Reason 5 and Record 1.5 reveals Kong drum module
By Rob Sandall
| Posted in Music Technology
Reason 5 and Record 1.5 have been enjoying a huge amount of press this week, with creator Propellerheads revealing new features daily as a teaser for the late-summer releases. The last announcement of the five is impressive indeed, trumpeting the addition of Kong, a brand new drum module apparently designed to “focus on letting you get exactly that drum sound you’re after.”
There are 16 pads on the module, relating as you’d assume to 16 different drums. What makes this module different is that each of the drum sounds has an analogue-style editing interface, so that every single one of your beats can be tweaked to pinpoint preference.
Taking the synth bass drum as an example, a user can completely shape the final output by manipulating pitch, bend time and frequency, attack and decay, the separate acoustic qualities of the click and the tone and noise levels generated. This formula – breaking down each sound into component parts to define what we hear when a drum is played – is also applied to synth snare, synth hi hat and synth tom.
When using acoustic models, the editor is different, allowing you to mess with the tuning, dampening, shell characteristic and skin tensions – a more natural approach, then, which again covers bass, snare, toms and cymbals as you’d expect.
Once the actual tones have been created, you can layer them in a sample library to blend tones – opening up infinite possibilities – and then fire up the REX player to create and trigger your loops with your brand new sound bank.
On top of that, ‘support generators’ allow you to bolster further tone and noise attributes if you’re not getting quite that presence you need, and nine separate effects generators can then be used to tweak things further – the likes of compression, overdrive, tape echo and a modulation ring.
Kong appears to represent the attention to detail that Reason users have come to love over the years, and is likely to prove to be much more than just a throwaway stick-on module. Best of all, existing Reason 4 users will only have to spend a modest amount on a Record 1.5 upgrade to feel the benefit of a Reason 5 update simultaneously, while anyone starting from scratch can buy Reason 4 and Record 1.0 right now, and feel the benefit of the upgrade when it kicks during August.
Tags: Kong drum module, Reason 5, Record 1.5