Only recently have I done a full album of tracking vocals, guitars and other things in Reason, and it convinced me that Reason is for me, all limitations aside.
But After using Reason extensively for a few years, going back to floating windows seemed unpractical. All the DAWs I've used had some flaw over another. My DAW career is like: Cubase>Cubase+Reason>Live+Reason>Reason Not that it's a bad one, it's just not "special" in the way that it once was. Some people might surprise you with Cubase or Studio One, or even Reaper or something, but Reason seems almost like a legacy product, these days. Now, if an act uses a laptop as an instrument, the obvious expectation is that they are running ableton, or maybe Logic. Maybe somebody would come in with Acid or cakewalk or something, but Reason was pretty much the standard.
We would fly everything into Pro Tools, for mixing and all that.
It's just that once upon a time, it was the only thing that was great at those things, and now a lot of other DAWs are also great at that stuff.ġ2 years ago, if I was working with an electronic act, or an industrial band or something, the standard expectation was that they would be bringing in a macbook running Reason, and maybe some outboard synth racks as well. Reason is still great at the stuff that it's always been great at. The things that made Reason great are still true: great sounds, great workflow and ergonomics, extremely CPU efficient, and it's designed from the ground up to work like a classic synth rack. I'm sorry if I came across like I was dissing Reason. As people learn and use other DAWs, there is less reason to keep updating Reason. They still have a loyal user base, but it's smaller every year.
Propellerhead kind of kept their head in the sand about all this.Įspecially with the explosion of ableton live as the new favorite workflow for EDM, Reason increasingly seemed like an answer in search of a question. "Normal" DAWs started offering more flexible and powerful sequencing, looping, pitch manipulation, and VST 2 especially unleashed a tidal wave of cheap, powerful, and great-sounding native instrument plugins. Music styles changed, and the divide between electronic music and everything else began to evaporate. And much like pro tools, Reason kind of stubbornly stagnated while the rest of the DAW world moved on.įor too long, they tried to hold onto the role of the "electronic production workstation" that is supposed to rewire into a "normal" DAW. Like Pro Tools did for audio, Reason revolutionized electronic music production. And Reason had routing and sequencing capabilities that the early plugin formats could not match, and a workflow especially suited to EDM. Being able to run a synth rack on a laptop was a big deal, what, 15 years ago now? Plugins and "regular" DAWs were just not there in terms of realtime native performance, and pro tools TDM was still pretty strictly a "recording" platform. When Reason first came out, it was a revolutionary thing.