Propellerhead Reason Essentials 1.5 Music Software

The new Rack Extension powered version of Reason Essentials 1.5 is here. Rack Extensions expand Reason Essentials and let you add whatever your music needs -- be it instruments or effects, by Propellerhead or others. Try it, buy it, and download it straight into your rack.

Reason Essentials is the perfect way into music making. All the tools you need to fulfill your ideas, in one affordable package. Reason Essentials comes with unlimited audio recording, flexible sequencing, a generous selection of Reason's instruments, effects & sound banks, and much more.

Reason Essentials packs in all the recording, editing, effects, instruments, mixing and mastering tools you need to sound great in a streamlined package.

Reason Essentials Vs. Reason

Reason Essentials may be one of the most affordable full-featured DAWs around, with a few limitations. Upgrading to the full version of Reason gets you more plug-in effects and virtual instruments built-in, along with a larger factory sound bank. Reason Essentials is the ideal introduction to Reason, with the same intuitive rack interface. And Reason Essentials files are compatible with in Reason, so you can share your projects with Reason users -- or upgrade your own system and still be able to open your existing files.

Reason Essentials gets you in on the ground floor of Reason for an affordable price, without bogging down your system's resources. And if you outgrow the plug-ins and instruments in Essentials and want to add more bells… read more and whistles, Essentials 1.5 is fully compatible with Rack Extensions from the Propellerhead Shop.

What are Rack Extensions?

Rack Extensions are downloadable instruments and effects you can use to expand and personalize your Reason rig, by Propellerhead or others. Try it, buy it, and download it straight into your rack. With Rack Extensions the Reason rack opens up to third-party developers. This is not another plugin format -- Rack Extensions are full Reason rack citizens, giving you the same great experience as any other Reason device. Load them in Combinators, route cables on the back, automate all parameters, and experiment with the safety of undo.

Browse all Rack Extensions in the Propellerhead Shop and even download fully functional trial versions to load into your rack. Every Rack Extension you have purchased can be downloaded as many times as you need -- for both Mac and Windows -- and the latest version is never more than a click away.

Rack Extensions are available in Reason 6.5 and Reason Essentials 1.5. For owners of Reason 6 or Reason Essentials, the upgrade is free.

Rack Extensions from Propellerhead

It's not just third-parties who are getting into the creation of Rack Extensions. Propellerhead Software is also releasing their own Rack Extension devices for Reason 6.5 and Reason Essentials 1.5.

Polar
Polar is an old school harmonizing and pitch-shifter effect with a host of modern tricks up its sleeves. Use it for classic harmonizing, stereo-widening, and real-time pitch shifting, or experiment with buffer looping and audio freezing to create otherworldly effects.

Load up Polar in the rack, and it will instantly make your sounds wider. Introduce slight pitch-shifting to make it even bigger. Turn the Shifters to add harmonics -- up to two octaves above, or two octaves below -- Finish up your patch by turning on the filter, manipulated by the built-in LFO and envelope.

If you are a singer, producer, guitarist or remixer who is looking for transparent pitch shifting, creative ways of turning bland recordings into wide, evolving soundscapes, or want to completely mangle a sound into an interesting mess, Polar brings all this and much more to your Reason rack.

Pulsar
Pulsar LGM-1 is a dual channel modulation powerhouse for the Reason rack. Propellerhead calls it an LFO -- but it's also a powerful little synth in its own right. For tweakers, Pulsar makes every single thing in the rack a little bit better. For back-of-the-rackophobes it comes with patches containing everything from lush evolving pads to the grittiest of wobble basses.

Need to add slow modulation to a filter, or alter the speed of a tremolo as you trigger new notes? Pulsar is up for any task. Turn up the Shuffle parameter to introduce some irregularity to your modulation. Smooth out sharp waveforms using Lag. Or go all-out bonkers and let LFO2 trigger the built-in envelope, set to change the rate of LFO2, and route the combined outputs of both LFOs to control the rate of LFO1.

When the rate is turned up, Pulsar transforms from low frequency oscillator to high powered synth with plenty of character. The LFO waveforms in combination with lag and shuffle brings tons of tones -- edgy and noisy.

Radical Piano
The premise is simple. The results are stunning. They'll give you three basic pianos paired with the technology to make an infinite number of your own. Based on a custom blend between sampling technology and physical modeling algorithms, Radical Piano affords songwriters, producers, and sound designers an unprecedented level of control to craft a realistic piano that is 100% unique.

With Radical Piano you can do things that are otherwise impossible, not only in multi-gigabyte sample libraries but even in the recording of actual acoustic pianos. Do you wish your close mic'd grand piano sounded just a little bit more like a vintage mono upright piano? Use the microphone blend to create a hybrid modeled sound. Route audio like a vocal through the jacks on the back of Radical Piano to hear it resonate the strings as if you had recorded piano and vocals together live. What if with the turn of a knob you could transform the tonal characteristics of your piano, shifting from a soft intimate performance to a bright aggressive instrument that will cut through your mix? They've got that knob, and it's called "Character."

Radical Piano will change the way you use pianos in your music by allowing you to imagine a piano in a real space and set about creating it yourself through intuitive controls. Or like you have done with synthesizers for years, you can listen to your favorite song and emulate the recording with uncanny accuracy. Perhaps even more impressive, the realism of Radical Piano will affect the way you play because it responds like a real piano to sustain pedal movement, key noise and velocity response.

To use Rack Extensions, you need Reason 6.5 or Reason Essentials 1.5.

About Reason Essentials

Just like its bigger brother, Reason Essentials puts making music in focus. From concept to completion, it comes with all the essential tools for turning good ideas into great songs.

Reason Essentials comes with a great selection of instruments and effects in a virtual rack that builds itself, or can be tweaked to your heart's content-drum machine, loop player, sampler, synths, reverb, delay, distortion and more. For guitar players, the built-in virtual guitar POD and bass POD from Line 6 bring a wide range of top quality guitar amps, cabinets and effects. The intuitive audio and MIDI sequencer makes recording and arranging your music a breeze.

Reason Essentials comes with a selection of great-sounding, easy to use virtual instruments. The Subtractor is a polyphonic, subtractive synthesizer suitable for all types of synthetic sounds. The NN-XT is an advanced sampler for multisampled acoustic instruments and sample-tweaking trickery. Dr. Octo Rex is an eight channel loop player for that provides fast arranging and deep control of your loops, while Redrum is a simple but powerful drum machine with a built-in step sequencer.

Recording music is all about seizing the moment. Capturing a perfect performance -- or even nailing that idea before it goes away -- requires tools that are ready when you are. Create record ready audio tracks in an instant. Simply plug in, breathe out, and you're ready to go -- Reason Essentials gives you unlimited audio tracks and instrument channels.

To help you arrange your tracks in a smooth, effortless way, Reason Essentials comes with a fast and flexible sequencer. Immediate and intuitive, the sequencer puts you in control of your arrangements, letting you move and edit parts as you go along. Every thinkable knob, button or fader can be automated with ease, and then edited and fine tuned.

As a perfect performance may be less than perfect from scratch, Reason Essentials features a swift and easy to use comp editor. Building the ultimate vocal track is as simple as selecting the parts that work and muting the ones that don't. Exit the comp editor and listen to the results; a perfect take containing only the good parts.

The acclaimed Propellerhead timestretch lets you play now and pick the tempo later. Change the song tempo and all your audio tracks will follow right along without any need for pre-processing of any kind. Need to slow your song down to nail a tricky passage? No problem. Just reduce the tempo, record your performance, and bring the tempo back up. The audio quality? Amazing.

Reason Essentials features a masterfully modeled mixing console that gives you a built-in two-band EQ on every channel, advanced effects handling, full automation, while that radio-ready master bus compressor gives you a big studio sound.

The Reason Essentials rack can be stacked with an infinite number of reverbs, distortion units, delays, dynamic processors, mastering EQs -- everything you need to shape and color your sounds. Click and drag effects straight to the rack or load any of the expertly crafted patches.

With Line 6 bass and guitar amplifiers available for every single track in your Reason Essentials project, you are never short of the perfect tones and timbres. As the amplifiers are insert effects and don't affect the original instrument signal, you are free to change your amplifier and cabinet settings at any point in time - even after laying down your track.

Instruments

- NN-XT advanced sampler
- Dr. Octo Rex loop player
- Redrum pattern-based drum machine
- Subtractor analog subtractive synthesizer
- ID-8 songwriter's toolbox
- Combinator, for building chains of instruments, effects, and pattern sequencers.

Effects

- Line 6 virtual guitar amplifier
- Line 6 virtual bass amplifier
- DDL-1 digital delay line
- DF-101 chorus/flanger
- RV7000 advanced reverb
- Scream 4 Sound Destruction Unit
- 4-band mastering EQ
- Dual band stereo imager
- Stereo compressor with sidechain input, soft-knee mode and CV out
- Maximizer with look-ahead and soft clip

Modeled mixing console with complete channel strip for every instrument and audio channel

- Gain
- 2-band EQ
- 4 Send effects slots
- Insert effect slot
- Master compressor

Other features

- Unlimited audio recording and instrument channels
- Fully featured high-precision multitrack sequencer with audio comping tools
- High quality realtime time stretch
- Advanced exporting -- export your separate mixer channels as individual audio stems, including effects and tempo track
- ReGroove Mixer real-time groove console
- Matrix pattern-based sequencer
- 14 x 2 mixer w/ EQ and effects send/return
- 6:2 channel stereo line mixer
- Spider Audio Merger & Splitter
- Spider Control Voltage Merger & Splitter
- Remote mapping to external MIDI controllers and hardware control surfaces
- Comes with a great factory sound bank, with patches for Reason Essentials devices, samples, and loops
- ReWire support
- Multicore support and 64-bit compatibility makes Reason Essentials fast and powerful on any computer

Package contains:
- Installation DVD
- Ignition Key + License
- Welcome card & Sticker sheet read less