Fresh Start: REAPER 6 Settings - Part 1

in this video i'm going into a brand new reaper install i'm going through all the preferences and everything that i think is the most important things to set up to customize it and to optimize it for your own use well really my own use but uh yeah hopefully you'll get a lot of inspiration from this video let's jump into it [Music] this video is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community for creators with thousands of classes on art graphic design productivity and more if you want to learn something new this is a fantastic place to start i'm always finding new inspiring classes on skillshare recently i went through this class dirty design with draplin crusty techniques to create truly original work i really enjoyed this one especially lessons four and five even though i don't use photoshop i was able to translate a lot of these ideas and put them into use in pixelmator pro which is my image editor of choice i got a lot of value out of this and the last one i'll mention here is always drawing how to start and keep a daily sketchbook this may be a good one to go through with your children my my son was very interested in this one and it's just presented a really fun way if you're looking for a new daily creative habit i think this is a great class to take the first 1000 people to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership if you want to stay on for a full year it comes down to about 10 dollars per month thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video so i just installed reaper here this is exactly what you see when you first launch reaper for the first time i have my license installed and the only other thing that i've set up here is i've two folders set up here for backups and repeats files in just a temp folder under my username so you could set that up on yours and this would be the same thing on windows just set it up so that you have a dedicated folder for reaper auto backups and peak files i will show this in this video but maybe not as much detail as previous videos so i'll just close that and the only other thing here is that i'm using the dark mode in mac os and reaper on mac follows the dark mode setting so we're going to maximize this window by alt clicking on the resize button there and that full screens it without going into full screen hiding the dock and all that kind of stuff let's just go around the interface and change a few things so i've got the mixer in the dock and i'm going to resize that so it takes up about half my screen maybe right there lots of room for inserts and sends in here i'm going to go to the master track and click this little i icon here and uncheck the option show multiple rows of tracks when size permits let's just add in a bunch of new tracks what is what is the shortcut for new track command t we're actually not going to change any of the keyboard shortcuts for this or very few of them because yeah there's just so many that i would need to change but we will change a few things here and there the first thing we're going to do here is add in some tracks the default is command t i think that's a weird shortcut but i'm just going to add in a bunch of them basically until my mixer is full and just so we can see the difference between the two settings there show multiple rows looks like this and yeah that's great you can have lots of rows of tracks i find that i get easily lost in this and i just like a long horizontal rows of tracks like a real mixer would be and i just scroll over if i need to see more i don't really like the transport bar in the middle so i'm going to right click it go to docked transport position and set this to top of main window and that just locks it up at the top of the window i'm going to right click in the transport bar again and go to center transport controls and so that puts the controls right in the middle that's how i like to have it at least with the default theme so let's open up the preferences so under the reaper menu preferences or options preferences and we're going to start off with the general page we're not going to go through every single setting here but quite a few of them i think maximum undo memory use let's just double this 512 and i'm going to include every type when approaching full undo i'm going to check that so it's going to keep the newest states so we'll just start deleting old ones if we go past 512 megabytes for undo now moving on to startup settings we've got open project last project tabs personally i like to just do new project a lot of people like the prompt option loading project has never worked for me i'm always working on so many different things you know if i have an idea i want to start off with an empty project and just start from scratch every single time that's my personal preference but you know these are preferences and choose what works for you maximum projects in recent project bliss i'm just going to set this to 10. next we're moving on to paths and default paths to save new projects i'm just going to go to browse and then choose my project hard drive so projects 2021 it's right there open default render path this one is safe to leave empty it's just going to use the project folder if you have a project folder saved already or else it's going to go into the reaper media folder which is already set up in your documents default rendering recording paths when project is unsaved again you can leave that blank and it's going to use the reaper media folder which if you're not sure it's going to be in your documents it's going to be this folder here reaper media under documents and it's going to be same place my document slash reaper media on windows check this box for store peak caches in alternate path i'm going to go to browse we're going to find that folder on the hard drive so it's users reaper blog temp and repeats and so that's where that peak cache will be and then the last one is just an alternate if you know you disconnect that drive or something like that there's a second peak folder i've never needed it now under keyboard multi-touch pretty much the only thing we're gonna do here is prevent alt key from focusing main window this actually has no effect on mac but i want to show this for the windows users a lot of people get frustrated by this they try to change keyboard shortcuts to use the alt key and then their main menu keeps popping up super annoying that's the option to prevent that you can't prevent the windows key from you know doing all the standard windows stuff unfortunately it's kind of you know built into the operating system if you're on a laptop some of these other options in the multi-touch section might be of interest not really relevant for what i'm doing but yeah those settings are there under project when creating a new project you can choose a template i don't have a default template set up yet but i would definitely use that in most cases for project loading look for project media and project directory before qualified path i like to use that because that gives me the flexibility of moving projects into different folders across different hard drives as long as i've managed all the media files it just loads up instantly that option only works if you're really diligent with actually keeping all of your media into the project folder which we'll talk about in a little bit and now we're on to the auto backup setup this is so important to get set up you know you never know when reaper's going to crash and uh you know it's pretty stable most of the time but as projects get big as you know rare bugs happen or if you're using a lot of plug-ins it you know things can happen you don't want to lose your work so let's set this up to save every six minutes so we're just going to change this number here from 15 to 6. when not recording we have the option of when it stopped or any time when not recording that seems this like the safest option for me i'm going to save to timestamp file in additional directory and hit browse and choose our temp folder again and so that backups folder again these are all preferences do what makes sense for you these are the settings that i've used for the past over 10 years in track send defaults one thing in particular that i want to change here this is a change that started with reaper six so when you record armor track by default it's going to monitor input so you can hear your voice or your guitar whatever it is right away if you have an audio interface that has direct monitoring built in and you use that function then you don't want to have both of those enabled at once so when you're direct monitoring on your interface you want to have monitor input turned off in reaper so just change that so that every new track starts with monitor input turned off we're going to click on this record config option and uncheck monitor input if you normally connect like input 3 or something as your default microphone or your your starting point for recording you can always change that so you go to input mono and just change that to whatever input you're actually recording uh your your stuff is connected to most of the time and that can save you having to change it on every single track you create on this page we can also change things like the default envelope point shape default automation mode default track height and i don't really have any problems with leaving these on the defaults for media item defaults i'm going to change a few things here i'm going to uncheck create automatic fade in fade out i will enable overlapping crossfade items when splitting i'm just going to set this to 5 milliseconds it's a little tough to see here because of dark mode but uh the default fade shape that's the one that i prefer and then i'm going to uncheck all of these loop source options i really hate them personally and i am going to enable the option trim content behind media items when editing so the loop source things if you import something and then drag one of the edges out beyond its original length it will just start repeating i've just never been a fan of that and i will choose to loop something if i want it to be looped so i have those all off by default so i'll demonstrate what that trim contents behind media items thing does so if i drag this item over that item it removes that first item if i have trim contents behind media items turned off it will keep that item in the middle and for me that gets really messy i don't like to see that so it's a very rare situation when i find that to be helpful so i like to have trim contents behind media items turned on moving on to the audio settings i'm going to uncheck close audio device when stopped in application is inactive never like that it makes it look like reaper's unresponsive tiny fade out on playback stop and playback start turn those off if you press play and there's like a punchy kick drum or something like that it's always going to have this soft attack the first time you play it and then second time's going to be different you're going to be so confused why if you loop something it sounds different when you first play versus looping it's so annoying turn those off i'm also going to uncheck show non-standard stereo channel pairs this removes the ability to have stereo pairs like channels two and three for me one and two three four five six as pairs makes the most sense the non-standard ones are kind of weird it's nice to have that flexibility in the daw you don't always see that to me that just this just cleans up that input selection menu so much under device i'm going to choose my device here now audio fuse 48k sample rate request block size um 512 when i'm recording i would normally have this set to like 64. and if i'm mixing 512 up to 10 24. so under audio and playback we're going to uncheck stop repeat playback at end of project that will just keep the project running past the end of items i find it kind of weird that it would just stop or go back to the start never been a fan of that i'm going to send a note off at playback stop which can help prevent stuck notes in some situations not all on the recording page we're going to change the file name for recorded files i find that this gets very cluttered having track number track name the year month day hours and minutes the day and time that's already taken care of by the operating system you know it's going to have a date stamp on it i don't like to have a really long file name because if you ever import that file into the project your track name is going to have all that information which you just then have to truncate it to what's actually relevant i'll just delete all of that go to wildcards project information i'm going to set this to just track name space dash space project information rec pass so the first thing you record on that track will be numbered one and you can also do if you do rec pass 0 0 it's going to have a 2 digit number to start with so it's going to be 0 1 you can see that in the example here this track is unnamed so let me apply this and call this guitar let's look at that example here again and so if i record on track number 44 which is named guitar it will be guitar space dash space 0 1 and so then i know that that's the first thing that i recorded on that track this number will automatically increment if you didn't have that there at all the rec pass the first thing you record would be just named guitar and the second one would be guitar 01 and that's where things get confusing because guitar one is actually take two so not ideal most of the time i don't care about the number that much but just you know sometimes it's a little confusing to have take number two be labeled as zero one you know it's a very minor thing doesn't really matter prompt to save delete rename new files on stop i'm going to uncheck that so that makes it always save that file when i hit record you can always delete the files after but this you know i've seen so many people always clicking save on that pop-up window every single time the extra step of having to grab the mouse having to click the button every time you record it's yeah it just it adds up it's a lot of wasted time in my opinion if you hit record and you hit stop it should always save that file it's much safer that way under loop recording i'm going to check this option bloop recording discard incomplete first or last takes if at least one full loop was recorded and the threshold for a complete take is ninety percent if you stop a little bit early as long as it's within ninety percent of the full length of that time selection um or the loop selection it will keep all that but if you go past the loop point and then stop on beat two or something like that it will discard that last take so you don't have these really short incomplete takes cluttering up your takes list all that audio is still there if you ever need it you can just drag out the edge of the item but this just simplifies loop recording a lot gets rid of takes you don't need you're never going to use things like that on the rendering preference page we've got block size to use when rendering i'm just going to put in 1024 sometimes your render speed is determined by this so certain projects will will render faster or slower depending on this number or depending on the audio device you have connected and i don't think that should be the case so 1024 seems to be a good setting for fast rendering regardless of the project on the appearance page i'm going to uncheck tool tips for ui elements this just reduces a bit of lag that you might see when you're moving faders and things like that so sometimes this tool tip actually makes it move slowly kind of depends on the system here but uh yeah this this moves much smoother for preferences appearance media i'm going to enable the button here no effects and i'm also going to change this to no handle and enable the volume knob that puts a couple icons on the items on a midi item it would be velocity but for audio items that becomes volume and also have a button to bring up the effects chain for that track if you have effects chains saved already right click on that button will give you a shortcut list for that but in general i just find that a lot faster than well you'd have to go to like item properties and then take effects and then add it there that's just too slow you can also experiment with things like draw labels above the item instead of on the item and that looks like that and when maximum legibility of the items is important having the labels above the item does make that a lot easier to read a few things i like to change under editing behavior move edit cursor to start of time selection on time selection change so with that off it looks like this my edit cursor is still there even though my time selection is over here if i hit apply i make a time selection next time i press play it's going to start there and also i can make edits that affect the start point of that time selection there i do like to have my loop points linked to time selection i find that to be the fastest way but a lot of people will use time selections and loop points for different things for editing behavior and envelope display i like to set my volume envelope range from infinity to plus 12. my default per take pitch envelope range will be 24 for the editing behavior and mouse i like to check this option ignore mouse wheel on all faders and so that prevents me from moving the mouse over a fader over the mixer and i've if i just want to scroll the mixer horizontally it's not changing the track volumes with this setting i'm still able to do things like changing the tempo using the mouse wheel but yeah track faders won't accidentally be moved when scrolling the track list or the mixer list there's so many mouse modifiers that we could change if i had to choose one that's like the most important i would go to arrange view right drag change my default from marquee select items to marquee select items and set time selection by default it looks like this if i make a marquee selection by right dragging it would select any items there let me just draw in some items here on different tracks if i right click right drag over that it selects the items but it doesn't it doesn't move my cursor and it doesn't set my time selection and so by applying this setting so items and time gets set with the same motion i right drag over these and my cursor is moved because of that previous setting that we chose and my time selection is for the length that i dragged over there i find it very quick to select these things i got really used to that setting and have used that for many years i'm going to show the volume envelope on this track and we'll change one other thing in mouse modifiers so i'm going to go to envelope segment so the default is move envelope segment ignoring time selection and if i want to just manipulate this section here um a drag on this is going to move the entire envelope and that's not what i want so let's undo that and we're going to set this to move envelope segment and press apply and now within the time selection if i drag this it's going to add in edge points and it's only made a change within that time selection and if i have points in there already those will be adjusted and there is a very very short transition time in there which i believe is this setting here so transition time for automatically created envelope edge points 0.5 so it's a half millisecond transition time which is a tiny amount and i think is a good setting to have as i said there's so many mouse modifier things that you could change i'm just going to cut it off at there just showing you too if you're new to reaper i want you to know that anything that you do with left drag right drag left click double click almost everything can be adjusted within this page of the preferences so media item left drag left click double click the track context for a double click you can change things there so clicks and drags are in mouse modifiers and then mouse wheel and keyboard is in the action list under preferences media copy imported media to project directory so if you're importing samples grabbing things from other projects putting them into a project it's going to copy that those items into your project media directory and while it does take up a little bit more disk space you're much less likely to lose files when you move your project yeah everything that belongs to the project tends to stay within the project using this option copy imported media for media midi we've got this option midi octave name display offset we're gonna set this to minus one it's a little hard to explain i've found that minus one tends to work best with any third-party plug-ins so if you press the key on your keyboard and you see the key light up on the interface it just seems to make more sense when you set it to -1 but also the actual numbers will change so if you have this on zero octaves and midi note 32 might not be triggering 32 in a certain plug-in so it's an octave off setting this to -1 tends to solve a lot of those issues everything else here i'm going to leave the same for video we're going to set this to only use vlc i do a lot of videos in reaper and for me that's been the best setting for actually installing reaper extensions check out my previous videos on that when moving audio items seek video frame to snap offset of audio item jumping ahead to the preferences plugins vst page this option bypass audio when opening plug-in config window this is something that i would check if i was getting crashes while plugins were being inserted into project so if i'm consistently seeing plugins crashing reaper the first time i open them then this may be an option the downside is that it silences your project momentarily as it's importing that and that can make it a lot more stable so just keep that one in mind if you're getting crashes that can help so that's it for preferences so now we're going to the project settings which is this i button here in the main toolbar you can also go you can also go to the file menu and find project settings there and so in here we're going to set our project to 48k we're going to set time base for items to beats position only and all the other settings there are fine under media we're going to set folder called audio files every time we save a project a new folder called audio files will be created in the same location and then any audio files that are in your project will be saved there anything you record goes there super easy to manage your media that way and i'm not going to worry about any of the other settings here i'm just going to hit save as default project settings and then next time i save a project it's going to have those settings already one more little thing in the interface if we right click in the info display box we're going to set this to cpu ram use time sense last save enable that so that puts in well that information that i just chose by default is just going to show some information about the selected track item details which it will it will switch to that when you actually move the mouse and things like that i'm going to go over to the main toolbar and just do some right clicking around and making sure that various things are enabled so if i right click on the crossfade button i have all three of these enabled if i right click on the grouping i want to enable select one select group under ripple edit ripple edit all effects tempo map i would want that one on for the envelope button envelope points and we'll point selection follows time selection i'm going to enable that just for saving time we're going to skip a few things like setting up the metronome i've done videos on that in detail so just leave that as is all right so now we're going into the action list and finding the default six theme adjuster let's run that it brings up this window and this gives us a few options for um configuring things so we can globally change some colors and i'm actually going to open up one of the windows that kind of looked funny media explorer and let's bring up a media item defaults yeah so i'm just going to tweak these colors a little bit so these these look a bit better so i'm going to change the gamma to start with so i've tweaked this a little bit gamma at 1.08 highlights at minus point 10 mid tones at 0.05 shadows at normal saturation just slightly above at 104 percent and we've resolved some issues here but one of them that we can't resolve here is the um the color of the fade shapes which i think is just a bug of using dark mode on the mac so that's the global settings page let's go over to the track control panel layout a is your default so anything you set here is going to be used for every new track when you create them anywhere where it says hide i'm going to uncheck that so just every option is available at all times so i can see my my record arm my monitor input button the effects chain automation mode my pan i don't like that the pan is in that position but it is what it is and my input my input mode my record mode here and my input selection the record mode will only be shown if the track is record armed and i think that kind of cleans up things a lot i also want to change like the minimum size for the the name because i don't usually have my my track like set that wide i don't know 110 looks about right so as i said this is the kind of default for any new track that you create we'll use that you can set things another way like uh like layout c and you press 100 to apply that and that will change that but when you make a new track it's always going to go back to layout a for the mixer i don't care too much about any of these settings i do kind of like the border on the left edge and i turn off meter expansion yeah and i make sure that element labels are there all the time all right so now we're going to the action list and we're going to set our zoom and scroll so if we search for zoom mouse wheel uh we want zoom horizontally which is this one here by default it's just mouse wheel and i don't like that and so i'm going to clear all that and i want option mouse wheel or alt mouse wheel to do that and override yes so this is just my preference option mouse wheel is zoom in in a lot of apps so i like that if you're finding that it is going in the opposite direction you would use this zoom horizontally reverse so it's going to depend on the mouse you use or other system settings resume vertically this is on command mouse wheel so that's that's essentially track height that's doing all tracks if you do track height adjust select the track heights with the mouse wheel default is command shift mouse wheel just delete that and do yeah so this particular mouse says horizontal wheel but it is um it is the normal mouse wheel motion so that does select a track and if i take off the shift modifier it's going to do all tracks all right so scrolling so if i want to just mouse wheel up and down anywhere in the track i want that to be scrolling through the list of tracks the same as if i had my mouse hovered over the left but just anywhere so we're going to filter this list by scroll mess wheel and so that's scroll vertically i'm gonna delete that add mouse wheel there we go so that's looking good and the other thing scrolling horizontally so that's already set up the way that i want with shift right now my mess wheel speed is a little off but that's actually because i'm sharing my pc mouse over to my mac not really an issue of reaper itself but if i wanted to change that it would change this um i would uncheck throttle mouse events for wheel and so that's significantly faster this video has gone on a lot longer than i thought but we're almost to the end here a couple more things in the theme development window so if i look for selected what i'm looking for here is draw selected bar on selected media item i'm going to enable that and then i'm going to choose a color so i'll just set this to i usually do like a blue i don't know let's do something like that we'll do the screen and so when i have this item selected there's this bar over it and it's just a little bit clearer which item is selected when there's multiple items here obviously there's a highlight but like regardless of custom color for a an item i'll set the item to a random color that green bar is still there so i find that to be really helpful if i search for take in this window there's also the option of drawing a colored bar on activemedia take and so if i have multiple takes in an item so let's do copy and then do a paste this takes okay so now the item has a green line and then i've got this neon green for the selected take so it's not incredibly important to have that but i find that just pops out a little bit better in this window you can also customize grid colors search for grid and so grid lines start of beats so let's just actually go opposite colors so white and so this is black let's change that to white and uh and also there's the midi editor stuff as well so let's do this and let's do pink and so i've got these pink lines and white um gridlines that brings me to this setting i search for grid i've got the option of dotted grid lines so i'll disable that now i have solid lines for the grids that really makes them stand out a lot better especially when screen recording and then there's this other option here grid line z order through items you can set it to over items that puts it kind of above the waveforms if there's any waveforms there and if we set it to under items that puts it to the back so so you can't see the grid lines through the items anymore and for certain things that makes it a lot easier it makes it a lot easier to see for me through items i think makes a lot of sense so this video has gone on much longer than i had originally thought when i was planning this but that just means that it's more filled with information for you to help you so thank you so much for watching don't forget to check out the sponsor skillshare they're a huge supporter of the channel and uh it's a great value what they're offering here please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already follow me on facebook and twitter support the reaper blog through patreon and visit reaperblog.net for a lot more [Applause] tutorials [Applause] you

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 36,847

Keywords: reaper preferences, best reaper settings, cockos reaper, how to use reaper, reaperdaw, reaper settings for beginners, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, how to set up reaper, reaper settings, the reaper blog, reaperblog, jon tidey, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, Skillshare

Id: u5GU3mwJf2E

Length: 34min 52sec (2092 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021