Reason 7

[MBTC]

I dabbled in hardware-with-computer for recording solutions going back to Atari ST in the late 80s, then again for a while with Cakewalk (on PC), Juno106, Korg M3r, Kurzweil K2000. The one thing that always bothered me was latency and the fact that it seemed like too much work to get the timing just right in the final mix. To me, timing is everything, in life and even more so in music.

Sometime around 2000 or 2001 or so I stumbled across a demo of FLStudio, probably still called Fruity Loops back then. It was no where near as feature packed as it is today, but my initial reaction was something along the lines of "holy shit! This is the future, hardware as we know it has its days numbered".... I said that not because the software based synths sounded particularly good, but because the timing was so tight and it took previously cumbersome aspects of workflow and made them a complete non-issue. At that time, I think the average CPU in a PC was not quite ready to replace hardware synths, nor was the skillset of software based synth developers. Still an evolving frontier, and besides, why would a company developing relatively simplistic code and selling it in a $3000 box that cost $400 to produce want to put their family jewels in a form that was easy to pirate and sign away their own profit strategy as an act of goodwill?

I put all of it down (due to life, not lack of interest) for a few years, and picked it back up around 2006-2007 timeframe. Wow, times had changed. Intel's Core2Duo processors had a huge impact. DAW makers had learned lots of tricks. Advancements in software were making it really hard to justify buying hardware. It's only gotten better since.

I would have expected hardware prices to come down quite a bit, but apparently hardware makers never got the memo about what was going on in the rest of the music world ... to be fair, manufacturing a tangible hardware device comes with its own set of costs and challenges to be dealt with, and those costs have to land somewhere.

So, what am I trying to say here? Well Reason was one of those DAWs that for a while I was interested in, but never got around to checking out (mostly because at the time, I could not use best-of-breed soft-synths with it). It sounds like they've caught up with the times, which is good, to be sure, but one thing I've noticed is that it seems like every DAW now is approaching having the same feature set as all the others. The moment one DAW comes up with a new idea or innovation, the others find a way to follow suit and implement same.

So, long-term, does the industry have room for so many DAWs? Maybe it does.... the DAW itself becomes an instrument, and musicians get attached to their instruments. But at the same time they are not accustomed to paying for annual upgrades for the right to play their vintage instrument, and that's one area that DAWs differ. A person could just go all-out-Ted -Kaczynski and build a cabin in the woods, disconnect themselves from the Internet and swear off ever upgrading again, but that would only buy them a decade at most. Upgrades are a fact of life in an evolving software and OS environment.

A maker of DAW software can only survive with a constant revenue stream and innovation. So I just wonder where the market will end up with a dozen or so of them all do the same thing, feature-wise?

[Berni]

Well Reason always has been way behind some of the bigger DAW's but looks like it's getting there but if you already have Live, Pro tools etc. there's nothing here of interest, at least not for me anyways. The other thing about reason is it has a generic sound that doesn't cut it for me. I can always tell when someone has made a track with it although this may have changed recently. At $399 it's not cheap either, for another $100 you could have Live 9 but it's probably worth the upgrade if you are an existing Reason owner.