‘Klang’, ‘Pangea’, and ‘Humana’ are romplers. Whilst it is capable of many things, its unique textures are particularly well suited to sound design, experimental music and ambient soundscapes. Its refreshingly simple interface (half of which is the same as Europa’s) belies its numerous sonic possibilities. ‘Grain’, as the name implies, is a granular synthesizer that allows you to process any samples, granularly. In practice, Europa is straightforward to use and capable of producing everything from beautiful 80sesque pads, to in-yer-face EDM basses and leads. In other words, pretty much everything except the pirate twins. There are also 3 LFOs, a modulation matrix, and effects. A mixer delivers the results to one of a variety of filters, and, in turn, to an amp, both of which have their own envelopes (complex for the former, ADSR for the latter). Each engine includes complex spectral filtering, harmonics processing and a versatile unison mode. These can be modulated by up to two modifiers, with the results displayed in a handy ‘oscilloscope’. Its three engines let you choose from simple and complex wavetables, or draw your own. ‘Europa’ is a wavetable synthesizer that was created for “huge, epic soundsâ€. So what’s new in Reason 10? Quite a lot actually! The biggest and most significant change came fairly recently, in Reason 9.5, when, after years of doggedly remaining a closed system, Propellerhead suddenly opened Reason up to third party plug-ins…and after years of restrictions, being able to run Arturia V Collection and Eventide Anthology X from inside Reason feels so simultaneously right and wrong that it’s like having a Catholic girl feed you a pork and cheese sandwich, on Yom Kippur. But although Reason has grown exponentially in its abilities, the simplicity that enabled me to go from install to remix in ten minutes, without having ever used it before, and without reading the manual, remains. Of course, much has changed since version 1.0. At a time when DAWs were clunky, mechanistic behemoths that had almost as much in common with computer programming as music making, Reason changed everything. His jaw dropped and he asked me, “how did you do that?†“Easy,†I replied, “It works just like my studio.†And that, in essence, is the point. Ten minutes later he returned with tea and biscuits, to find Reason not just up and running, but that I had done an entire drum n bass remix. Whilst Al headed to the Kitchen for refreshments, I installed Reason on his Apple Mac. My homie, Alain Whyte had just returned from a tour with Morrissey and phoned me to see if I’d like to check out his latest software purchase…Reason 1.0 so I popped over to his studio.
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