Propellerhead introduces Layers synth.

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EdGrip
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14 Sep 2017


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chimp_spanner
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14 Sep 2017

Ah I see you beat me to it (by a few seconds!). As I said in my post - since deleted - lacks a bit of finesse to my mind! No multi out, no click and drag to add steps, no CV input (although the step CV output could be useful maybe?), interface isn't as cool as it could've been given the theme/style. I dunno. Just wide of the mark for me. Probably the first PH(kinda) RE I will skip! But I'll play with the demo and see what's what :)

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aeox
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14 Sep 2017

Eh, no innovation.

Tumble
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14 Sep 2017

For a brief moment I genuinely thought this was some sort of new sampler when I saw the thumbnail in my YT feed. Turns out it's just a more flexible version of the Analogue Monsters refill.

seqoi
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14 Sep 2017

Indeed for some reason i expected more from them. This looks like poor's man sample rompler. And that's a closed one. Many RE devices in current shop appear to be more advanced then this one.

From what i can see you can do pretty much everything with 4X NN19 and some clever routing in Combinator. + ton of samples already available.

And yes i expected more on the backside. At least FX routing. I guess in future update they will add it and custom sample loading option.

To each their own i guess.
Last edited by seqoi on 14 Sep 2017, edited 1 time in total.

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fotizimo
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14 Sep 2017

first thing this reminded me of was the Pink Noise Analog Monster refill:

http://www.reasonbanks.com/refill_AM3.html

covers these synths:

• Alesis Andromeda A6
• Korg MonoPoly
• Korg MS-20
• Korg Poly800 MKII
• Moog Prodigy
• Oberheim Matrix-1000
• Roland Juno-60
• Roland Jupiter 4
• Studio Electronics SE-1X
• Waldorf Microwave XT

Goes for 30 euros on the reasonbanks.com site. Seems like a low-effort release from Propellerheads IMHO. somehow i wonder if we are going to look back at version 9.5 as the "jump the shark" time for Propellerheads.
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Loque
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14 Sep 2017

It is an IDT, right? Might be good for some old school 80s stuff. Maybe i gonna try it if it is on 9€ to check if the sounds are worth it and i cannot do it with my synths (and i think most of my synths should be able to create the sounds...). Sry, if i am rude, but thats my opinion.
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Miguel da Wu
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14 Sep 2017

sorry propellerhead, this extension doesn´t convince me at all.

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JiggeryPokery
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14 Sep 2017

fotizimo wrote:
14 Sep 2017
first thing this reminded me of was the Pink Noise Analog Monster refill:

http://www.reasonbanks.com/refill_AM3.html

covers these synths:

• Alesis Andromeda A6
• Korg MonoPoly
• Korg MS-20
• Korg Poly800 MKII
• Moog Prodigy
• Oberheim Matrix-1000
• Roland Juno-60
• Roland Jupiter 4
• Studio Electronics SE-1X
• Waldorf Microwave XT

Goes for 30 euros on the reasonbanks.com site. Seems like a low-effort release from Propellerheads IMHO. somehow i wonder if we are going to look back at version 9.5 as the "jump the shark" time for Propellerheads.
As soon as I saw the list I thought exactly the same thing. It doesn't remind me of the AM3 list. It IS the AM3 list.

And considering AM3 is one of the top 10 Reason ReFills ever made, and probably top 5 for many users, if PN was involved in this product with some sort of licensing deal, then fair enough. It would be interesting to hear from people with Layers and AM3.

Edit - yeah, PinkNoise were involved ;)

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chimp_spanner
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14 Sep 2017

Hmmm. Yeah I'm not really feeling it. It's an especially hard sell because I own all the Volcas, and the Roland JX, JU and JP, not to mention just about every synth in the shop :D So I'm kinda setting myself up for disappointment haha.

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Oquasec
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14 Sep 2017

For me it has to be a synth like parsec.
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chimp_spanner
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14 Sep 2017

Oquasec wrote:
14 Sep 2017
For me it has to be a synth like parsec.
For 99EU, absolutely! That's Nostromo 2 money. Which I'm *dangerously* close to buying. Ugh.

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jfrichards
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14 Sep 2017

Reason is finally adjusting it's approach to being more for the musician and less for the technician. Props have always suffered from the technician culture while exploiting their little niche. For those of us who are interested in the technical side of electronic music, Reason has always been and will always be an endless source of inspiration, but we have each sacrificed years of musical creativity to dive into the technical world. Layers, like Players, is Props latest attempt to pull us out of our basement workshops and into the concert/CD/dancehall culture. If you go through the Layers presets, and super easy modifications, you'll find a performance and composing beast at your fingertips. For those who have labored long for multi-synth combinators, modulation matrix designs, and 3rd party patches, you will not be impressed. For the other 300 million modern musicians, you're gonna love it.

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chimp_spanner
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14 Sep 2017

jfrichards wrote:
14 Sep 2017
Reason is finally adjusting it's approach to being more for the musician and less for the technician. Props have always suffered from the technician culture while exploiting their little niche. For those of us who are interested in the technical side of electronic music, Reason has always been and will always be an endless source of inspiration, but we have each sacrificed years of musical creativity to dive into the technical world. Layers, like Players, is Props latest attempt to pull us out of our basement workshops and into the concert/CD/dancehall culture. If you go through the Layers presets, and super easy modifications, you'll find a performance and composing beast at your fingertips. For those who have labored long for multi-synth combinators, modulation matrix designs, and 3rd party patches, you will not be impressed. For the other 300 million modern musicians, you're gonna love it.
Oh yeah I mean don't get me wrong - even as somewhat of a technician, I still need to get things done. So I'm all about quick, easy workflow. Some of the presets are nice for sure! People might find it useful even just as a preset bank (if they don't already own AM ReFill).

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fotizimo
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14 Sep 2017

JiggeryPokery wrote:
14 Sep 2017

Edit - yeah, PinkNoise were involved ;)
So i wonder why there was no mention of it, since it took the community all of an hour to figure this out for ourselves. i wonder what this will do to AM3 sales?
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JiggeryPokery
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14 Sep 2017

jfrichards wrote:
14 Sep 2017
Reason is finally adjusting it's approach to being more for the musician and less for the technician. Props have always suffered from the technician culture while exploiting their little niche. For those of us who are interested in the technical side of electronic music, Reason has always been and will always be an endless source of inspiration, but we have each sacrificed years of musical creativity to dive into the technical world. Layers, like Players, is Props latest attempt to pull us out of our basement workshops and into the concert/CD/dancehall culture. If you go through the Layers presets, and super easy modifications, you'll find a performance and composing beast at your fingertips. For those who have labored long for multi-synth combinators, modulation matrix designs, and 3rd party patches, you will not be impressed. For the other 300 million modern musicians, you're gonna love it.
As one of those who does a lot of Reason programming, I can't say I've sacrificed any musical creativity, indeed it's been enhanced by Reason. As much as we get technical, just as often we simply write and don't worry about the technical aspects. Those two aspects are not, as you seem to contrarily suggest, mutually exclusive.

You're over-estimating how many Reason users actually do go that deep in CV and Combinator programming. My guess is the vast majority of DAW users tend towards presets and only relative handfuls program everything from scratch, and there are others who use presets but who love to tweak. There aren't 300 million people using Ableton, let alone Reason. :puf_wink:

Also, it feels derogatory to suggest people who can program technically complex—which isn't necessarily the same as nice-sounding!—patches, would automatically "not be impressed" by someone else's preset. Why would they not be impressed, if the preset is good and useful?

My view on Layers is if one doesn't have the brilliant AM3 ReFill then I guess it'll be in an interesting short-cut of a device, but it's more expensive than the ReFill, and probably has fewer samples. I can understand why Reasonbanks might have licensed the samples, it probably makes sense if most of their income is via Kontakt, with ReFill sales somewhere between nowt and bugger all. That means Layers for them is free money in a high profile PH RE. And for PH that makes it a really an extraordinarily cheap product to produce, as they've not spent twelve months or more recording and editing samples.

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Ottostrom
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14 Sep 2017

jfrichards wrote:
14 Sep 2017
Reason is finally adjusting it's approach to being more for the musician and less for the technician. Props have always suffered from the technician culture while exploiting their little niche. For those of us who are interested in the technical side of electronic music, Reason has always been and will always be an endless source of inspiration, but we have each sacrificed years of musical creativity to dive into the technical world. Layers, like Players, is Props latest attempt to pull us out of our basement workshops and into the concert/CD/dancehall culture. If you go through the Layers presets, and super easy modifications, you'll find a performance and composing beast at your fingertips. For those who have labored long for multi-synth combinators, modulation matrix designs, and 3rd party patches, you will not be impressed. For the other 300 million modern musicians, you're gonna love it.
Well said Richard!
If we go back a couple of years, the only thing I was interested in when it came to synths was how many adjustable parameters there were. And although I still love to have plenty of options I have started to realize what kind of impact such a thing can have on you. Nowadays I just want to get to the songwriting, and fast! :)

EdGrip
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14 Sep 2017

I dunno. The interface isn't as attractive as it could be, there are omissions in the synth list if we're talking classic synths that non-obsessives might have heard of (and what's the deal with the CS80? Is it properly included, or isn't it?) and I think "Layers" is a weird name for it.

I could be proven totally wrong when I've had a go with it, but surely the selling point here is being able to play well-sampled expensive classic analogue synths? The fact that you can layer sounds is a feature, not the key thing of it. You might as well call it "Steps", or "Envelopes", for all the info they convey about what the actual point of the device is.

It just seems to me that as a release, it could have been better thought out.

mguh22
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14 Sep 2017

Nothing really new in this Rack Extension for those with Analogue Monsters already. These are great sounds though!

However for something so simple it's disappointing that this only works on Reason 9.2+ I cannot buy it from the store with a Reason 8 license; it says you must upgrade.

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EnochLight
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14 Sep 2017

I think the promo video is worth being posted in the OP. I love retro-camp marketing!

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Oquasec
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14 Sep 2017

Looks like an alright plugin, but I can honestly just pass on that and just combi.
There's plugins for everybody, and being able to choose what you want to use to produce is basically the whole point of picking in the first place :]

Nothing wrong with getting it, nothing wrong with leaving it where it is. Reason is built for tweak-obsessed producers and modular fanatics alike.
They nailed the modular workflow and put it into one of the tidiest formats I have ever seen for plugins, and managed to keep wires intact for that.
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Miss Controllerism
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14 Sep 2017

Not impressed at all with this..

Also nostromo2 they didnt reset the trial version

Speedball
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14 Sep 2017

2010 it would have been ahead of the curve.

Its just embarrasing, they are always late.


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chimp_spanner
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14 Sep 2017

I mean, FWIW @Miss...just get it (Nostromo that is!). It's absolutely fantastic. Literally an infinite source of new basses, plucks, pads and textures.

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QVprod
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14 Sep 2017

To eliminate confusion (though it's been mentioned already) It's basically a Pink Noise RE. This doesn't really fit within Propellerhead's usual style of product.

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