Yesterday Propellerhead announced Reason 11. It comes with some cool new features and new rack devices:

• Reason Rack Plugin: Reason 11 can be loaded as an instrument or effects rack as a VST3 plugin in your favourite DAW like Ableton Live or Steinberg Cubase for example. More about this later (see below this list).
• Automation lines can be curved: instead of a flat line from point A to B lines in Reason 11 can be curved to make it non linear.
• Crossfades on audioclips: in Reason 11 you can stitch two audio parts together using a crossfade to make the transition sounding smoother.
• 2 new effect devices are added: Sweeper Modulation Effect and Quartet Chorus Ensemble are added to Reason 11.
• The effects of the SSL mixer as rack devices: the Master Bus Compressor, Channel Dynamics and the Channel EQ are in Reason 11 also included as Reason devices so they can be used anywhere in the rack and also in the Reason Rack Plugin.
• Vertical zoom: in Reason 11 you can make a track lane taller (vertical zoom) for zooming into a MIDI or audio lane.
• Mute MIDI notes: in Reason 11 you can select MIDI notes in the lane and mute them.
• Draw multiple notes: in Reason 11 you can now draw multiple notes by simply drawing a line with the cursor, which is handy for creating drumrolls or busy hihat patterns.
• Selected MIDI notes are shown on piano roll: when you select MIDI notes in Reason 11 the corresponding notes in the piano roll will light up.
• Reason Suite: a new Reason version is added. The Suite is the most complete one. It’s all of Reason’s instrument and effects plus: Scenic Hybrid Instrument, Complex-1 Modular Synth, Umpf Club Drums, Umpf Retro Beats, Reason Electric Bass, Reason Drum Kits, Processed Pianos, Layers Wave Edition, Layers, Parsec Spectral Synthesizer, Radical Keys, Polar Dual Pitch Shifter, Rotor Rotary Speaker, PolyStep Sequencer, Quad Note Generator, Drum Sequencer.
• Scenic Hybrid Instrument: A cinematic instrument that focusses on atmospheric sounds with performance controls. It is only available in the Suite version but can be bought separately as Reason RE for the standard Reason version.

Reason Rack Plugin

The Reason Rack Plugin is interesting. It creates 2 new things which were never before possible:

1. You can now send audio through the Reason Rack Plugin for example from Ableton Live.
2. Since the Reason Rack Plugin is a VST3 plugin, you can save the patches as a .vstpreset. This way you can make very complicated rack setups and save them into presets, which turns the Reason Rack Plugin into some kind of Super Combinator.

You can even imagine that it would be useful to run the Reason Rack Plugin from Reason itself as a “Super Combinator”. Unfortunately Reason 11 doesn’t support VST 3 plugins.

Propellerhead drops the name Propellerhead

This is weird: Propellerhead will change its name in Reason Studios.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll see us changing to Reason Studios wherever Propellerhead has shown up— places like on our website, Facebook, Instagram and the like. Don’t worry, all your old links will still work. While the name and logo change, the people here remain as dedicated as ever.

This is confusing because I see for example that www.twitter.com/reasonstudios is used by a band. They are also using a SoundCloud account under that name.

Why rename your company? It is possible that Reason Studios as a company in the future will build products and services that are not 100% Reason related?

This feels a bit like the Allihoopa story, first being part of Propellerhead, then becoming a separate company and then closing down and Propellerhead taking over their old products again.

Take and Figure are now part of Reason Studios while Take and Figure have nothing to do with Reason. Confusing.

Can’t find the reason behind this…

Reason 11 will be released on September 25, 2019.