Propellerhead Abbey Road Keyboards Reason ReFill Collection
Abbey Road Keyboards ReFill delivers a hyper sampled collection of seven unique instruments recorded for Propellerhead Software's Reason using the original equipment at the legendary Abbey Road Studios.

Instruments:
• Steinway Upright—the Mrs. Mills Piano
• Challen Studio Piano
• Hammond RT-3
• Mannborg Harmonium
• Schiedmayer Celeste
• Mellotron MKII
• Tubular Bells

Note: ReFills do not work in standalone—they require a full version of Reason to operate. (See “What is a ReFill below)

The Abbey Road Keyboards were recorded using the original mics, outboard gear, and vintage mixing desk from Abbey Road's Studio Two, re-creating not only the sound of the instruments themselves, but the very signal paths, technology, and recording techniques that is the Abbey Road sound. Each instrument was captured using multiple microphones placed at different locations in Studio Two's beautiful-sounding recording space, allowing for full ambiance control in Reason.

Enclosed in the Abbey Road Keyboards ReFill box is Guide to Abbey Road Keyboards, a 40-page booklet by author by Mark Vail. Jam-packed with full-color photographs and descriptive session diagrams, this book gives you in-depth info on the featured instruments and the Abbey Road technology used to record them.

The included preset patches give you automatic combinator patches for various mic blends, while style patches add processing to combinator patches and template patches give you empty, pre-wired user patches to create your own presets.

Abbey Road Keyboard delivers the classic instruments recorded with the original mics in the original recording room, with the original equipment. This is Abbey Road in a box.

Instruments in detail

Steinway Vertegrand "Mrs. Mills" piano: Manufactured in Hamburg, Germany in 1905 by Steinway & Sons, this exquisite piano has been tuned in a way that makes it sound out of tune--but in a very pleasant way, like some beaten-up barroom piano only better. Thanks to its lacquered hammers the "Mrs. Mills" piano produces a bright, cut-through-the-mix sound and responds very dynamically to varying note velocities.

Challen studio piano: Sounding more like a typical home piano than the Steinway, the Challen piano offers a warm tone along with an unusually long sustain in its notes.

Hammond RT-3 & Leslie Model 122: The RT-3 is much bigger and heavier than the familiar big and heavy Hammond B. Besides the organ, there's one other crucial item necessary for the full and proper effect: a Leslie 122 speaker. The talented Hammond organist Peter Adams played on the sessions to help capture many combinations the Hammond-and-Leslie sound.

Mannborg Harmonium: The Mannborg Har monium is a foot-pedaled organ that sucks air through the reeds when pumped with the pedals. This Harmonium could qualify as the first instrument with a split keyboard; keys on the left side of the split point play a different group of reeds than those on the right. This split feature is maintained in the Harmonium presets.

Mellotron Model 400: The Mellotron Model 400 qualifies as one of the earliest sample players, except that instead of having RAM chips full of sounds inside, its samples have been recorded on 6' long strips of 3/8" magnetic tape. Abbey Road Keyboards features the samples of the Cello, Strings, and Flute tapes.

Schiedmayer Celeste: The Celeste is like an overgrown glockenspiel, played with piano style keys. It produces soft and warm, bell-like timbres. Historically speaking, a Celeste has most often been used within orchestral contexts, however many Abbey Road artists have discovered the Schiedmayer to work well for pop and other musical styles.

Premier Tubular Bells: The Tubular Bells is an orchestral percussion instrument made up of hollow metal tubes mounted on a frame. It's tuned and laid out like a keyboard instrument and played by striking it with rubberized hammers. Who would use tubular bells, known as orchestral chimes, in a pop song? The Beatles, for one. Listen to "You Never Give Me Your Money" or "When I'm 64".


What is a ReFill?

Even if you haven't come across the term ReFill before, as a Reason user you most likely use ReFills daily. All sounds, patches, loops and grooves included with Reason come in ReFill format, as both the Factory and Orkester Sound Banks are ReFills.

When using ReFills with Reason, you can load patches for any of the devices included in Reason, as well as REX files, samples in WAV or AIFF format, MIDI files and Reason song files.

One advantage of containing sounds in ReFills is that audio samples are compressed to about half their original file size when stored in ReFills, with no loss of audio quality. Samples contained in ReFills also load faster in Reason.