What are your top five devices at the moment?

[Jagwah]

1. Europa. Bread and butter synth. Easiest synth to get good sound quickly.

Europa would have easily been my #1 if I didn't change paths recently, really well done synth everyone likes using it

1. Thor - Love the supersaw oscillator even if its mono

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2. Thor. Trying to get a NordLead kinda synth string sound from several different synths, and finally Thor did it best. Shows how incredible versatile it is.

Nice to know Thor is still kicking butt!

1. Serum - one of my newest toys and oh man I love it! And I'm having fun making my own Reese basses and getting into sound design.

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1.Serum - had it for ages but use it on every single track. Love the amount of mod options and find it quick when creating sounds.

Serum is pretty amazing I would really like to dive in to it. Like mentioned above playing with Reese basses is fun and really deep. I don't know why the onboard effects make everything sound so good and punchy, why does that multiband compressor sound so good? The oscillators are so powerful. I imagine Serum is where a lot of new sound design comes from today, at least in a few music genres.

[Goriila Texas]

This thread would be better if links to said products were posted imo.

[Goriila Texas]

How about posting your top 5 RE's that you can talk about?

Sure. I use a lot of different devices, but I've been using these continuously since getting them.

Objekt - just try it
Chris Griffin S73 - amazing sounding electric piano.. amazing effects. I wish Chris would give us audio in.
Mimic - the best sampler in Reason (I never really took to Grain and the 19/XT are so outdated)
Bassline Generator - capable of much more than doing basslines, but it's really good at that, too. The last update really moved it up to a new tier.
Combinator 2 - how much fun is this? I love building my own devices.

I wish Mimic had a play button on it like Grain so you could audition sounds and not have to use a keyboard.

[challism]

Sure. I use a lot of different devices, but I've been using these continuously since getting them.

Objekt - just try it
Chris Griffin S73 - amazing sounding electric piano.. amazing effects. I wish Chris would give us audio in.
Mimic - the best sampler in Reason (I never really took to Grain and the 19/XT are so outdated)
Bassline Generator - capable of much more than doing basslines, but it's really good at that, too. The last update really moved it up to a new tier.
Combinator 2 - how much fun is this? I love building my own devices.

I wish Mimic had a play button on it like Grain so you could audition sounds and not have to use a keyboard.

Agreed. I wish Mimic had quite a few features it doesn't have. It is what it is until they give us an update (if). So it goes.

[dvdrtldg]

Sorry, I'm doing Top 10 so there

* Objekt - because it's the newest shiniest toy in the box, but I'm pretty sure it'll still be on the top 10 list if you ask me again in a year from now

* Europa - I like doing weird experimental soundscapey stuff and it's so easy to get weird experimental WTF sounds from this synth

* Dr Octo Rex - I'm constantly amazed at all the ways in which you can make a loop not sound like a loop with this thing. A simple design classic

* Audio Thing Fog Convolver - the most fun you can have with a reverb. Does a great job with bread & butter room/plate/hall FX, but then you can get super fricken weird & sound designy with it and the UI invites experimentation

* Waves Abbey Road RS124 compressor - hard not to overdo it with this one, because it sounds so amazingly good when you push it to extremes. My favourite comp for sustained bass tones, just adds tons of smooth creamy character

* Scaler 2 - the composer's best friend

* Inspiral - the composer's best friend's little brother

* Shape LFO - just a great super versatile LFO

* Sequences - just a great super versatile sequencer

* PSQ-1684 - arguably getting a bit long in the tooth, arguably eclipsed by some of the more complex players, but I still love it as a CV utility/sequencer, especially for complex generative setups. It's crazy useful

[Jagwah]

Sorry, I'm doing Top 10 so there

Nice to see Europa again.

Scaler 2 is an interesting one, I have a few music theory REs that in the beginning seemed great, then once I learned a bit of theory it seemed better to focus on that rather than do advanced stuff I don't really understand with the devices. Just curious, do you do complex stuff with it or is it more of a leg up helping you with the more basic side of things?

[veezay]

1. Thor. Gets the bread and butter jobs done, and is useful for a whole lot of other non-synth jobs as well.

2. MClass Equalizer. It's the only EQ I really need, apart from the next device.

3. Omega Trimmer (Forgotten Clank Studios). Gentle or very steep lowpass and highpass filtering and a +/- 30 dB gain in a compact 1U device. It's the perfect complement to the MClass EQ.

4. Synapse DR-1 Deep Reverb (Synapse Audio Software). Creamy and lush reverb for occasions when none of the RV7000 offerings don't quite cut it.

5. The Echo. Basically the only delay device that I use for delay effects.


These are probably the ones that I use most often. There are a lot of other devices as well that almost made it to the top 5 (such as Selig Leveler and Spectral Scan Software 4 Phase LFO, and something as basic as the Audio Track if that counts). Without all these mentioned I would have to seriously rewire my brain to do a lot of the tasks.

[dvdrtldg]

Scaler 2 is an interesting one, I have a few music theory REs that in the beginning seemed great, then once I learned a bit of theory it seemed better to focus on that rather than do advanced stuff I don't really understand with the devices. Just curious, do you do complex stuff with it or is it more of a leg up helping you with the more basic side of things?

I use it mostly as a chord bank. I have a background in music theory and there are a lot of features in Scaler that I don't bother with, but just as a chord generator it's really useful. If I had a keyboard (which I don't), I might use Scaler less and just come up with chords by letting my fingers wander over the keys, but as things stand it does the job perfectly. I simply go looking for a bunch of nice chords that go together well, drag them into the sequencer and then start messing with them - rearranging, editing the MIDI, playing with inversions, looping, arpeggiating, whatever. It's not so necessary if I'm working with simple pop or blues chords, can easily come up with those on my own. But if I want to get into weirder territory - atonal, weird modes, out-there jazz etc - Scaler is a huge time saver

Only bummer is that it's a bit clunky to use in Reason, due to lack of internal MIDI out

[Steedus]

Weirdly one of the top devices I consistently use is Tonicmint's free AB Transpose player > https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack ... transpose/

Being able to just jump octaves in the rack when messing around with a sound is invaluable to me. I know you can do this in the sequencer but I find this quicker and cleaner.

[ltbrunt00]

Spitfire Audio - Albion One: This was a tie with all their Albion libraries, Abbey Road 1/2 and BBC Orchestra full. even with all this I reach for Albion One as a starter 90 percent of the time.

Waves - Grand Piano: goes in everything

Spitfire Audio - London Contemporary Strings. Articulations are amazing even for a older product

Orange Tree Samples - Evolution Infinity: I am a lazy guitar player and finds editing live guitars to tedious, Evolution Infinity lets me tweak make changes all day long.

Sound Paint - Saxophone Tenor, Soprano: I am still blown away be this. I love the SWAM Horns, Strings. Controlling every aspect of a articulation in Swam is superior to Sound Paint but the ease of getting great sounding horns in Sound Paint wins the this sounds amazing move on to something else quickly race.

Honorable mention goes to

PX7 FM Synthesizer: (discontinued by Reason) I still love it and use it all over the place
Thor: Everything cuts through the mix with little effort
The Legend and VK2: both are amazing and after spending way to much money on many different synths I always
somehow add one of these to everything even if they don't make the final track they were used at some point.

[petecampbell]

For me it's
1. Echo - Use it on every track, all the time. There is still no replacement.
2. Thor - I've created 100s of patches over the years and they are still used. I know my way around it like my back pocket. I wish a new version with the same interface but some extra oversampling and additional wave forms would be released.
3. PX7 - I just love it, the simple FM interface.
4. Grain - Great for experimentation with samples. Easy to use, easy to create lush textures.
5. Combinator - I love being able wrap all fx, arps, and layered synths in to one container.

I also like Europe, but for some reason i don't use it that much because i don't develop muscle memory for operating it.

[motuscott]

Bong, chef's knife, vape pen, weed whacker, bong

[SebAudio]

For me it's
1. Echo - Use it on every track, all the time. There is still no replacement.
2. Thor - I've created 100s of patches over the years and they are still used. I know my way around it like my back pocket. I wish a new version with the same interface but some extra oversampling and additional wave forms would be released.
3. PX7 - I just love it, the simple FM interface.
4. Grain - Great for experimentation with samples. Easy to use, easy to create lush textures.
5. Combinator - I love being able wrap all fx, arps, and layered synths in to one container.

I also like Europe, but for some reason i don't use it that much because i don't develop muscle memory for operating it.

Where Thor modules are « focused » and you have to « plumbing » them and the difficulty (and fun !) comes from the latter, Europa’s oscillators are « open bar » and so it’s hard to know what modifiers are great with what oscillator shapes, and then you have the spectral filter and harmonics. Wow ! Muscle memory seems impossible. The routing is quite straightforward. Europa while powerful always appears to me as not as much a thoughtful synth as Thor.