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A
Review For The DUB Community It's
more than fair to establish, how the last
decade has seen a significant rise of
computer based Dub productions. The Dubroom
receives as many hits on it's pages on Dub
production than on our free and legal MP3
reviews. Quite remarkable and surely
gives an indication about something. We're talking thousands
and thousands of people every week, looking
for info of the creation of Dub. The
hits come from everywhere in the world, even
from places you wouldn't expect! We're
living in a time wherein many Dub producers
trade in their hardware more and more
because of the power of contemporary DAW's
like Propellerhead's Reason and Ableton's
Live. As more and more people are getting into the
production of DUB Music with DAW's, the need
for this review of Reason exclusively for
the Dub community is self-evident. So
here it is: an
independent review, aimed at helping both
the beginners and those who happened to
start a bit earlier in time. It's the Dubroom's contribution
to the online DUB producers community. When
you make Dub and consider to get Reason,
this review will provide
you with an in-depth look at the software in
sight and sound. It comes from the explicit
perspective of an acknowledged computer
based DUB engineer with an experience in
this field dating back to the late 1980's,
early 1990's and a desire to share things as
soon as they're discovered. Come
mek wi Reason together! A
DUB Engineer's Perspective Every
Dub engineer and producer knows how
important it is to be able to connect and
use devices in that specific Dub set up.
Standard options are no options. We want to
know, how is the flexibility in Reason 8.0?
This question is not as obvious as it may
sound at first. Check
this: it can easily be established how
Propellerhead (and others) have been
instrumental in the creation of completely
new musical computer-based genres. With such
a successful enterprise, it's tempting to go
and facilitate just the computer-based
musical genres and forget about, well, Dub.
You can't make Dubstep without a computer
but you can make Dub without one. Dub is a
form of music and technology that predates
the computer. So
yes. We ask: does Reason have the
flexibility to function as a Dub studio on
top of all the Electronic Dance Music (EDM)
technologies incorporated in the software? Most
reviews on Reason 8.0 are written for and
from the perspective of contemporary EDM
producers. Usually, the software is reviewed
on huge machines with a whole battery of
hardware attached. That's not what we're
going to do here. This review is especially
for the (online) DUB artist community, for
the world-wide Digital DUB massive even. A
movement that is much larger then most
people assume, a movement that depends on
software like Reason because most of us are
simply not able to finance a studio life
time. Does
Propellerhead know about this? Yes, they do.
We know for a fact that they very much
welcome a review from the DUB perspective.
After all, because of DUB the studio
engineer turned into a musical artist which
is the whole point of DAW's and EDM in the
first place. DUB is very much part of the
Roots of EDM, and Roots have their function.
That function will be a main part of our
focus. The
Configuration For
this review, we used a new model of a 64bit Windows 8
machine with 8 Gigabytes of RAM and Intel
processors. That's quite a machine, in times
where 32bit and 4 Gigabytes of RAM still
form the norm. So the 32bit version was
installed, with only 4 Gigabytes available. No external
sound device was connected either, the internal Real-Tek
audio card was used with a ASIO4ALL driver.
MIDI keyboard? Nope. Mouse and computer
keyboard.
A minimal configuration. When
Reason performs in this configuration, it
will break all sound barriers in 64bit
mode. The
Installation Process Reason
8.0 comes as a huge download. It's a zip
file you can download straight from your
account at the Propellerhead website. After
unzipping everything to a folder, it's
merely clicking the "Install
Reason.exe" file. Unless you don't want
the standard install options, that is.
Installation goes quick, the computer will
reset and when you launch Reason, you can
log in with your account name and password
or you can authorize your copy on the
Propellerhead website and simply start the
program without Internet connection. It's more difficult
to read this than to actually do, by the
way. When
you run a 64bit OS like Windows 8, Reason
will install it's 64bit version by default.
Adding /32 ("Install Reason.exe
/32") will install it's 32bit version
which you must do when you plan to use other 32bit software
for plug-in's through Propellerhead's Rewire
protocol. Everything is explained in the
installation manual. Talking
about plug-in's, even though Propellerhead
doesn't really like using that term for
their "Rack Extensions": Reason
8.0 comes with a free Bass and Guitar Amp as
well as a "Retro Transformer".
You'll need to install them separately, but
more about that later.
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