8 Reaper Tips to Level Up Your Workflow

it's been a while since i did one for the reaper kids but being that reaper is a huge part of my life it was time i want to dig into some of my favorite tools in reaper and open a discussion in the comments about reaper tips that might have changed things for the better for you somehow i love knowing that the underdog of a dog reaper is finally getting its praise for being the hidden powerhouse that it is by the end of this episode you'll have picked up a few things that help reaper stand out from his competitors if nothing else you'll appreciate what could be done with this doll if you're going to apply it so what's happening fam miami here with jst and i'm honestly so reaper that my instagram tag is still evaluating that was good how i snagged that i don't know but hopefully you aren't still evaluating reaper or this channel hit that subscribe button and notification bell and i might just stop pausing five seconds randomly and holding up your workflow on the contrary today i'm all about speeding up your workflow so let's get into what i consider to be some of the most useful features of reaper outside of a bunch of memorized key commands this might just win you over if you're contemplating switching from another dog one of my favorite tips the plug-in mix knob this is a feature that should be in every major daw but it isn't for whatever reason it gives each plug-in its own specific mix knob so that you can blend in the amount of the effect you want from each vst it can be extremely useful on bus comps but we're going to test it out on a vocal here with howard benson vocals so let's say that there's a plug-in that i really like what it's doing but i'd like to dial it back a bit [Music] by using this mix knob in the top right corner i'm allowed to set that to where i want it to be getting the effect from the plug-in that i have and i can do this individually on any plugin that's inside of my chain extremely useful [Music] sounds pretty great right around there and uh it also shows just how powerful this plug-in is doing pretty much covering the whole chain here the crazy thing about this feature is that it would be near impossible to achieve the same results without it but on to the next tip recording and streaming your daw audio have you ever run into an issue of trying to record your daw audio but you get confused by the way that you need to route it or you might even be thinking of streaming but can't get everything working seamlessly without quality loss more on that in a minute this is actually a plug-in called restream which can be used with any daw that allows you to send signals out to be recorded or streamed with third-party software like obs it's pretty much what i use all the time when i do my screen shares check it out so the way that you're going to want to do this is add it to the end of your master chain and i'll be using obs with this we're going to send this out local broadcast let's play back the audio here [Music] notice how we can see the level here which is being sent out to the other which is receiving it which is an obs and all you have to do is set that up in obs to receive it and now you're going to get all the audio coming out of your daw on to the next mixing multiple sessions at once this has been one of the biggest improvements to my workflow ever reaper gives you the ability to open and work in a bunch of sessions at once but they work seamlessly together how do i explain what i'm trying to say let's say you had some settings in one session but you wanted them in another you can drag and drop them into each other you can send the audio out of the master of a track in one session and be recording it in another all the while they just sit in little tabs on your screen so let me show you how simple this is you literally open a new project tab and from here you can either start a new project or you can open an entire project and start mixing from there as you can see i'm working on a ton of different projects from all over tons of different genres and none of them interfere with each other when i switch from one project to next the other projects go into the background so i haven't noticed any spike in my cpu from doing it this way i've been able to mix entire albums this way and that's if i don't want to put them all in the same session which reaper is also capable of doing uh because of its low cpu use but yeah great way to be able to interact with all of your tracks at the same time number four routing anything can be routed simply in reaper unlike other daws but the ability to route by dragging is my favorite of course there are folders and subfolders which are also drag and drop but check out the way that side chaining can be made simple in this example so in side chaining you're going to want to add the side chain to whichever thing you want to duck in this case we're going to do the base and then we're going to route from the kick to go here but instead of doing anything fancy you just grab the route button here and you drag and drop it onto there and now it will sidechain the kick in the base this next one is something people ask about all the time reaper themes yes reaper skins and reaper themes one of the coolest applications i've seen applied to a doll the ability to customize the way that it looks i bring this up because people are always so worried about switching dolls because they're so comfortable with how theirs looks and the shortcuts but one of the beauties of reaper is you can change the shortcuts to mimic the one in your old daw as well as the way that it looks take a look for yourself so if you've ever opened reaper before this is the default theme that most people are familiar with you know nothing too crazy but if you want to switch to another daw even this is one of my favorite pro tools themes they have multiples of these that you can download i'll put that in the description and the one that everyone's always asking us for that's used in our examples smooth six and i will say that this looks a little bit better on mac than it does on windows for whatever reason but still pretty cool so i would suggest if you're switching from another daw all you have to do is just change out and find the theme that will help you adjust on to number six making videos in reaper now the first thing i'm going to mention is obviously you can do this in video editing software but not everyone has that at their fingertips but a lot of people don't know that just want to upload a song somewhere with an image like youtube is you can do all of this inside of reaper with no worries okay and all you need to do this is to add a track or ctrl t you're then going to drag an image onto this track i'm going to grab something from my desktop really quick we're going to do this thing where we don't ask why miami has a random picture of spongebob and yeah this is looping the item source we're going to change that right here and you're going to make this as long as the track is itself so that when you bounce this it's there for the whole time now you can do this with multiple pictures as well so you can create kind of a collage or montage or slideshow whatever kind of thing you want to do you're going to change this down here where it's usually on wave you're going to change this to video ffmpeg here change the format to mkv and 24 bit because that's what the song is and then just render and now you're going to have a video that has your song and whatever images you have there it really is a one stop shot for all things don't expect yourself to go make the next avatar movie in here but if you're in a pinch and don't want to waste your time with another software and this will have you covered on to tip number seven reaper actions and sws extensions i remember before getting reaper that there was a way to customize basically every action that i wanted to do which made me switch macros are on a whole different level i was looking for something along the lines of a batch commander in terms of customization and i was much more pleased with what reaper had to offer me rendering by region this goes for all people that make libraries or are interested in the idea of doing so the way that reaper is set up to handle file naming for samples is otherworldly its use of folders makes this the ideal daw to create libraries with for all of my contact instrument makers out there so this is a project that is separated into regions and if i wanted to bounce them all individually for let's say a sample library when i go to render let's see see 900 some odd files you can separate by the file name here so it's going to name them first by the track whatever you have the number for the track then by the parent track which would be what folder they're all inside of and then by the region whichever you have that name to so that when you set it up in a program like contact to read it everything will be organized from the second that you hit render here and that's why most people make their sample libraries inside of reaper so let's go over all of this one more time quick routing restream or recording or streaming your daw multiple session mixing rendering regions mix knobs on plugins scripts and sws extensions and of course making videos in reaper there are tools here that might not ever be implemented into another daw again i always appreciate reaper because it put the power in the hands of the user no matter how ridiculous the user task may be it's been a few years since i've made the complete switch to reaper but with new features constantly being added and scripts being made as we speak i'm pretty sure they can consider me a customer for life if you're an engineer on the come up give this video a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe you only have to do it one time and tap that bell for notifications so when a video drops you know the location until next time i am out of here mic drop except as engineers we know i'd never really dropped this thing because yeah that's just one of those times later

Channel: Joey Sturgis Tones

Views: 27,341

Keywords: home recording, audio production, mixing tutorials, Joey Sturgis Tones, Miami with JST, audio engineer tips and tricks, Reaper, DAW review, the best features of Reaper, what is the best DAW, hidden features of Reaper, how to use Reaper, streaming DAW audio, Howard Benson Vocals

Id: cxJXU2niXns

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022