Propellerhead, the Swedish developer of popular music production software including Reason, ReCycle! and ReBirth, announces Reason 2.5, an upgrade to its flagship package. The new version comes with four brand new sound processing tools, and two new signal path routing utilities.
Reason emulates a rack of electronic synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and mixing equipment. Previous versions of Reason have won numerous awards, including the highly-coveted TEC Award, Editor’s Choice Awards from Electronic Musician, MacWorld, Remix, and Computer Music magazines, and the mipa award for Best Software Instrument. It’s available for both Mac OS and Windows platforms.
The new 2.5 version of Reason will be available in the second quarter of 2003. Reason 2.0 registered users will get the 2.5 update for free.
BV512 Digital Vocoder
The BV512 Digital Vocoder is a 4 to 512 band vocoder capable of modulating sounds, both in an old-school analog style, and in a digital FFT fashion. As a bonus, it also serves as a fully-automated graphic equalizer. A vocoder takes two input signals, the carrier, which provides the pitch, and the modulator, supplying the characteristics. This type of device is usually seen as a tool to create robotic voice effects, but with Reason’s unlimited patching capabilities, you can combine any two sound sources. For example, you could vocode a percussion track with the bass line, or a string pad with rhythm guitar.
RV7000 Advanced Reverb
The RV7000 is a stereo effect module dedicated to high-quality reverberation, with a quality rivaling the best hardware and software solutions you can buy. The reverb engine consists of nine algorithms: Small Space, Room, Hall, Arena, Plate, Spring, Echo, Multitap and Reverse, with up to seven individual parameters each. In addition to the reverb section, the RV7000 also includes an EQ and a gate section. The EQ section features parametric EQ and a low-shelving filter, for additional tweaking of the reverb signal. The Gate section can be applied to any reverb algorithm and can be triggered with CV or MIDI.
Scream 4 Sound Destruction Unit
Scream 4 is a distortion unit with 10 different damage types -Overdrive, Distortion, Fuzz, Tube, Tape, Feedback, Modulate, Warp, Digital and Scream. In addition to the distortion section, Scream 4 also incorporates a +/- 18dB 3-band EQ; and the unique Body Section, which is similar to a speaker simulator. There are five basic Body types to select from, each with it’s own vibe, as well as separate controls for Body Resonance and Body Scale. The Auto function is an amplitude respondent envelope follower that controls the scale parameter, creating unique dynamic effects.
UN-16 Unison
The UN-16 Unison is a reincarnation of the mysterious “Unison’ button found on early ’80s synths. Transformed into a Reason half-rack unit, it fattens up incoming audio by emulating the effect of 4, 8, or 16 detuned voices playing the same sound. The result is rich and wide, slightly similar to a chorus effect, but more complex.
Spider Audio
Spider Audio is a utility that merges and splits audio, bringing even more of the hardware studio’s patching capabilities into the software realm. Multiple audio signals can be merged and processed with the same insert effect or an instrument’s output can be split into four and sent to four different effect processors.
Spider CV
The Spider CV is the same as Spider Audio, except that the splitting and merging is performed on CV and gate signals. The merge function comes with individual attenuators for each input and the split function also inverts one of the CV outputs. This opens up for advanced and flexible modulation and control routing.
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