A first look at Reason 6, Balance and Reason Essentials!

A few months back Propellerhead's CEO Ernst Nathorst-Böös gave a speech at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship about branding products. He mentioned the trouble of having your product's name be more familiar than your company name. Sound familiar? With that in mind I'm looking at today's announcement of Reason 6 and Reason Essentials. Reason 6 introduces three new effects devices The Pulveriser High Yield Demolition Unit (makes me think Metasonix was an inspiration), The Echo an advanced stereo echo with the same wobble capabilities of the echo in Kong (but with a lot more programability) and the Alligator, a three channel pattern based gate effect with built in phaser, delay and drive. But the big news and why I mentioned Ernst speech at SSES is the end of Record. That's right the end of Record. Reason 6 brings it all together in Reason in 64 bit! Neptune, the SSL modeled mixer with master bus compression, audio recording with time stretching and transposing and a fancy schmancy recording meter that doubles as a guitar tuner. Here's a look:



Now bringing it all together in Reason 6 to me makes perfect sense. And offering the "starter" product Reason Essentials that comes with Reason's new Balance audio interface is a great way to rope in the singer songwriter market that Record was originally marketed towards. I think the real downfall of Record was that the target market probably end up using whatever came with the audio interface they bought - generally Pro Tools. So offering Balance with Reason Essentials is a great way to compete for Propellerhead with Avid. And from the initial tech specs Balance looks pretty good:

2-in by 2-out audio interface
USB 2.0 – bus powered
Hi-end pre-amplifiers
Hi-end 24-bit ADC/DACs, 44.1 to 96kHz
Low latency design
Clip Safe — a “built-in recording engineer” that automatically "heals" clipped recordings.
Mac OS class compliant (no driver on Mac OS). ASIO drivers for Windows installed with the software.
Built-in Propellerhead Ignition Key
Direct monitoring (for stand-alone or DAW use)
Two XLR microphone inputs w. 48V phantom power
Two 1/4" guitar inputs with padding
Four 1/4" line inputs (two stereo pairs)
One 1/4” headphone output
Two 1/4" TRS balanced main outputs
Hardware input source selection
Input level control
Separate output and headphone level control
Output muting

Check out the video with future Mrs. 72, Olivia Broadfield:



The question that I'd really like answered at this point is if Recycle will someday be incorporated into the Reason rack? That's the one thing that Reason 6 is missing for me. But I was stoked to find out that Miho Hatori uses Reason:



Reason 6, Reason Essentials and Balance will be available at the end of September! Reason/Record owners that purchase Reason Essentials with Balance receive a free Reason 6 upgrade.