Friday, May 28, 2010
Reason 5: The Return of Live Sampling at Last?!
In the past, I've been pretty critical of Propellerheads on this blog, particularly the "closed system" nature of Reason and their insistence on requiring their users to buy an entirely separate program if they actually want to do proper recording. What a hamfisted workflow! But when they get it right, they get it right.
As you've probably heard, Reason 5 is on its way, and the 'Heads have gradually been revealing the new features in a series of videos. Nothing lit me on fire until today when they announced that Reason 5 would include live sampling, something virtually unheard of in the world of software samplers for some stupid reason. Instead of just loading in a recording you made in another program, Reason 5 will let you sample your sounds live from within the sampler itself, just like... oh, every hardware sampler ever (Oberheim DPX1 notwithstanding...). This is something I've been wishing the major sampling platforms would introduce for years now, so it's nice to see someone finally take the lead.
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6 comments:
Yeah I've decided my first "DAW" that i decide to throw my cash down on. Sadly I bought the 2 programs 3 days before they announced reason 5/record 1.5 free upgrade *sigh*. But after watching all the new stuff that is going to be coming, I don't mind spending the money for the update.
I do find it quite stupid they made 2 programs, but when you do buy those programs and you open up record I don't see any workflow problems with 2 programs.
I love the workflow personally. I can just get to doing what I want to do without too much thinking, but can get pretty damn deep if need be.
Kong does look amazing. But I haven't had access to Logic's amazing drum machine or NI Machine.
Either way for me it seems like this is the "DAW" for me...at least for now.
Neptune will make me switch to Record as my primary DAW solution. If they could just get in MIDI Out, or make me a Rewire developer so I could write my own Rewire client for MIDI Out, I'd dump every other bit of software out there.
I like what they're doing, I just wish they'd get one or two more features in fast, and then they'd kill the competition.
Ableton samples. you can grab audio and drag to simpler or samples. or right click (command click for mac users) and slice to drum rack. it's a great platform...
FL STUDIOS DIRECT WAVE
HAS LIVE RECORDING ..........
I can understand the criticism about the closed system - yes, it would be great if they opened everything up to everyone, but I think the whole philosophy about Reason might have been missed. I'd always viewed it as a cheap alternative to doing the Cubase/Logic/ with millions of VSTs that you have to hunt down and buy route. I prefer a finite set of options - VSTs for the various stages/elements of a production. Too much choice leads to me spending hours and hours trying to figure everything out or resampling for the sake of resampling... Reason/Record suits me because I have a finite amount of time to spend creating music and because I've been with it sooo long (since v2.5) I know the bits I use frequently inside out - I've still not got into the full feature set of some of the devices yet! If I had to do the same with the VST universe, I'd spend my entire time fiddling and not ever writing. So to me, the philosophy is that Reason provides a good set of devices that anyone can pick up quickly, with enough variation and flexibility that not everything produced by it sounds the same.
Record was a big step in the right direction... just not big enough in some ways. There were critical flaws in it (for example, no pitch shifting capability, no normalization). The new mixer interface plus the ability to use all the devices real-time with the recording functionality (I use it for real-time vocoding live) is awesomely powerful for the price you pay - hardware equivalents cost 10 times as much. And the new abilities they're putting in, plus some of the workflow things and realising that people are collaborating and don't want to send the Record/Reason file plus all the Refills around each time are a major step forward for the kind of work I'm starting to do.
I'm really looking forward to this new release. :)
I used it when it came out, and slowly abandoned it after working in Cubase and Ableton. Seeing the press on it recently made me miss the simple and intuitive flow. I went out and bought Reason 3 NIB on ebay for $80. I never use softsynths, but I love the huge-block clunky piano roll. And everything is so easy to route, and Rewire into Abes if necessary.
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