Propellerhead has released Radical Keys, a new Reason Rack Extension featuring three classic electric pianos: the Rhodes Mk1, the Wurlitzer and the Pianet-T.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyJBQZrWr20
Features:
- Three classic electric pianos: Rhodes Mk 1, Wurlitzer and Pianet T.
- Choose and blend between line-recorded, amplified and room mic signals.
- 101 instantly playable piano patches for any style of music and any style of playing.
- Tweak the instrument’s character by altering sympathetic resonance and envelope
- Set the level for the instrument’s mechanical noises such as key noise and pedal noise. Make it clean or make it rough.
- Adjustable velocity response lets you control how the instrument responds to your performance.
- Unique effect section designed specifically for Radical Keys. Consists of Tremolo, Compressor, Overdrive, EQ, Phaser, Chorus and Ambience processing.
Propellerhead’s Radical Keys Rack Extension is available now for US $99.
I’m rather suprised at how pricey rack extensions are. They do sound great, but that’s some pretty severe vendor lock-in; if you ever get tired of Reason as your DAW, you can’t ake those plugins elsewhere (although I suppose ReWire is sort of insurance against that outcome).
Rack Extensions are a hit with developers because you can’t easily pirate them, so developers can make money.
For better or worse, iOS and Rack Extensions seem to be what developers are focusing on.
It’s not really important, but as someone who’s into economics I can’t figure that. Since rack extensions are hard to pirate, it’s safer to price them more cheaply and sell more, because you’re not worried about your plugin showing up on the pirate bay 3 months after release. Ah well, I’m a hardware guy.
…though Reason remains pretty kickass, especially that Scream distortion.
I am not a developer but I believe the cost could be linked to the size of the market. Even though everything point to a copy of itunes from the props the Reason market way smaller than the 200 + million iOS users. The other thing is the complexity of the graphic design for the REs, beyond what someone would need to do with an iOS app.
The music market is a nice market. All the way back to the dude making custom made fiddles for Nero…
The demos on their website sound really good. I hope they come out with a Kontact version, I’m not a reason guy.
Why not port the racks to ipad and use them simultaneously and sell them at a reason-able price !
After FCPX came out and it wasn’t able to load old Final Cut projects I didn’t want to get stuck like that with music projects so I began only starting new projects in Reason while I waited for Logic 10 to come but now it’s been like 18 months and with REs and everything I may just stick with Reason. I mean other than chopping up samples (why is there still no quick way to slice samples and assign to drumpads like every other DAW?) I have no real reason to use another DAW. Plus I’m really starting to like the simplicity of having all the plugins even from 3rd parties coming from one repository so when I upgrade my workstation I just download them all in a couple seconds instead of digging out CDs and trying to remember login credentials for a half dozen random vendors, know what I mean?
Reason keeps getting better and better, in my opinion. I’ve been using it since 2.5, which was already pretty rock solid. My beef for the longest time was no audio interfacing, which was fixed with Record and now implemented in Reason 6. I’ve fallen in love with Rack Extensions as well, and the price points on these devices are pretty competitive, and the virtual voltage-control-ability on everything makes it even more interesting. At this point, my only beef now is the lack of native MIDI support for my hardware synths. If they can get that implemented in the same way they’ve done everything else, I don’t think I’ll need another DAW for a very long time.