5 REAPER Options for MIDI Editing you NEED to know!

something that people either love or really hate about reaper is that the midi editor sometimes feels like it's a totally different program and you may have even noticed that when your midi editor window is in focus if you look at the top of your screen you will see a whole new set of options up here as opposed to when the arrange view is focused and you see this stuff everything we're going to cover today lives under the options tab up here you can also find all of them in the actions list if you go to the midi editor section and search for options and you can set hotkeys to them add them to toolbars whatever floats your boat now if you are using a screen set where your midi editor is docked like i do right here then you'll notice that clicking on the midi editor window does focus that window but you won't see these options pop up up there so the way to access these is by going over to this kind of gray area above your piano roll and right clicking and then here you can find them in the options tab so there's a lot of cool stuff here today i'm going to show you five as always i encourage you to go and check out the rest yourself but let's so the first thing i want to show you is sync editor transport to project transport and that will take a guess so with this option off your arrange view and midi editor move independently from each other so your edit cursor will always be in the same place but for example if i zoom in on my arrange view or in the midi editor the other window stays where it is and the same thing applies to scrolling so for example if i'm in a range view and i click somewhere to edit some notes the midi editor will open but it may just be somewhere else it may be really zoomed in so you'd have to kind of zoom out and scroll around to find the same spot and that gets a little bit annoying so if you go to options and put a little tick on that box they will sync up so when i scroll on either side the other side scrolls with it i can also zoom and it will just respect the same zoom settings so whenever i click anywhere on my range view it'll be on the exact same spot in the midi editor with the same zoom amount a lot less confusing in my opinion and right below that we have this other option with which you can sync up the grid divisions between your arranged view and your midi editor and i actually like this option off but you know you do you so let's get to number two chase midi notes ons during playback okay so i got a track here with an arpeggiated synth on it and right now if i start playing the item from this spot we're not going to hear anything then we get to bar 2 and we are now hearing the bottom two notes but still not hearing the top two so this could be fine but where it kind of gets annoying is for example if i'm hearing this while editing another instrument you know like drums well as i edit my drums i want to hear the other lines regardless of where i hit play right i also want to hear the longer notes when i get to measure two because otherwise it's going to be missing these two notes so if you want notes played from the middle you got to go to options and enable chase midi note ons during playback and now when i hit play i immediately hear like every midi notes that kind of crosses my edit cursor [Music] so why is this and why is this option off by default i hear nobody asking so i'm gonna go on a slight tangent and explain why this is but if you're sitting there going hey man i don't care i'm not a nerd then you know feel free to skip to the next chapter all right so now the cool kids are gone let's get into this a little bit so the reason that by default we hear no sound when we play midi notes from the middle goes all the way back to when midi technology itself was being designed regardless of what duh or synth or vsti that you're using each midi note is made up of two messages so when you first play or write a note there's a midi note on message that's sent so here we got this d sharp note and each note carries three bits of information so we got the note value which for d sharp 2 is 51 as you can see on this corner right here it also has a velocity value in this case 94 out of 127 so that's pretty forte and it also has a channel number which by default is one so the midi note on message tells the vsti play whatever sound is assigned to note value 51 play that with a velocity of 94 and send that note to channel 1. then when you release a key or when the note ends in the editor another message called midi note off will be sent so this message will have the same note value of 51 and the same channel number of one but the velocity of this second note off message is set to zero so that communicates to whatever comes after that this note is over so the duration of each note is dictated by the distance between the midi note on and the midi note off message for each note so while most does including reaper will display note events as kind of like a block with a length in this case two whole measures in reality nothing is contained in the middle of this block it's just there for us to better visually make sense of what's written so when you play a note from the middle well the midi note on message was never sent it's all the way back here and at the end there will be a midi note off message which if there was a midi note on message would cut that note off but on its own it's essentially a note being played with a velocity of zero which is nothing at all so when you enable midi chase what happens then is that reaper looks at where the edit cursor is and it will look at midi note on messages that come before it but the midi note off goes after and if it finds any it will send those midi note on messages at the moment that we start playback all right spiel over let's get to number three right after these messages okay so the next group of options are down here and no preview this one you may want to set up a hotkey for because most of the time it's super useful but every once in a while i do like it off so when this top option is on if you click on an existing note or even on an empty area you hear what that note sounds like [Music] also when i click and create a note or drag it around we're hearing all that stuff where this gets annoying is when you say are transposing a big passage or just moving a big passage kind of over in those cases you may be hearing like a hundred notes played together and first of all it sounds really loud and it's just kind of like confusing garbage that doesn't really give me any useful information so in those moments i just turn it off with my hotkey which is command option shift and p and there are also some extra options in the same section that give you more control over what you want to preview and what you don't want to preview so for example when i change velocity on a note you keep hearing the same note kind of machine gun right but if i go and disable preview on velocity change that won't happen we still get a preview on notes that we do click on but not like a hundred times when we're changing velocity the next two options i always keep on especially the bottom one is kind of genius it will also preview every note that overlaps the note being edited so when you're editing chord voicings for example you get to hear the whole chord pretty neat let's move on to number four allow midi edit to extend the media item so this one is again totally self-explanatory but it is off by default i think don't don't quote me on that and that means if i create a note here when i get to the end that's it if i want to extend the item either i need to do it from the arrange view if it's looped i'd have to drag this green line to extend its actual range and also if i'm copying this stuff from an earlier passage and the passage is longer than the item then that kind of breaks stuff and especially if you don't notice it can get really confusing and weird so if you go to options and turn this on now i can extend the notes and the item that it's on is extended with it nice and easy on a related note if you go to preferences editing behavior and midi editor there's also this option down here double click outside the bounds of any media item to extend the nearest media item so if i turn that on i can also double click in this empty area and just extend my item that way super nice set it forget it don't even mention it to anybody and last but not least number five okay so i gotta admit that i'm cheating a little bit because this last option is not under options but under view i had to get to five cause hey let's face it nobody's clicking on a top four video so anyway under view you have this sub menu called show slash hide note rose and of course by default we're showing all note rows but you can for example hide unused and unnamed no rows which is awesome for drum editing where you may not have sounds assigned to every single key clicking on this will save space and kind of declutter your whole uh situation and by the way since these options are a couple of sub-menus deep and that's kind of annoying i've also added these to my midi toolbar amongst lots of other things so i got this one which is the default this one is hide unused note rows so i only see rows that have notes on them and then unused and unnamed that we covered before there's also a more recently added option here called show custom note review which allows you to basically select what is shown what is hidden and even the order of your note rows which is not something you could do before so in this mode i can hold command on mac or control on pc and i can drag any note row anywhere i want so maybe i can grab all my hi-hats and put them next to each other maybe all my toms next to each other and also by command option and clicking you can remove any note row that you want so maybe i can delete these rows on the bottom basically choose to show what i want maybe i'm not using some of these top notes there even though they're named so basically you get your own custom view mode where the order may not even follow the regular order of note rows and you just show and hide what you want super awesome now these custom note rows are saved with the track so if i go to another track as you can see it has its own view mode that's right now been untouched but if i go back to my drums it just looks how i left it so i wish there was a way to kind of copy this and you know save it for later use or on other tracks but i don't know if there is so let me know in the comments if you do but in any event you can save this track as a track template and this custom note row will be saved with that so you can use it later it's a newer feature so i'm sure it will get some more love in the upcoming updates but for now really cool and welcome addition to the midi editor which some people may not know about so all right that's five i hope you found these useful you may have noticed that there are a lot fewer episodes these days because papa gotta get that bread you know of course i wish i could you know do youtube full-time and if you do want to support me towards that goal you can become a member here on youtube or make one-time contributions to the channel through buy me coffee.com all the links will be in the description and you'll also get access to some exclusive material including mixed breakdowns of famous songs and also check out this video if you want to see all the stuff i have in my midi toolbar which is a lot of stuff so that's it adios muchachos [Music]

Channel: IDDQD Sound

Views: 7,563

Keywords: reaper tutorials, reaper daw tutorials, reaper midi, reaper, reaper play midi from middle, reaper midi options, reaper sync transport and midi, reaper custom note order, reaper midi drum editing

Id: gOlWQsDHzfU

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022