Reason sound doesn't sell is not true

[deep'n'dark]

When I downloaded FL Studio (10.0) for comparison against Reason, I noticed how FL sounded good out of the box. Like someone mentioned it sounded "full".
I don't know why but FL Studio doesn't require as much work with the sounds you use, while in Reason I need to tweak, effectize and mask/change the source almost every time. I think Reason has it's own features that I love tho.

The reason for "Reason Sound" are the stock effects. I have got many Rack Extensions to get a different sound. Here's a list of the REs I've bought:

Korg Poly Six
Rob Papen Predator
Synapse Audio Antidote
Rob Papen Distort
Blamsoft Resampler
Ochen K. Glitch
Sonic Charge Echobode
FX Pansion Etch Red
Softube Tsar-R1 Reverb
Uhbik-A
Req131 31 Band EQ
Izotope Ozone Maximizer
Pulsar Dual LFO
Softube Saturation Knob

I love how Propellerheads added spectrum analyzer to the SSL EQ, I didn't use the EQ before, but now when I do, my mixes sound so much better.

[Tronam]

EDIT : I will even add something that shows even better my feeling about this. I used to be a Reason fanboy actually. So my perception was biased toward Reason at the time. I already told this story somewhere else on the forum but it is the perfect place. At the time (something like ten years before), I was with my friend using Reason and loving it (came from a DOS tracker, we were amazed by the gorgeous sound of Reason washed in FX and the lively synths comparing to dry pitched samples). Some day, just out of curiosity we tried FL Studio demo (Fruity Loops at the time), and at first glance were not impressed at all, ugly GUI, toyish feeling, the synths GUI were not appealing (we were young ). But as soon as we wrote a 4 bar beat with a stupid synthesized bassline (a saw and a filter) and it was sounding so full, so gorgeous comparing to our countless hours projects in Reason ^^

This is actually really interesting to me because you mentioned having started on trackers, and you are describing exactly my feeling about trackers: something very hard to define is missing in a sound when played back through a tracker, and this includes the top of the line Renoise. i got into a forum discussion about this problem at Renoise's site, and unintentionally started a huge mess... where exactly one person out of twenty said they agreed with me and everyone else was doing null tests and crap to prove that i was imagining it.

I came from trackers as well, going all the way back to Protracker on the Amiga and they absolutely have a "sound" which is quite distinctive, even now with Renoise. I think it's partially due to the interface and how it encourages a different approach to composing, but also the way that samples get bent and manipulated in that pattern based environment is something I can usually recognize immediately. This very often holds true for me with Ableton Live as well. Heavy use of its clip warping, glitch cutting and certain built-in effects/instruments are a dead giveaway.

These kinds of differences between music programs will be inescapable unless everyone completely bypasses their host's effects and uses only the exact same 3rd party plugins. I also think the interface can influence how you compose. What I don't believe is that any of this has to do with the mystical audio engine. That's the part that so many people keep getting hung up on.

[Davias]

EDIT : I will even add something that shows even better my feeling about this. I used to be a Reason fanboy actually. So my perception was biased toward Reason at the time. I already told this story somewhere else on the forum but it is the perfect place. At the time (something like ten years before), I was with my friend using Reason and loving it (came from a DOS tracker, we were amazed by the gorgeous sound of Reason washed in FX and the lively synths comparing to dry pitched samples). Some day, just out of curiosity we tried FL Studio demo (Fruity Loops at the time), and at first glance were not impressed at all, ugly GUI, toyish feeling, the synths GUI were not appealing (we were young ). But as soon as we wrote a 4 bar beat with a stupid synthesized bassline (a saw and a filter) and it was sounding so full, so gorgeous comparing to our countless hours projects in Reason ^^

This is actually really interesting to me because you mentioned having started on trackers, and you are describing exactly my feeling about trackers: something very hard to define is missing in a sound when played back through a tracker, and this includes the top of the line Renoise. i got into a forum discussion about this problem at Renoise's site, and unintentionally started a huge mess... where exactly one person out of twenty said they agreed with me and everyone else was doing null tests and crap to prove that i was imagining it.

I came from trackers as well, going all the way back to Protracker on the Amiga and they absolutely have a "sound" which is quite distinctive, even now with Renoise. I think it's partially due to the interface and how it encourages a different approach to composing, but also the way that samples get bent and manipulated in that pattern based environment is something I can usually recognize immediately. This very often holds true for me with Ableton Live as well. Heavy use of its clip warping, glitch cutting and certain built-in effects/instruments are a dead giveaway.

These kinds of differences between music programs will be inescapable unless everyone completely bypasses their host's effects and uses only the exact same 3rd party plugins. I also think the interface can influence how you compose. What I don't believe is that any of this has to do with the mystical audio engine. That's the part that so many people keep getting hung up on.

That is funny, I remember back in the days that Impulse Tracker sounded more "transparent" to me than FastTracker II, but I used FTII because the interface of IT was too weird for me ^^ I remember that FTII sounded pleasant to me despite the lacks of FXs and bad samples sources. But when I loaded a kick into it, and play, it has punch !
When I load a kick into a wave editor it has punch, same in FL, same in Renoise... When I loaded a kick into NN-XT, NN-19 or Redrum, no mather what the settings it sounded crap, transient muffled, low end compromised. So I'm still lost with this. For me Renoise or Fl sounds transparent. I know Reason sound can sell (sure, I hear Stromae all day long on tv, please help !) and that you can have a neat production with Reason (I've heard the examples posted, impressive). I just never understood why I had to put 25 stock fx on a sample for it to sound good while in other daws I could just load the sample and play. Same with subtractor, Malstrom and Thor (but this is harder to judge since there is no VST equivalents). I know prodigy sold albums made with Reason but they are sounding crap comparing to their older albums (again could be me, but I talk with music likers that doesn't know a thing about a daw or a plugin and they can naturally tell me the same feeling). But it can come from so many things ? Bad sound sources choices by Liam Howlett, bad mix, bad master, bad OTB processing. But he ditched Reason as soon as his commercial arrangement was done with PH so I guess he must feel like me.

Anyway all this to conclude with "use what works for you", and clearly Reason didn't worked for me on that side. Not to mention all the RE/CPU problems (hopefully I didn't have to live that), or the fact that nowadays with modulars plugs like mux or vstforks the whole cable thing in Reason is not so impossible to recreate in any daw, so finally Reason doesn't bring anything new/different comparing to vst world, and is still closed (a RE that can't be used in a other DAW or resold means closed environment to me).

[Tronam]

When I load a kick into a wave editor it has punch, same in FL, same in Renoise... When I loaded a kick into NN-XT, NN-19 or Redrum, no mather what the settings it sounded crap, transient muffled, low end compromised. So I'm still lost with this. For me Renoise or Fl sounds transparent.

Really? Ok, so which of these is Logic and which is Redrum?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/614 ... ckTest.wav

[spaceman]

When I loaded a kick into NN-XT, NN-19 or Redrum, no mather what the settings it sounded crap, transient muffled, low end compromised. So I'm still lost with this. For me Renoise or Fl sounds transparent. I know Reason sound can sell (sure, I hear Stromae all day long on tv, please help !) and that you can have a neat production with Reason (I've heard the examples posted, impressive). I just never understood why I had to put 25 stock fx on a sample for it to sound good while in other daws.

What a load of bollocks.

[fceramic]

I'm pretty sure Reason is transparent. I would guess some people forget that Reason's samplers have velocity as a default, which is not always standard, and low volume can often give the impression of "sounding crap, transient muffled, low end compromised".

[Tronam]

I'm pretty sure Reason is transparent. I would guess some people forget that Reason's samplers have velocity as a default, which is not always standard, and low volume can often give the impression of "sounding crap, transient muffled, low end compromised".

It's amazing how influential volume alone can be on people's impression of audio quality. I wouldn't be surprised if most of this "sound" mythology revolves around the fact that most of Reason's instruments instantiate at reduced level to help prevent main output clipping. Redrum is a good example of this. By default its master level is set to about 80% of maximum volume. The individual sample slots are set the same way including velocity. The end result is that normal pattern notes on a normalized sample will peak at around -3dB. That's enough of a volume difference to skew impressions of transients and bass response.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Davias]

When I load a kick into a wave editor it has punch, same in FL, same in Renoise... When I loaded a kick into NN-XT, NN-19 or Redrum, no mather what the settings it sounded crap, transient muffled, low end compromised. So I'm still lost with this. For me Renoise or Fl sounds transparent.

Really? Ok, so which of these is Logic and which is Redrum?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/614 ... ckTest.wav

Ok you are right they sound the same. Thanks to your audio example I understood that the differences I saw before may just come from audio alignment to sample positions, two kicks can have a different looking waveform but still sound exactly the same when reconstructed.

I think the Redrum kick is the second one in your example

[Davias]

When I loaded a kick into NN-XT, NN-19 or Redrum, no mather what the settings it sounded crap, transient muffled, low end compromised. So I'm still lost with this. For me Renoise or Fl sounds transparent. I know Reason sound can sell (sure, I hear Stromae all day long on tv, please help !) and that you can have a neat production with Reason (I've heard the examples posted, impressive). I just never understood why I had to put 25 stock fx on a sample for it to sound good while in other daws.

What a load of bollocks.

I guess it came from some bad memories. Don't pay attention I've already changed my mind.

[Tronam]

I guess it came from some bad memories. Don't pay attention I've already changed my mind.

It's not like you're the first person to be fooled by this. The biggest culprit for me are compressors. I am constantly tricked into thinking they're improving the sound when in fact most of what it's doing is just boosting up the volume. It's probably in these companies' best interests to set them that way, but I've always wished they'd include a feature that perfectly scaled the output with the compression so that all you could hear was the effect without any increase in peak volume. Subtle compression is hard for me to hear.

[Davias]

I'm pretty sure Reason is transparent. I would guess some people forget that Reason's samplers have velocity as a default, which is not always standard, and low volume can often give the impression of "sounding crap, transient muffled, low end compromised".

Spot on ! I think this is part why I kept that feeling. That and what were mentioned before (factory sounds, fx) and less knowledge than now led me to that feeling but now it is cleared. Reason sounds normal. I was just imagining things back in the days. Case closed.

[Davias]

I guess it came from some bad memories. Don't pay attention I've already changed my mind.

It's not like you're the first person to be fooled by this. The biggest culprit for me are compressors. I am constantly tricked into thinking they're improving the sound when in fact most of what it's doing is just boosting up the volume. It's probably in these companies' best interests to set them that way, but I've always wished they'd include a feature that perfectly scaled the output with the compression so that all you could hear was the effect without any increase in peak volume. Subtle compression is hard for me to hear.

Yes, I match volume since a certain time now and it feels so normal to me that I forgot at the time I was using Reason I didn't really grasp the louder is better paradigm

For compression, since I have usually loud kicks, I try to match the kick level with and without compression, and see where the rest sits.

I guess also that my bad mixing skills at the time were part of why I was fooled. It all makes sense, coming from a tracker with dry sound, it was certainly misuse of these 25 fx chains that led to these muffled transients which still haunt me in my dreams

[Tronam]

Speaking of volume levels, I wonder if there's a correlation between popularity and how loud VSTi developers set up their default instrument output. I've noticed that Spectrasonics, U-He and Sylenth1, for example, all seem to default at a pretty high volume level nearing 0dB. I wonder if that has a psychological influence on people's first impressions of those instruments.

Sylenth1 is such a massively popular synth, especially in the EDM community, so I was curious about its fundamental sound. After exploring its oscillators and filter a bit, I think the major reason for its popularity is the easy user interface, low CPU usage and quick ability to create stacked, wide sounds. The oscillators actually appear to be simple digital waveforms without any so called "analog" emulation at all, so quite thin sounding. I wanted to compare it to Thor and see how easy it would be to mimic the raw oscillator and filter behavior. It proved much easier than I expected. Thor's analog oscillator was actually warmer or "rounder" than Sylenth1, so I had to switch to the wavetable saw oscillator to match them. It was an interesting test:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/614 ... ylenth.wav
(Just raw oscillators and filter. No effects)

[spaceman]

I believe most people still judge sounds quality by volume and the looks of the graphics.
The power of imagination in the brain is not to be underestimated.

I don't blame anyone. You can find several example of top producers tweaking sounds several times before finally realising they're tweaking the wrong plugin or channel.