Included sounds: if you care about them, you probably care about them a lot. Now, to some of us, sound design is an essential part of the pleasure of music making. Give us an INIT preset and let us muddle our way to making something work – even badly. But then there are people who don’t enjoy that, or simply don’t have the luxury. (You do not want to fall down a sound programming rabbit hole when you’ve got a TV score deadline looming on the clock.) And so the folks who make music software routinely focus on lots of built-in sounds as a selling point.
Well, Propellerhead have certainly found a novel way of marketing that feature.
If you’re ever skeptical of claims of “hundreds” or “thousands” of new sounds (and I think you should be), the Swedes are out to actually prove they’ve packed Reason 9 with sounds.
They’ve built a passenger side keyboard rig (using a CME slim keyboard), and jam through a full thousand presets as they head east through the desert out of LA. (Okay, I know the American market is big, but it’s a shame they didn’t take this road show from Stockholm up into the Lapland. Had they gone through some ReFills, though, I think they would have actually run out of Swedish road and had to board a ferry to Norway or something.)
It’s… entertaining.
And stunt while it may be, some of those sounds sound good.
It seems I caught some flak from people skeptical of Reason in the last comment thread. But this kind of demonstrates to me why Reason endures: it’s just a very, very consistent product, in a way that a lot of users can understand. That’s not to say niche players like Bitwig Studio or Usine or … wow, did no one mention Renoise this time … uh, aren’t cool. In fact, technically speaking, I find each of those in some instances more interesting. But Reason’s back catalog of sounds and ReFills and years of loyal users explain why this is still a market-leading program. (Oh, another thing: usually if people are complaining about a piece of software, it indicates it’s popular … either in their own usage, or people around them.)
Previously:
Why you should care that Reason 9 just arrived