Propellerheads Ready Reason 4
While Thomas Wendt is putting the finishing touches on the official press release, we’ll tell you that Propellerheads is about to release Reason 4 and is looking for beta testers.
Looks like there’s a bunch of new goodies including the Thor synthesizer, which “sounds like no synthesizer you’ve ever heard before” — (like we’ve never heard that before…)
The Thor synth features six different oscillator types and four filters. Six open filter and oscillator slots let you load up three different synth filters and three separate oscillators simultaneously, and a modulation matrix gives the user control over the entire signal flow, letting you modulate anything within Thor with anything within Thor. A modular analog-style step sequencer is also included.
Reason 4 also includes RPG-8, a super-charged arpeggiator with several new features that will reportedly allow you to play Reason’s instruments in new ways. A Single Note Repeat function engages the arpeggiator only when two or more simultaneous notes are held down – letting you add sudden bursts of arpeggio to your melody lines. The ‘Manual’ mode will arpeggiate notes strictly in the order they were input, for realtime arpeggio control.
The new ReGroove mixer in Reason 4 applies its swing timing non-destructively and in realtime, giving you freedom to adjust its settings – and fine-tune your groove – as your music is playing. You can lock all your tracks together into one unified feel, or you can apply different settings to up to 32 musical elements in your song. Each of the groove channels feature controls for groove amount, slide and shuffle plus more detailed settings. The Reason soundbank comes with a great selection of groove patches, many of them created from analyzed recordings of real musicians as well as classic groovy tracks.
The Reason sequencer has also been updated, with the he key word being workflow. A sequencer device or instrument now gets its own dedicated track, with separate lanes for note, performance and automation data, opting for a better overview and less clutter. All sequencer data – notes, automation, the works – is now housed in clips, musical building blocks that can be opened, sliced or moved. When a clip is moved to a new location, all its internal data follows right along with it, always ending up exactly where you intended it to. The new Tool window, an ever present floating window, provides fast access to those detailed editing functions you use all the time; quantize, transpose, note velocity, note length and legato.
Factory Sound Bank additions in version 4:
• Thor patches by Daniel Wang, Morgan Geis, Pascal Gabrie, Plaid, Richard Barbieri, Richard Devine, Sonic Boom, Tippe, Two Lone Swordsmen, Gordon Reid, Vengeance
• More Combinator patches, including arpeggio-driven patches using the RPG-8 arpeggiator. – Groove files for ReGroove
• New ReDrum drum patches
• Song starters
The Combinator and NN-XT devices have both had minor revisions to make programming patches easier and more powerful. The NN-XT has been given new features to edit multiple samples simultaneously, to chromatically auto-map samples and a new Group Mono function to let samples play polyphonically, but still be silenced by other samples in the same sample group. The Combinator now has a transpose function that transposes notes sent to a device. Very handy to create splits. Other additions include performance data filters to stop certain types of data from being sent to a device, more flexible choice of Sources in the programmer and a function to automate the receive notes option, making it possible to switch between instruments in a Combinator patch
PropellerHeads has not announced a release date, but the program has entered beta testing. Most likely it will be released this fall. More information on Reason 4 and beta testing.
