly, there's no support for third-party effects or instruments and you'll probably want a more specialised application for mastering, but there's already plenty of software to do such things.

There isn't, however, a virtual music studio that does the virtual studio thing as successfully and as impressively as Reason 2.5. Unbelievably, this is also a free upgrade for all registered users of version 2.0 of the software. Reasons not to upgrade: none.