Reason 9 revealed, find out what’s new

Reason 9 has been announced and the good folk over at Propellerhead have revealed what to expect from the latest release of their massively popular DAW software.

Reason 9 is the most exciting version yet, with major new features that are sure to help everyone make more and better music,”

That’s of course the Propellerhead product manager [Mattias Häggström Gerdt] talking but to be fair if previous versions on anything to go by, Reason 9 should no doubt delivers some cool new features. Let’s take a look…

What’s new…

More sales talk from Mattias

“For Reason 9, we focused on the journey from inspiration to perfection. The new devices and sounds can spark a million new ideas, while the new tools and highly requested features help you polish those ideas to perfection. Reason 9 makes it fun and easy for everyone to capture their inspiration and develop musical ideas.”

Three new player devices

Reason 9 adds three new player devices that can instantly transform an MIDI input into music.

Note Echo creates rhythmic, pitched MIDI delays for melodies, drum rolls etc
Scales & Chords turns simple melodies into beautiful harmonies and chords so you can stay focused on the music making. This is a big help for those without any music theory knowledge and is in line with many other ‘assisters’ in both DAWS and with advanced keyboards such as Native Instruments’ Kontrol S Keyboards and AKAI’s Advance keyboards.
Dual Arpeggio transforms chords into intricate and inspiring rhythms. From classic up-and-down to polyphonic and polyrhythmic and can be used with any Reason 9 rack instrument.

Other notable new features

Two other new features in Reason 9 that certainly add to making the DAW even more complete as a package are their new Pitch Edit mode which allows one to tweak a vocal recording by fixing out-of-tune notes, adding vibrato and even being able to create a new melody from the recording. This sounds pretty much like an integration of something like Melodyne.

Then there’s also the Audio to MIDI feature which means you can convert audio to MIDI notes, a feature that is probably one of Ableton’s strongest features. This offers so many possibilities for sound manipulation.

On top of this Reason 9 also adds another 1,000 new sounds to their library and they’ve made some workflow enhancements to the reason rack including darker themes for those inclined. There’s no specific mention of any enhancements to the arranger/editor which is an area they could still be a bit stronger.