Reason Studios Reason 13

A quarter of a century after v1, Reason reaches the not so unlucky v13, but is this once influential DAW still relevant? Andy Jones investigates

- Andy Jones

Wow. 24 years. To think that there was a significant part of the world’s population

worried about the world ending and the Millennium Bug as the new century dawned in 2000 – not us, we were too busy playing Deus X and saying that Kid A wasn’t as influential as everyone thought it was. But then all those fears washed away, like tears in rain, because Reason v1 arrived!

To give you some idea of the impact of (then) Propellerhead Software’s first version of Reason, it pretty much invented the phrase ‘game changer’. At that point, software instruments were thin on the ground, and DAWs looked like spreadsheets or monochrome LEGO block builders. Reason changed all that, by mounting a stack of instruments – including the Subtractor synth, Redrum drum machine and Dr Rex and

NN19 samplers – together in a virtual rack along with eight effects, allowing you to plug them into one another with virtual wires and, sequence them. More importantly than any of that, it made making music fun and colourful. And great sounding…

All within Reason

Reason won a lot of fans for its instant music making prowess, and later versions kept the momentum going, as we detail in our ‘A (very brief) history of Reason’ box to the right. But really, Reason was kept as a fairly insular DAW for perhaps too long, one that didn’t really like to welcome other instruments and audio until much later versions, and getting you to use the (albeit pretty good at the time) ReWire feature for any inter app chat.

And this perceived lack of progress in its lifetime has lost Reason some fans over the years. Or maybe it’s fairer to say that bigger developers like Ableton and Apple have moved their DAWs along faster. Either way, Reason has become more of an instrument ecosphere than DAW, especially with its transition to a VST plugin at v11, which effectively meant it could work within other DAWs.