Reason Turns 25

Reason has turned 25, having been released in November 2000 - built upon the amazing  ReBirth RB338, it came with a 14-channel stereo Mixer, ReDrum Drum Computer, the SubTractor Polyphonic Synthesizer, the NN19 Digital Sampler (named after the 1985 hit "19" by Paul Hardcastle... who knew!), the Dr:Rex Loop Player, and the ReBirth Input Machine. It was a huge step forward for production, especially given it's lovingly crafted "hardware" units which you could patch together, complete with wobbly cables. I have to say, I'm a huge Reason fan and I have many fond memories of using it over the years - and they continue to innovate! 

Here's a video at Superbooth last year with them... 

Liam Howlett of the Prodigy famously used Reason for the 'Always Outnumbered Never Outgunned':

"For this album I used Reason. It's a consumer-based product, that's very kind of like low-fi and just perfect for what I wanted to do. I started off on this Roland W30 and I've kind of ended back on the equivalent of what the W30 would be now, which to me, is Reason, a self-contained program. Obviously you can't record vocals or actual audio into it, so when I wrote all the demos on Reason and then we shifted across to ProTools and it went up another gear. That's basically how I wrote the record, all on the laptop."

In this video, we join Luc Theriault on a journey through the last 20 years. More from the Reason blog:

Time flies, as they say. 25 years ago, the very first version of Reason saw the light of the day. The idea was to create a self-contained music production and sound design software, available to anyone with even a fairly average computer. The philosophy behind Reason was to "democratize the music making", meaning everyone should be able to create music without having to shell out a fortune on musical instruments and hardware. The concept turned out to be a real hit and Reason continues to evolve to this day!

Background

After the huge success of the ReBirth application, released in 1997, Marcus Zetterquist came up with the idea of making a music production tool based on a rack concept, where you could connect various rack modules to each using virtual cables, to form a virtual music studio.

As Ernst Nathorst-Böös said "Reason was the software we wanted to create when we made ReBirth". Due to the generally low performance of computers at that time this wasn't feasible, so it had to wait a couple of years.

Ernst, Marcus and Peter (Jubel) agreed that the "hardware rack" metaphor made perfect sense and was quite easy for most users to grasp: you connect a cable from one jack to another, and that's it. On the first prototypes the jacks were on the front panel of the rack. This was later changed, and they eventually ended up on the back panels. You could quickly switch between front and back by pressing the now famous [Tab] key.

Visit the Reason website: https://www.reasonstudios.com/news/post/hooray-reason-turns-25

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