10 user licenses means you'll have plenty of this popular virtual rack to go around.
Reason 5 EDU*10 includes 10 user licenses for the regular Reason 5, but at a special price for educators and students. Proof of status is required for purchase and registration of this software.
The Reason 5 virtual rack comes with all the gear you could possibly need: samplers, analog synths, graintable synth, vocoder, mixer, drum machines, arpeggiator, compressors, EQ, and effects. With its generous sound bank and intuitive flow, Reason 5 helps you along in your creative process, and never gets in your way. This version adds the mighty Kong Drum Designer, the versatile Dr. Octo Rex loop player, live sampling input, the Blocks pattern-based sequencing mode, and more.
About Reason
Reason's heart is its virtual rack of instruments and effects. As you create your track, Reason automatically patches and cables your rack. If you want to get deep, simply flip the rack around and route the cables any way you like.
Finding your sound is an important part of the musical process. With gigabytes of synths, samples, drum kits, and effects, Reason's sound bank is packed with everything you'll need from the start. Want more? Expand your palette with a world of ReFill libraries (sold separately).
The thing that strikes new Reason users most is how much they get done in a short amount of time. Reason's legendary creative flow keeps you focused on the music—and the fun at all times.
Need more gear? No problem. Choose a synth, a drum machine, a loop player, or any device from the Create menu and it will instantly appear in your rack, logically patched into the signal chain. And, because Reason is designed to go easy on your computer, you can repeat the process until you're more than happy.
Each unit in Reason's virtual rack is edited from its own on-screen front panel. All the sliders, knobs, buttons, and functions are right in front of you, ready to be tweaked, turned, and twisted in absolute real time. All your front panel actions—filter adjustments, pitch bending, gain riding, or panning—can be recorded and automated in the Reason sequencer.
A single key press will turn Reason's rack around, and there you are, in patch-cord heaven. Most audio connections are made automatically. When a new device is created, it appears immediately below the currently selected device, and Reason patches it into the system in the most logical way. Repatch by dragging the patch cord plug to the desired connector to build your own sounds—or tweak the included presets.
New in Reason 5
Dr. Octo Rex Loop Player
The upgraded Dr. Octo Rex loop player loads 8 REX loops into one player and lets you switch between them on the fly. This makes arranging a breeze—load the drum loops into one player, the guitars into another, and use the sequencer to select what loop to play in a pattern-like fashion.
With 8 loops to switch between, the new loop player also comes ready for the experimental minded. Set the player to retrig the loops on the beat, on the bar, or on the 16th note. You can also program the loops manually like in the original rex player.
For each of the 8 loops, the new rex player also comes with an expanded set of per-slice settings. Set pan, pitch, filter frequency, and level, reverse slices, use multiple outputs, create alternating groups of slices, and much more.
The Reason 5 Factory Sound Bank comes complete with guitar and acoustic drums patches for Dr. Octo Rex and a huge selection of techno, house, club, hip-hop, and R&B loops from signature sound designers.
Blocks
Many musicians tend to think of music in terms like intro, verse, chorus, breakdown, buildup and so on. With the new Blocks mode in Reason 5 and Record 1.5, your sequencer does too.
Blocks lets you sequence your songs using a more pattern-based approach, with the segments of your song as individual building blocks to be laid out in your arrangement.
Start by creating the discrete parts of your song in Blocks mode. When you are ready to start building your song, just switch back to Song mode and draw in what blocks should play in the dedicated pattern lane. Use one block for the verse and one for the chorus—or build your song around a single 8-bar loop.
Blocks provide a very fast way of creating a musical structure for your song. But the options don't end there. 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 in song mode.
A typical use for Blocks is to create your backing track in Blocks mode, and then use the song view to record vocals or instrumental performances. For music based around a single looped section, one repeated Block with automation and mutes of individual tracks added in song mode makes arranging a breeze.
You never have to commit to using either mode—you are free to move back and forth between Blocks and Song mode, and any changes you make in your Blocks will instantly be manifested in all instances of that Block. Need some tambourine on that chorus? Add it, and there will be tambourine whenever the chorus block is playing.
Live Sampling
Remember the time when samples were something you sampled and not loaded from your hard drive? When a sampler was a machine that could record samples, not just play them back.
As samplers became software instead of machines, they came to rely on external sample editing software for recording and editing the samples and the art of spur-of-the-moment creative sampling was pretty much lost. Reason 5 is bringing it back with its live sampling input.
All sample players in Reason are now samplers. Just hook up a sound source to the rack's sampling input and you are ready to start sampling. Use a mic, a turntable, an instrument, or the entire Reason mix.
Sampling in Reason 5 is simple and straightforward. Hit the sample button and Reason 5 starts sampling. Reason 5 will detect the sample start automatically. You can sample when Reason 5 is running too if you like—no need to stop the music.
If needed, bring up the built-in sample editor to set start and end points, loop points, and more. This is possible for all loaded samples by the way—not only the ones you have sampled.
As always, this version of Reason lets you focus on music making—and sampling in this case. All samples are neatly stored in the song file and accessible in the new samples pane in the tool window. Here you can easily see what samples are loaded into what machine and delete and export samples as you wish.
Live sampling together with pitch detection of root key and automatic zone mapping makes it dead easy to sample an instrument and map the samples across the keyboard. This way you'll create your own multi-sampled instruments for NN-XT and NN-19 in an instant.
Kong Drum Designer
Reason 5 provides you with analog synthesis, physical modeling, sampling, REX loops, support sound generators, effects, flexible routing, multiple hit types, and more. The Kong Drum Designer is not your regular drum module. It's the drum module focused on letting you get exactly that drum sound you're after.
Kong has 16 pads and 16 drums. Build your drum sounds based on any of the nine different drum modules. Flavor the sound with 11 support generators and effects. Program automation, create alternating groups, and let Reason's powerful sequencer control the beat.
Reason 5 ships with a sound bank containing a generous supply of kits for Kong across a wide variety of styles.
