A loop editor, two bass synths and a drum machine.

Reason Studios is the Stockholm company behind Reason, a music-production program built around a virtual rack of instruments and effects. Until August 2019 it was called Propellerhead Software. The company, English Wikipedia and a 2019 company press release all give its founding year as 1994 and its founders as Ernst Nathorst-Böös, Marcus Zetterquist and Peter Jubel. The account given to Sound On Sound in January 2003 differs slightly: Nathorst-Böös, who had worked in music-equipment distribution, as a technical editor for Swedish music magazines and in a documentation business whose work included Steinberg’s Cubase manuals, said he met Zetterquist in 1991 and the two formed Propellerhead in 1994, and the magazine said Jubel — who had written the software for Clavia’s Nord Lead synthesizer — joined “around two years later.” We give both accounts.

The name, English Wikipedia says, comes from slang for a technology enthusiast, after the propeller beanie; the company is not related to the British electronic duo Propellerheads.

The first product was ReCycle, a loop editor that let producers change a loop’s tempo without changing its pitch, saving to the company’s own REX format. It was launched in conjunction with Steinberg, which marketed it as a companion to Cubase. In 1997 came ReBirth RB-338, software versions of two Roland TB-303 bass synthesizers and a TR-808 drum machine, with a TR-909 added later; Sound On Sound called it “one of the first software instruments to achieve widespread acceptance, and even cult status.” With Steinberg, Propellerhead also developed ReWire, released in 1998 to link ReBirth with Cubase and opened to other developers without a licence fee in January 1999, Sound On Sound reported that year.

A studio in a rack, with cables.

Reason followed in 2000. It presented a complete studio as a rack of hardware-style devices — synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and effects — joined by virtual patch cables. In the 2003 interview Nathorst-Böös credited the cables to Zetterquist: “that’s a typically Marcus thing,” he said, adding that the idea was familiar to musicians, solved routing problems and was “just totally cool.” Reason won a Musikmesse International Press Award (MIPA) in 2002, and Computer Music later wrote that it “changed the face of desktop music production.” At the time of the interview the company had a staff of 16, and it released its programs for Mac and PC at the same time, built on a shared in-house code library, Nathorst-Böös explained.

The program grew in steps. Record, a recording and mixing program with a large-format virtual console, was released in September 2009 and folded into Reason 6 in 2011. In March 2012 the company announced Rack Extensions, letting other developers sell devices that run inside the rack; support for VST plug-ins followed with Reason 9.5 after an April 2017 announcement. Propellerhead also made one piece of hardware, the Balance audio interface of 2011, and iOS apps including Figure and Take.

The rename came on 26 August 2019. “Today Propellerhead Software becomes Reason Studios,” the company announced from Stockholm, launching Reason 11 with the Reason Rack Plugin, which put the rack inside other workstations. “The world really knows us for Reason,” said its chief product officer, Timothy Self. Earlier that year Nathorst-Böös had handed the chief executive role to Niklas Agevik in a planned succession, staying on as a shareholder and board member, the company said in May 2019.

Software as a design object.

The seven makers in this guide build the tools of the home and project studio: digital audio workstations, the software in which music is now recorded, edited and mixed, and — in TASCAM’s case — the hardware that came before them. TEAC introduced the first Portastudio, a four-track cassette recorder with a built-in mixer, at a New York audio convention in 1979.

The oldest software house here is Steinberg of Hamburg, founded in 1984 by Karl Steinberg and Manfred Rürup and the maker of Cubase; Yamaha says it acquired the company in 2005. Cakewalk began in Boston in 1987 as Greg Hendershott’s Twelve Tone Systems, came under Roland’s majority control in 2008 and Gibson’s in 2013, and has been a brand of BandLab Technologies of Singapore since 2018.

Three are European and younger. Reason Studios, founded in Stockholm in 1994 as Propellerhead Software, was bought in January 2026 by LANDR of Montreal, Music Business Worldwide reported. Image-Line, the maker of FL Studio, was founded by Jean-Marie Cannie and Frank Van Biesen and gives its headquarters as Ghent, Belgium. Bitwig was founded in Berlin in 2009, and its company is registered there.

Cockos, the maker of REAPER, says it was founded in 2004; archived copies of its website show its postal address moving from San Francisco to Manhattan and, by late 2024, to Rosendale, New York. TASCAM is a brand of TEAC Corporation, which is listed in Tokyo, based in Tama, Tokyo, and was majority-owned by Gibson from 2013 to 2020.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two owners in nine years.

Ownership changed twice. In April 2017 the private-equity fund Verdane Capital IX came in as “a new partner” that would become “an active owner,” Verdane announced, with Nathorst-Böös continuing as chief executive; Music Business Worldwide later described Verdane, a European growth-equity firm, as Reason Studios’ majority owner from 2017. In January 2026 LANDR, the Montreal music-production platform known for AI mastering, announced it had acquired Reason Studios for an undisclosed sum, with Verdane exiting, Music Business Worldwide reported on 7 January; the company’s own timeline files the deal under 2025. Reason Studios continues under its own brand in Stockholm, with teams in both cities, and LANDR’s chief executive, Pascal Pilon, said the aim was to make the Reason Rack “indispensable” for every producer, “regardless of what DAW they use.”

Since then the company has sold the Rack plugin separately, released Reason 14 in May 2026 and, in August 2026, launched Reason Free, a no-cost version with 15 devices. It also says Reason has joined Drömlandet, a permanent exhibition at Tekniska Museet, Sweden’s national museum of science and technology in Stockholm, alongside Teenage Engineering; we have that from the company only. The 2019 rename retired the Propellerhead logotype that English Wikipedia dates to 1994–2019, and the company publishes no brand colours or typeface in the sources we checked.

For a design guide, Reason Studios shows how a single interface idea — a rack joined by cables — can carry a brand through a change of name and two owners. Compare Steinberg, its partner on ReCycle and ReWire, and Native Instruments. For this guide we use rack black, aluminium grey and a patch-cable red with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Reason Studios’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.