Time-stretch and audio quantize with Reason 7

Correcting the timing of a real instruments and percussion is a practice that many producers use in their music on a regular basis. Time-stretching and audio quantizing can be used to subtly nudge a vocal back in time, correct the timing of a dodgy bass player or even to create new glitched-out sounds from your original audio.

These features have been included in most major DAWs (Most notably Ableton Live) for quite some time now, but it was only recently that Propellerhead announced that they would be adding this to Reason 7 (released April 30th). So what's the big deal, why are people getting exited about something that they've already seen on another platform? I guess it's not the actual technology that people are interested in but the way the company has intergraded it into their software. Propellerhead are notorious for doing things a little different, and this implementation of audio quantize is no exception.

The workflow and sheer beauty of Propellerhead's Reason sets it worlds apart from the rest of the competition. The modularity of the virtual rack makes it stand out to individuals that like to experiment and get their hands dirty while writing music. Flip the rack around to reveal endless routing options with audio and CV cables that give you the flexibility to create pretty much anything you like. After you've spent half an hour messing about you will realise that Reason is truly an audio geek's paradise.

The way that time stretching is implemented into Reason isn't necessarily different to other DAWs but it does look sleeker and more intuitive. You can even bounce your sliced audio to .REX format so you can experiment even further with Reasons built in Dr.Octorex player. Fair enough, it's taken Propellerheads quite some time to add audio quantizing and time-stretching to reason but features like this are worth the wait if they're implemented as flawlessly as this.

The video below shows off what can be done with the audio quantise and time-stretch features that will be available in Reason 7.