Review: Propellerhead Reason 8

When non-studio people inevitably ask me ‘how long did it take’ to produce a track, I answer them somewhat cryptically: “I get it 80% done in four hours, about 95% there in four days, and 99% complete in four weeks” (as we all know, a track is never entirely finished, only abandoned). Naturally, they look at me blankly.

What I’m talking about is workflow. It doesn’t take long to figure out if you’re onto something: drums, bass, a lead line… if things click, you bash away frantically until you’ve got all the constituent dramatis personae stacked and racked, and maybe already loosely arranged. Four hours… ish.

From there you’re sufficiently in love with the track to spend a day on the build up, a couple of hours on the drum fills, and another couple exploring some more interesting chord inversions on your pad sound. Four days… ish.

By this stage you could pat your track on the bum and release it into the world. But you’ve got pride and (deadlines notwithstanding) you keep your track in the background, return to it periodically, give it a polish, fine tune the compression and EQ, and some of the internal mastering plugs. I’m not saying you work on it solidly for four weeks but it stays in your orbit that long.

LETTING IT FLOW

Again, what I’m talking about here is workflow. In those frantic first few hours you don’t want any obstacles in your way. Something sounds good? Get it down. Don’t overthink it. You really need your DAW to keep up. And here’s a big reason why Ableton’s Live has won so many friends. When people saw they could simply drag loops into the Arrange page and not worry about tempo or key… it really was like throwing paint at the wall — very different to the dominant tape-operator or piano-roll approach of the time.

Okay, I’m about 300 words into this review and I’ve not mentioned a new synth engine, or a 300GB sample library yet, so I’m guessing a few of you may have already drifted off. “If this bloke says ‘workflow’ one more time, someone please put me into an induced coma.”

So it’s with a certain amount of bravery that Propellerhead reveals version 8 of its flagship Reason DAW, leading with workflow improvements and not an ‘Odin’ synth or ‘Valhalla’ sample library. And I’ll admit I’m one of those who met the news with shoulders involuntarily slumped. One thing’s for sure I didn’t set my alarm early to be the first to download the update.

But I have, and I’m glad I did. The short review of Reason 8 is that it makes those first four hours of track building I was talking about far more productive. There is far more of that easy ‘throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks’ required to more quickly pull something together I’m excited by. Arguably, the improvements don’t do a heck of a lot for the following ‘four days’ or ‘four weeks’ but Reason 8 encourages me to jump into a super-creative mindset more readily.