5 Power Tips for Reaper DAW - Boost Your Productivity

welcome to reaper TV in this week's video we're going to be taking a look at five top tips that are going to help improve your productivity when you're working with reaper so let's take a look at those five tips right now if you've got multiple mini items up at the same time and you happen to select all those MIDI items if you no double-click any of those items to start open up the MIDI editor you'll find one problem you now end up with multiple versions of the MIDI editor open now that's fine if you've got a couple but if you've got 20 or 30 tracks and you've accidentally selected all of those it can get a little unwieldy and possibly even crash your copy of Reaper so we can do is we can change the default behavior for how this is actually working so if we go to the preferences section and we scroll down to editing behavior and MIDI editor we take a look at the option for behavior for open items in built-in MIDI editor you can see by default it says open all selected MIDI items what we can do is we can simply change that and just choose open the clipped MIDI item only hit apply and okay I still have the three MIDI files open or the three MIDI files selected I can double click I now only end up with one MIDI editor open and that's the one we double clicked on just to show you that if I now choose a different one it's only the one that I choose opens up now it makes life easier when you're working with a program like Reaper that when you start to build up multiple tracks that you color code the tracks to give you some kind of relevance so if you take a look at my particular track layer you can see all my drums are colored red or my face color green guitars colored blue and vocals colored yellow and so on this can be a kind of time-consuming laborious process if you use in a template or a project template then you can assign those colors and save that out then all your projects will have those new colors assigned to them but when you start to create new tracks that doesn't happen you've got to manually add those colors in or use an option like I have in the top left hand corner where I can just quickly click and add those color coding in that's still a laborious process so how about we automate that process let's come up to the extensions and we're going to choose auto color icon now this is part of the SWS SNM extensions which are completely free the link will be in the description below so I recommend going over to the website downloading those installing them they really do enhance your copy of repo with a whole range of new and additional features as well as things to speed up the entire process of working with repo with standard different functions and things you've got so what you can see on here is that I've now got set up some actions or some macros what this does is it checks for a particular action to be met when that's met it does something so for example when I create a track and I have the word drum in the name of that track now it could be part of the track it could be you could have drumming drummers whatever you wanted as long as it contains the word drum then it's going to apply the color to it we can also apply icons so we can automatically do that we can do the same with regions or we can also do it with markers so what we can do is we can set those little triggers up so I'm going to create one now for my string section so I'm going to click add that's going to create track by default if I want to change that I can right click and I can choose track marker or region so I'm just going to choose we're going to leave it as track we're going to give it a name so I'm going to just double click in there and I'm going to say strings so as long as strings is met then I'm going to do something in this instance we're going to sign a color to it so we'll double click set color with the right mouse and we'll just choose a color and we'll go for let's go for a purpley kind of color that'll do click OK if I wanted to assign an icon I can right click and I can choose load icon but we won't wear with that for now we'll just close that down and you can see now that strings is automatically assign that label so let's just create a new track I will insert a new track I will give this one so we put strings section so I just use the term strings once I hit you can see now it automatically names it because the term strings is in name if we use just string you see nothing happens because the term we set up with strings the plural version of it so you can if you wanted we could come back to that go to the auto color where we've got that one for strings which is at the top now I can just double click change that term and we just put string in there and now you'll see that string string section strings have all been named accordingly if you find when you're working on projects that you regularly use the same set of plugins with the same settings speed up the entire process by saving those as an effects chain and to do that you simply come up to the effects button on the particular track that you want to save out click on that that'll open up will show you all the effects just come up to the effects menu and you've got the option then to say save effects chain if we do that we can give that a name our we can hit save we've now saved that out as an effects chain and we're going to apply that to any track we want so let's create a new track and we'll come to the effects panel so we right click on there and we'll say add effects chain and you can see we've got guitar effects master choose that option that will now load those three effects in for us and allow us to pick up the exact same settings that we had on that original track a quick way of speeding up your workflow so from time to time the Oh mote come across instances where you need to stretch or shrink audio and there's a quick and dirty way you're doing that in Reaper if we take a listen to this audio to start off with tweaking you exactly working whether so load up just this little portion of audio so we hit play we can listen to that so there's the audio that's what we're working with now if I want to stretch that out the easiest way of doing that is hold the Alt key down the keyboard and go either to the left or the right hand side and you'll see now we get a little grab hand and I can click and drag that over to make it longer and shorter you'll also notice that the pitch doesn't change on there we're still retaining the same pitch of the original audio now you may not want that to be the case and we can easily enable and disable that option all we need to do is choose the audio slice we're working with right click and come to item settings and you'll see we have an option is checked by default that says preserve pitch when changing play rate if we disable that will now find that if we make the audio shorter the pitch will get higher if we make the audio longer the pitch will get lower so let's take a listen this is the shortened version and the longer version - RIA neighbor that simply click on the audio right click item properties and switch it back on and now we're back to where we were to start off with quick and easy in this final tip we're going to take a look at dealing with routing so let's just say in this example I've got a delay bar set up so that is already set up with the delay applied to it or reverb or whatever you want to work with and I want to assign all of these tracks to go down to that bus now I could do it manually one at a time by clicking and dragging setting up the first bus so on or I could obviously go to the i/o and I can set up sends and receives and you know it's easy way to do it but it just gets a bit time-consuming so let's just clear that out a second let's just leave that off there what we're going to do is we're going to do it all in one go one swift action so I'm going to click on the first track I'll hold the shift key down the keyboard click on the last track which in this example is the delay bus we have to include the track that we want to actually send all these sends to click on that one so we've got all those tracks selected now keeping the shift key held down simply go to the i/o drag down the send drag and drop it onto the final one which in this example is the bus now it looks like this when you created one but if we close that down and open up the i/o you'll now see that all of those sends have all been set up so all the sends and receives are all in place in one simple quick action so there we go five power tips for every Reaper user hopefully you found something in that video that you didn't know or maybe you shown you a different way of working with something you already covered in the past well if you enjoyed the video please give it a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button to be kept up to date with all the new content we add every single week if you could he comments questions or feedback on this video or anything else covered on the channel please pop those in the comment section below we've tried to read everything you write and answer as many questions as possible well until next time happy mix in you

Channel: ReaperTV

Views: 67,494

Keywords: Reaper, DAW, Home Recording Studio, Mixing, Mastering, PsmegTV, ReaperTV, Color Coded Tracks, Track Icons, Elastic Audio, Time Stretch Audio, FX Chains, Midi Tracks, Quick Tips for Reaper DAW, Learn Reaper DAW, Learning Reaper DAW, Reaper Tutorial for Beginners, Reaper Tutorial

Id: 9EyXXjNj77Q

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2016