Beginner's Guide to Using Reaper (Updated)

hey it's clay welcome to another video this is going to be an introductory tutorial using the software Reaper it's a da W a digital audio workstation is an excellent program to use for recording editing and exporting various audio files and recordings of all different kinds whether you're doing the music or spoken word or basically any kind of audio capture that needs to be edited and exported to a useful format Reaper is awesome it has a very very useful free trial which is full-featured and potentially indefinite in time period and speaking for myself personally when the time came and I had the money to pay the 60 dollars for the individual license I was very pleased to do so I've been using the program for a number of years now and I would say that it with confidence that it is fully featured to be a professional DW if I so desired and so I've got a lot of confidence in it but it's also pretty user friendly so if you're new buckle in and let's get started so I am assuming nothing that you this is the first time you've downloaded Reaper and you have never used any software like this before my goal is to try to give you an introduction to some of the most important and most used features realize that Reaper is pretty complex TIFF use it to its fullest extent but I'm just gonna try to get you up and running and then I will give you some advanced topics to look into and in the other videos or other places so let's go ahead and get started alright so first things first you've downloaded Reaper and you want to capture a recording well you have to have some sort of hardware to interface with your computer to allow you to do so and so typically that means you may have some kind of microphone or maybe an instrument that will need to plug into what is called a USB audio interface that is probably the most common and most popular and what I personally would recommend as far as the hardware you need to get up and running I have a focus right - I - but there are a whole bunch of other interfaces that will work do some other searching on the topic of audio interface and you will get some answers but so let's say you're plugging into your audio interface the first thing you need to do is to get Reaper to recognize what you are using what you need to do is go up here at the top to options and then preferences and then you need to go to device under audio device and then here where it says audio system you have a variety of different audio systems this is depending on the type of driver and hardware setup you are using I think ASIO is the most common and popular that is used with all the USB audio interfaces that I have personally ever used now next you need to make sure that you download and install the driver for your interface and if you have done that correctly it will appear in this drop down menu here if you have not done that correctly or you don't see that here you need to go back and you need to try to download do a google search for your devices Audio Driver try installing that and restarting your computer and then come back to this step alternatively if you can't seem to get that to work try googling this ASIO for all that is a kind of a generic ASIO USB interface driver that often works pretty well and give that a shot that might help you get up and running but this is gonna require some outside googling but make sure you get your driver installed correctly and then you can configure inputs I just want to enable those inputs input 1 input 2 buts that's all my interface uses and that's pretty much all you need to do at this point and go ahead and hit apply and ok so now this is kind of where you are at and I just kind of want to run through some of the different things that you can see you've got some grey space over here and over here these this is a duplicate in the default window so if I double click in this area this creates what is called a track adding a new track is one of the core features of Reaper it's really where you do a lot of different things you can double click in one of these different spaces you could also choose to right click and hit click on this insert a new track or you could press ctrl T on your keyboard or you could go up to track and hit insert new track all of those will make all of these beautiful tracks a track is pretty foundational and you need to have a track in order to do anything so we've got our fancy new track here now this space over here is kind of the timeline where as you record something whatever you capture is going to be depicted on here across the top you see a time window this is measured in seconds or bars it's kind of delimited in bars now the time period that you can see here there's three seconds six seconds that's a one way to measure it but then also reaper has the ability to quantize or to sync with the with your music and that is kind of connected right down here so you can see i'm in 6/8 we can change that to 4/4 if you wish we can also change the BPM let's just do 129 60 and then up here you've got the metronome which gives you that little click that if you just press space that'll play the through and that'll give you a click track and so you that's a really nice way to set the tempo of your song and then you can see it actually breaks this into bars so we've got because we're in 4/4 that's going to be depicted here so there's 1 1 2 3 4 2 2 3 you know etc etc if you know anything about counting music if we change this to 3 4 you can see that changes the number of beats bars we have there's 1 2 3 2 2 3 and so on so that's a nice thing that you can do you don't have to you can turn the metronome off and you can just not mess with this at all and just carry on and not concern yourself with the tempo if you don't want to but it's a nice feature to have if you want it alright so let's come back and look at our little track here again I want to explain what some of these different buttons mean up here on the track as well as down here kind of in this master area first of all you can this area you can name the track so I just double click there and I can just call it track 1 then you've got a volume control right here for that track and you can see down at the bottom left right here it's doing the same thing and and so when I say this is a duplicate in this this track here is the same as this track here it's just a different way of looking at it you also have a pan control you can hard pan left right or Center you've got mute which is handy to shut off the volume for that specific track you also have s for solo solo means that all other tracks will be temporarily muted and you can just listen to that track next we have effects so this is going to mostly be our like VST plugins' or any other kind of things to effect the track which we'll come back to later this is an important button here this is the record monitoring if you were to enable this then you should be able to hear whatever that track is going to sound like actively as you play into it so we'll come back to that more later but if you if you don't hear anything and you want to hear what's going on during that track you need to enable monitoring with that button and then this menu here helps you to choose the input so this is linking with your audio interface right yeah so if you've got an input mono input maybe you're just plugging in a guitar or a single microphone on into it put one on your device well then this is where you select it or let's say one of the things I will do pretty frequently is I'll have input one on here and I'll integrate a second track you'll have been put two on here so now both of the inputs on my oh and an audio interface will be enabled that can call this one track too and all the same controls will apply so some pretty handy stuff and you can do some more complicated things but we're just going to stick with that for now so we've got our two tracks ready to go now let's say you want to begin recording so what you first need to do is choose which tracks you are going to record onto and that is called arming so if you go to this little red button here on the track this arms or if you click again disarms right so if it's active you can actually see my voice is coming through on here on these yellow marks so that means that this is ready to go and so this whatever I record into input one will be captured on this track likewise here on input 2 I currently have a guitar cable that is not plugged in which is why you see a static there it's just making a buzzing sound and so if I were to record now both of the tracks in my audio interface are going to be at captured onto these two tracks so let's just say we want to do track 1 and we're ready to go then you go down here - this is the master section to kind of control where you're at in the timeline you would hit this red button and now you can see my voice is actively recording onto our timeline and then let's say I want to be all done I can just click stop you also could play and here's our play and here's our pause you can also use this to go back to the beginning play again go back to the beginning very very good there easy stuff as far as starting stopping and all the works so let's say I'm done with that right I want to keep that let them to call that vocal now let's say I've got an get rid of this track I'm gonna make a newt so all I did there is I you can see which where every one is highlighted there is in a letter color and I just hit the Delete key on my keyboard to get rid of it I'm gonna double click add a new track I'm gonna arm it for recording I'm gonna call this guitar let's say I have a guitar that I plug in to input one on my interface you can see input when it's selected now all I do is just hit record and I can play my guitar track and it will be on this second track so now I've got two tracks I can do whatever I want to them and pretty much ready to go so now let's say you've done some experimenting and you've got some tracks recorded now let's talk a little bit about how you want to edit or manipulate those tracks so Reaper is very powerful in this regard this is one of the main reasons why you would want to use Reaper so first and foremost you know you can use these plus and minus buttons here to resize the tracks in such a way that they might more opinion I'm talking over here you've got your horizontal access zoom out zoom in your vertical access to zoom out or zoom in it's just a nice way to help organize things now again we have these bars here and I can use my mouse to click into the fields and select wherever I want that to actively be now up here we've got snap enabled and snap means that it's going to so if I click in here it's not like halfway through it doesn't actually do anything because it is snapping to the bars of the track and that also means like if I click and hold I can drag you can see how it's being snapped correctly wherever I want it to be now there may also be situations where you don't actually want that so if you turn this snap off now you can see I can move it freely and it will not automatically gravitate towards those bars the edges of those bars so it's a nice tool to have both ways some other little shortcuts that I use pretty frequently sometimes you want to split things so if you put your gear click here and put your cursor there if you go ahead and quit the S key now you've split your tracks into two which is really handy it also choose to change the volume of that specific part now this is not the same as changing this volume of the whole track what I'm doing here is I'm changing the actual volume of this specific item within the track so now this section is going to be what about three point four nine decibels louder and then both will be governed by whatever changes I make here so you're making volume changes within the track itself all right so now that we have captured some of our audio maybe if organized a we've got everything set up properly would not be correct to make a video on a DA W without talking about editing your audio using VST plugins this is probably one of the biggest advantages to using a DA W over something like audacity just the flexibility and power that you get with using VST plugins is really strong and it is really cool in Reaper does plug the VST plugins very well I've said it before this FX window this is where you manage all of your plugins now vsts are just one type of plugin you also have many others now if you're brand-new you're probably I can have as many plugins as I do I downloaded a lot of these or purchase some of them and I do kind of like to kind of suit to mess around with free plugins you can do google searching for a lot of them and you will find a lot of choices you may not have all these folders but what I want to focus you towards is the caucus folder this is the company that makes reaper and they have included some default plugins that are actually all around very excellent and i would highly recommend that you get used to using them specifically the specifically the compressor EQ the delay the pitch shifter the reverb the tuning the sampler is really good in the synth I use a lot of these plugins very frequently you know specifically about this EQ it's very simple but it's also very powerful and you know personally I think you may use other plugins fret set of preference but as far as features go these plugins are excellent and they will get you a long ways and so let's just talk briefly about this this is a topic where you should do in-depth looking on your own past this but we'll just briefly get into this so again if I click on this green FX window this is only applied to this specific track that I've got or any sub tracks that are in underneath the parent folder but that's a kind of a more advanced feature as well but the you know if I make a new track whatever I'm doing on this screen effects window with track 1 will not be applied to track 2 unless I add it so this is the kind of the effects master window and you can see I can put a list of different plugins here let's maybe do a delay let's add a compressor let's put the compressor first and then let's add a reverb so these this is my chain of plugins and it goes from top to bottom the signal flows through them one at a time into the other and you can use this checkbox to enable or disable those specific plugins you can click on the plug-in name to pull up the window to edit it some plugins pop out in their own window and other times they stay in but this gives you a lot of flexibility to edit your signal and I'd highly recommend you look into VST plugins at some point in time alright so now that we've talked a bit about editing let's talk about finalizing and exporting your track this is the best part you're at all done you want to share it with somebody let's show you how to do that so you go to file and then hit render and then this is your render menu you could do the master mix that's fine entire project is just going to do everything that you have done then if we go to browse this is going to be the computer folder that the file is going to be placed in you could name it we'll call up the testerino one you can change the sample rate now I commonly most commonly used is 44 1 or 48 and what I recommend is that you match this with whatever your audio interface driver is set to use so mine is set to 48 and so I'm going to keep it at that I like to do stereo I like to bump this up to extreme high quality because I like to have quality and I don't mind if I have large files I don't really care about compressing I want it to be full of quality for audio output format I use wave because that's what my other programs use but you can also to mp3 or FLAC or whatever you like and then you hit render and that's it so now you can go and share your wonderful music with the world so anyways that's gonna wrap up my beginners tutorial like I said Reaper is a very complicated complex program he there as much more you can do so please dive deeper into some of these topics but hopefully you are up and running and able to make some of your own music and share it please let me know your thoughts and comments down below and I'll see you again soon thanks bye

Channel: Kley De Jong

Views: 101,840

Keywords: kley, de, jong, guitar, electric, acoustic, how, to, guide, demo, music, art, reaper, how to, training, beginner, noobie, noob, newb, daw, audio, workstation, software, recording

Id: 0AXRerY1mf4

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2018