Reason: From Eurorack to Your Rack. Get back in the box.

Today, Noise Engineering ventures into software with the release of Synth Bundle 1.

Our first journey into software products came about because of a Twitter conversation of all things. Mattias Haggstrom is one of our many fans who reach out to us to discuss our products. He also happens to be the Product Director for Reason. He suggested that our products would be a good fit for the Reason Extension marketplace. At this point we weren’t even aware that Reason supported extensions -- Stephen had been an avid Reason user from their initial beta only until version six, and Kris had never really used it. It didn’t take us long to see the advantages inherent in their system as we are a tiny company without even a single full time programmer. The reduced barrier to entry provided by Propellerhead was a huge win for getting back into the box :)

Internally, we develop many of our modules as software with a framework that allows us to simulate the portions of the module dependent on hardware design. This system is called NERDS (Noise Engineering Rapid Development Synthesizer. Why else would we call it that?). This system also provided the backbone of the Reason versions of our products. We were very quickly able to get a Basimilus Iteritas working in its most basic form inside Reason. Manis Iteritas and Loquelic Iteritas Percido followed nearly immediately in basic form. All three of these extensions are stand-alone voices in hardware, which made them a good fit. We then had to implement a few relatively big features that don’t exist in hardware such as polyphony and sample-rate conversion for Reason’s supported rates. Then we had to do a total rethink of the “panel” layout and artwork given Reason’s different form factor. We had something ready for test.

As is always true with development the last 20% of the functionality was the vast majority of the work. We are not expert users of Reason so much of our guidance for the final design was provided by our amazing beta testers. They helped us flesh out our design to meet the expectations of the community and gave tons of great suggestions for the improvement of these products.

The Reason Rack Extensions feature the same control that our Eurorack modules are known for: tons of tonal control on the front panel, and loads of back-panel control for parameter modulation.

The other cool thing that REs feature is user-selectable monophony or polyphony (Noise Engineering: now with more phony!).

Basimilus Iteritas, Manis Iteritas, Loquelic Iteritas Percido Rack Extensions are available now. Buy all three in a specially priced bundle, or choose a single extension. For a limited time, all extensions and the Synth Bundle will be offered at a special introductory rate (~40% off!). More content is coming soon and in the coming weeks, we will be working with the kind folks at ReasonTalk to create a Song Challenge: enter for a chance to win Noise Engineering Rack Extensions!

Watch our social media channels for more content showing off these rack extensions and some of the things they can do.

And of course, we’ll keep working on the hardware you know and love!