Reason

A digital audio workstation developed by the Swedish company Reason Studios. Reason is used for creating and editing music digitally, by emulating a rack of hardware synthesizers, samplers, signal processors, sequencers, and mixers.

Sequencing

Record, edit, arrange. Simply connect your MIDI controller and start making music—no setup required. Capture MIDI performances and automation, or draw in notes with the mouse. Whatever suits your workflow, Reason's sequencer is fast, flexible and fun. Keeping with Reason’s famous ease of use, Reason's sequencer still comes with all the editing features you need. If your playing is too tight—use the ReGroove Groove Mixer to add more human feel.

Recording

Record your audio with ease. From a simple vocal take to a full band recording session, the recording workflow is easy and fast. No dialog boxes to break your flow. Need to nail a tricky performance? The comp editor helps you stitch multiple takes together to a perfect take. You can even record first and pick a tempo later. Reason’s legendary project-wide time stretch will change the tempo of your entire song without any audible artifacts.

Mixing

Reason gives your tracks that big studio sound right out of your computer. Faithfully modeled after the famous SSL 9000k* analog mixing desk, Reason's mixer comes complete with flexible routing, full dynamics, EQ, advanced effects handling, full automation, groups and parallel channels, and the famous master-bus compression. The spectrum analyzer window and visual EQ makes it easy to fine-tune the sound of your tracks from anywhere in the program.

Audio Editing

With your audio safely recorded in your project, Reason can help you polish your tracks to perfection. Slice Edit helps you correct the timing problems in your recordings, from subtle tweaks to hard quantize. Reason’s Pitch Edit can quickly correct the pitch in a vocal recording and gives you detailed control over pitch, time and articulations in the performance. And the best of all: It sounds good. Really, really good!

Sampling

All sample players in Reason are also samplers. Hit the sample button on the instrument’s panel and start recording straight into the selected instrument, bringing the lost art of creative sampling back again. All samples can be trimmed, edited and normalized in Reason’s built-in sample editor.

Blocks

Intro, verse, chorus–if that’s how you think about your music, then Blocks might help you build your songs. Create your song’s discreet parts and use Blocks as a very fast way of creating a musical structure for your song. With the basic arrangement laid out, you can see the contents of the blocks and create variations and mute individual parts, or add further musical elements on top.

REX

With REX loops you turn concrete-rigid loops into musical modeling clay, letting you change tempo, pitch and timing independently, and remodel the groove to suit all your musical purposes. Playing them back in Reason’s Dr. Octo Rex even lets you deconstruct the loops and create fills and variations that recorded loops can’t provide. Reason can turn audio recordings into REX files on its own, but for expert level control you might want to try ReCycle.