REASON 5

Propellerhead REASON 5 [PC/MAC]

The Reason rack comes with all the gear you could possibly need: samplers, analog synths, graintable synth, vocoder, mixer, drum machines, arpeggiator, compressors, EQ and effects. With its generous sound bank and intuitive flow, Reason helps you along in your creative process, and never gets in your way. Version 5 adds the mighty Kong Drum Designer, the versatile Dr. Octo Rex loop player, live sampling input, the Blocks pattern based sequencing mode and more.

Reason’s heart is its virtual rack of instruments and effects. As you create your track, Reason automatically patches and cables your rack. If you want to get deep, simply flip the rack around and route the cables any way you like.

Finding your sound is an important part of the musical process. With Gigabytes of synths, samples, drum kits, and effects, Reason’s sound bank is packed with everything you’ll need from the start. Want more? Expand your palette with a world of ReFill libraries.

The thing that strikes new Reason users most is how much they get done in a short amount of time. Reason’s legendary creative flow keeps you focused on the music — and the fun. At all times.

Need more gear? No problem. Choose a synth, a drum machine, a loop player or any device from the Create menu and it will instantly appear in your rack, logically patched into the signal chain. And because Reason is designed to go easy on your computer, you can repeat the process until you’re more than happy.

Each unit in Reason’s virtual rack is edited from its own on-screen front panel. All the sliders, knobs, buttons and functions are right in front of you, ready to be tweaked, turned and twisted in absolute real-time. And all your front panel actions — filter adjustments, pitch bending, gain riding or panning — can be recorded and automated in the Reason sequencer.

A single key press will turn Reason’s rack around, and there you are, in patch cord heaven. Most audio connections are made automatically. When a new device is created, it appears immediately below the currently selected device, and Reason patches it into the system in the most logical way. Repatch by dragging the patch cord plug to the desired connector to build your own sounds — or tweak the included presets.

What's new in Reason 5?

Kong Drum Designer

Analog synthesis, physical modeling, sampling, REX loops, support sound generators, effects, flexible routing, multiple hit types and more. The Kong Drum Designer is not your regular drum module. It's the drum module focused on letting you get exactly that drum sound you're after.

Kong has 16 pads and 16 drums. Build your drum sounds based on any of the nine different drum modules. Flavor the sound with 11 support generators and effects. Program automation, create alternating groups and let Reason's powerful sequencer control the beat.

Reason 5 ships with a sound bank with a generous supply of kits for Kong across a wide variety of styles.

Synth Bass Drum

From hard knocking kicks to long booming ones, the analog modeling kick drum can do them all.

Synth Snare

The synth snare drum is based on tone, harmonic and noise. Short and snappy or long and noisy. You decide.

Synth Hi-Hat

This module has four different hit types that can be spread out across the pads: closed, semi-closed; semi-open or open.

Synth Tom Tom

If your fondest memories in life include a musical backdrop of those ubiquitous tom tom breaks in 80s ballads, then this module will make your eyes misty. With its range of settings, this module can produce a wide selection of percussion sounds.

Physical Bass Drum

Built on physical modeling, this module generates organic sounding kicks with flexible settings for tuning, size, beater characteristics and more.

Physical Snare Drum

This module has four hit types (center, position 1, position 2 and edge) to generate a very natural sounding snare drum. It comes with settings for snare tension, bottom and top pitch and more.

Physical Tom Tom

This model has settings for size, tuning, stick and more, making it capable of sounding like a wide range of tom tom-like drums.

Sample player

The NN-Nano is a multi-layered sampler & sample player that lets you build drum sounds by layering samples. You can create layered sounds or use velocity settings to create velocity switching between samples.

REX player

Nurse REX is an extremely versatile loop player. You can use it to trigger an entire loop from a pad, in sync of course, or use it to play a selected slice only. You can assign one loop across several pads and set the REX player to trigger chunks of slices – still in sync: instant breakbeat bliss!

Support Generators

The support generators can be added after the drum module in the signal flow. They can add noise or tone to the sound if you need a little extra to get the sound you're after.