Today we're rolling out the next Reason 12 early access release and it's a doozy. I'm happy to introduce Mimic Creative Sampler to the world.
Mimic is a modern sampler included in Reason 12 designed for quick and immediate triggering, chopping and manipulation of whatever audio you throw at it. Instead of trying to design the most advanced sampler out there, we focused on making Mimic perfect for ideation—getting something fun and useful from a sample quickly. It takes your sounds and plays them back to you, but much like its Dungeons & Dragons namesake, it's a bit of a shape changer that might surprise you!
At its most basic, you drop a sample into Mimic and then play your keyboard to play it back either chromatically in Pitch mode, or by triggering slices in Slice mode. I've particularly enjoyed slicing up the preview audio from the Sound Packs in Reason+, a great source for interesting chunks of music. Once in Mimic, you can always adapt pitch and playback speed to your liking using the stretch modes based on Reason's legendary time stretch algorithms. It can sound both incredibly good and out-of-this-world weird, in the best possible way. I use it extensively for making the slices of a sample really long when chopping something up, for example.
To shape your sound further, useful synth-style parameters and effects are right there in the front panel. The effects were chosen to change the character of the sample rather than add a glossy sheen, an homage to the grit of early hardware samplers. It can really make a sound your own.
We honestly could've stopped there and had a really useful, quick and capable sampler, but we had other ideas! To simplify what people often use several samplers for, Mimic has 8 slots that you can play in Multi Slot or Multi Pitch mode. In these modes, each slot is mapped to a key or a key range. You can use this to build drum kits, create layered instruments patches, trigger words from a vocal sample on some keys and then play the same vocals as a melody over four octaves all in the same instrument. It's loads of fun and can lead to some really cool patches.
Mimic really captures our design philosophy in many ways. We try to not overcomplicate, we put ideation and immediate musical results first and we want every device to have its own identity and character—not just copy something else. Above all, it should be fun and lead you to new ideas. I think we really succeeded here and I hope you'll agree when you get your hands on Mimic!
Mimic Creative Sampler is available right now in early access to Reason+ subscribers. It's built into Reason 12 and will be available in the perpetual version when it releases in September.
Mattias Häggström Gerdt
Product Manager
