Fresh Start: REAPER Settings - Part 4: MIDI

welcome back to the fresh start series where i take a new install of reaper and then customize it to fit my needs basically and to show you a whole bunch of preferences and options and things that you can customize to make reaper work the way that it should for you so in this episode we're talking about the midi editor i'll be going through some of the preferences options action list and getting this really optimized for my workflow and as if i was starting from scratch but taking the decade of reaper use into consideration [Music] this video is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community for creators with thousands of classes and art design productivity and more skillshare is a fantastic place for creators to share what they know and it's also a great place for anyone to go and learn i spend a few hours every week on skillshare and i really enjoy it this week i've been watching this video from andy j pizza social media for creatives five exercises to power your 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preferences to get this started so i'm going to go to midi editor page of the reaper preferences and for the most part i'm going to leave this as default i think these defaults are pretty good the one thing that i want to change here is one midi editor per media item track or project this is definitely going to be personal preference i've been tending to go eat between either track or project option and i'll explain the differences so one midi editor per media item could get you into a situation where you have you know every time you double click on a midi item it opens up a separate floating window or another docked window if you have the editor docked and then it's a different window for each item that can be confusing especially if the settings aren't the same between each midi editor and i don't like that so track is a better way of doing that so that any of the midi on let's say my bass synth track always comes up and looking the same and it's very easy to you to keep everything organized because it's all within one midi editor but i could also jump over to my midi drum track and then that can have its own customized look just for the drums and when i jump back to the base all my settings are going to be saved with that track so i like that because for a bass or a piano or something like that you want to have all the midi notes shown the way you know as a keyboard layout but with midi drums often you have the notes style as diamonds or triangles rather than showing the length of the note and also you often use midi note names so instead of the piano roll you see list of names like kick snare toms etc and then the third option is for one midi editor per project so that means every time you double-click a midi item it's going to replace whatever editor was open before and close the other midi information i think this is also a good way of working but it really depends on if you're if you need to customize the midi editor for different track types drums versus melodic instruments that sort of thing so for me track works the best so that's where i'm going to set it and as far as these settings go i'm going to leave everything else the same here now moving on to media midi let's have a look here i think i must have covered this in a previous episode but the midi octave name display offset i've set this to -1 and i don't know why there is a difference but from the default to what pretty much everyone uses but -1 tends to work the best with other instruments so if you're pressing d minus two on the midi keyboard um in the piano roll that's going to match up with d minus two in whatever synth or sampler you're using often the midi note octaves would be different if you just left it as default it can be confusing but i found that -1 is the best option to use there under the playback tab we've got some options for midi here send midi note offs when on record arming a track reset midi cc pitch on playback start playback stop and playback loop skip and so that's basically if you have like recorded pitch bend automation and then you jump to another part in the project is that going to reset that or not but that's it that's what we're going to change in the preferences all right so let's add in a virtual instrument on a new track and i'll just choose some instrument so um you know if you only have reaper built-in synths then this list will look a lot different but if you have lots of vsts like i do then yeah you'll you'll see all of your instruments category here i'll just put in the default re resins plugin here and add and so using that shortcut there insert virtual instrument on new track which you can find by right clicking in the track area or going to the track menu and you'll see it there that loads in the synth it arms it the track for recording it monitor enables that so that the midi input can be received by the synth and then the audio out of the synth comes out the speakers and it always sets that to all midi inputs on all channels as the track input so i can play a note on my midi keyboard and that comes through now let's put in a midi item and i'll just show you a couple ways of inserting a midi item we can go to the insert menu and go to new midi item and that's going to put in a one bar item at your cursor position also you can make a time selection by just dragging in the timeline in an empty space and then if we go to insert menu new midi item is going to be an item for that length of the time selection and my preferred way is to hold down the command key on mac or ctrl key on windows and just drag out an empty midi item so this will work as long as you don't have any other items selected so there's three ways you can add in a midi item and let's double click and that brings up the midi editor as a floating window so again this is a new install of reaper and this is what you would see the first time and i do have this set up as one editor per track so if i make another midi item here to the right and i double click this this midi editor window switched to the second item and if i move my cursor position you'll see that it changes inside of the midi editor as well but that item isn't active until you double click it if i make another track insert another midi item and double click that a second midi editor window opens up which is fine but this becomes a case where often it's better to start docking your windows just so it gets a little less cluttered so i'm going to take this first midi editor window i'm going to hit this button here for docking and that puts the midi editor across the entire bottom of my screen about fifty percent of the screen is taken up by the midi editor now so now i'll just click on one of the other items on a track that did bring up another midi editor window um and it's not docked but we can just dock that and if i open up again a third item same track it's just going to update if you look at the the tabs here at the bottom whichever track it is and whichever item is active it will automatically switch the tabs if i delete all the midi items from a track what happens it deletes that midi editor tab so let's do a quick tour around the midi editor we've got our main toolbar which has view and mode functions here snapping to grid and that sort of thing we've got our sort of info area so wherever your mouse is hovered over that will change the display so right now my mouse is hovered over note number 49 which is a c-sharp in octave 2. it also shows the time position there so my mouse is at bar 1 beat 4 and 91 ticks below that you see what's called the piano roll which is kind of like a player piano if you can imagine those where the keyboard is turned on its side 90 degrees and wherever your mouse is hovered over or if you're playing keys you can see the midi notes light up as you touch a key so that's super helpful for finding which note your mouse is hovered over or which one you are editing at that particular time then there's the actual editor or grid or sequencer whatever you want to call it and this is divided up into a grid so right now we're at a 30 second note grid i'll just change this to a 16th note grid or i can change this to a quarter note grid and these grid lines and the minimum length for a note changes automatically to insert a note i just double click and that adds it there if i want to remove this note i can double click it again and it's gone if i want to make a longer note i can just drag out so hold the note or hold the key hold the mouse and drag out that note and it will automatically snap to those quarter note lengths whatever my grid is set to when snap to grid is on which is this button here this magnet icon same as the main toolbar snap to grid and showing grid lines are in the midi editor toolbar if i hold down shift i can adjust the length of a note the start or the end without snapping to grid so without the shift key held down it's going to snap to the grid lines and if i hold down shift it can move freely if i hold the command key control key on pc that will copy that item or that midi note or if i have a few notes selected i can drag them out and copy them like that holding down the option key or the alt key will bring up the eraser tool and i can erase notes so kind of have to drag from outside to bring that in super quick overview of how how you add notes and how you remove notes to select multiple notes like the arranged view you're going to use right drag holding down the right mouse button and dragging over will select multiple notes we can also select all notes on a single key by right clicking that key in the piano roll so i just right clicked on d3 that selected all the d3s in here if we hold command and click that will remove one from a selection okay so all of that is good i like all that stuff it i think it's pretty intuitive or you can at least get used to it um what i don't like is the zoom and scroll much like the arrange view this is something that we need to adjust so let's go to the action list now the midi editor actually has its own action list but it's the same shortcut which is the question mark key on your keyboard to bring up the action list so when the midi editor is active and you open the action list you should see where it says section midi editor and if not you can just choose from main to midi editor let's find what the mouse wheel is attached to so we're going to click on find shortcut and i'm going to roll the mouse wheel over this and now we've got this on zoom horizontally midi relative mouse wheel all right so i'll just get rid of that i don't want that and zoom horizontally i'll just set that on alt mouse wheel option mouse wheel and okay and we will say yes and let's see what how that looks so that's zooming in the same as the arrange view so when i push up on my mouse wheel it zooms into that point and that's how i like it but definitely if you prefer the default or if you prefer any other keyboard shortcut or modification of this just know that the action list is where you would change that and you can find something that works for your workflow zooming in vertically which is basically increasing the the size of the notes on the vertical grid making those the piano grid taller that's on command mouse wheel and i i do like that so it's not how i've i've usually used command shift but that doesn't really make sense that's not the same as what i'm doing in the arranged view which would be select to track height so having it on command actually makes a lot of sense for me all right so i'm going to search for scroll and we're looking for scroll horizontally and i'll get rid of this and so scroll horizontally midi relative mouse wheel and so i'm going to have this on shift horizontal wheel yeah so when i pulled when i push up that's going to scroll to the right and that's the same as my arrange view that's the way i like it scroll vertically for some reason it's set to command option mouse wheel i'm just going to add in regular old mouse wheel and so that when i push up it goes up when i hold shift and push up it moves uh the view to the right so that's that's always worked for me but definitely do whatever you feel is the right way for you all right so coming back to our tour around the midi editor we've got the cc lanes and by default it's going to show you velocity you can see this little plus button that's where additional cc lanes can be popped up or if you don't want to see multiple lanes you can just click the drop-down list where it says velocity and change that to something different so i'm going to take our second cc lane change this to mod wheel and so under mod wheel i can draw in different points and so these are positions of the mod wheel we can click and drag to move any of these around um again alt drag will delete points a command drag will kind of draw and also notice that these are snapping to grid so if you have a 1 16 grid and you draw in you'll have more frequent individual changes if you want to do things like select all or modify what default cc lane is you can right click go to default cc curve shape it's set to square let's set this to linear i'm going to select all events in the lane and then delete and now let's draw this in and now i have linear points between and that's a much more gradual um you know more more natural drawing shape you can always change the point shape um it's a little awkward you can't click on the actual point because that will remove it but you just select them and then right click beside and we can go to cc curve shape we can set this to let's say fast end that's going to put in a little uh different kind of curve on each of those selected points so i'm bringing this up also because there's another place where we can make a customization that i like to do so we're going to look for the action edit adjust value for events mouse wheel midi controller only this is set on shift mouse wheel which would be good but my mouse wheel comes up as horizontal wheel for me so i'm actually going to change this to command shift mouse wheel which again shows as horizontal wheel but so when i have some midi cc data selected i can press command shift and drag over that pull my mouse wheel and that will adjust that cc lane and i can do that with midi items velocity selected i can do the same thing so that's going to change the velocity using the mouse wheel and if i hide this midi cc lane it will just automatically do it with velocity you might find that unchecking this option cc selection follows note selection helps you modify individual cc lanes separate from your velocity and everything else separate from the actual notes and their position a little bit easier so that option is there under options cc velocity lane cc selection follows note selection let's move into customizing the midi editor i have actually done a video explaining my midi editor toolbar but if i had to just choose a few things to add to the default midi editor toolbar i think i think we can do that here so i'm going to right click on the toolbar go to customize and then we're going to add this brings up the action list and the first one we'll look for is humanize and so this will be humanize notes the default keyboard shortcut for that is h which is easy to remember but it's also nice to have that on the toolbar and so i'm going to select that and that will add it to the toolbar at the end and then i'm going to do one more thing here which is preview so that's this one options preview notes when inserting or editing and i'm going to go to select and close okay i want to change the order of these i want human eyes to be over beside quantize yeah so preview notes when inserting or editing let's right click on that and then they're going to look for headphones okay so here's here's some headphone icon so that's going to be for previewing the midi note so when you press a key or when you double click to enter a note does it play a sound or not things can get kind of tedious when you're hearing that constantly so i like to have that as an option there isn't really a good uh icon for humanized notes so i'm just going to leave that with a text there and save and close so there we go there's our new customized toolbar we've got humanized notes that brings up the humanized nose window uh it's right beside quantize and at the end we've got the preview notes button so now when i click in the editor it's not making a sound turn it on and it's back the default toolbar has functions for showing piano roll showing named notes showing the event list and showing musical notation personally i never use those last two views so i would just usually remove those so customize event list delete key musical notation delete and save when you are working with midi drums often you want to change the notes on the piano roll to actually reflect what drum that is sometimes that automatically comes over sometimes you need to import a midi note name file and if you want to name it manually you might not know how to do it so if we're in the default piano roll mode we can double right click to bring up the text box so we can call this one d 3 and so now i've added that d3 label to the key if i go over to note names view i've got the d3 there when you're in this view for the piano roll it's the same thing double right click and you can enter things like uh tom one and if you press tab that will go to the next key tom tom2 uh hi hat snare so if we've customized our piano roll note names we can save that share it with other users or we can download things from the reaper stash where people have already done this for you so things like easy drummer addictive drums steven slate drums a lot of people have already created note name files and that makes editing so much faster one more thing before we go if you want to change anything for the way that the mouse clicking and dragging changes for the midi editor so for left click left drag and double click you can customize almost everything that you can do with the with the mouse within the midi editor if you're left clicking on a midi note is it going to select the note is it going to select the note and move the edit cursor are we going to erase the note have the the note length all these different options there if we double click same sort of thing we can change that from erasing note or run an entirely different action from the action list same for the note edge for the cc events cc lane cc segment which is within a time selection the source loop end markers midi ruler marker and region lanes piano roll and midi editor so there are so many options here um for customizing all these different things if reaper midi editor is not working for you spend some time within the action list and the mouse modifiers and figure out exactly what you want to do and hopefully you'll be able to find equivalent functions for those things for me most of these defaults seem pretty good and i don't really have any trouble with those so i think that's everything on my list for starting the midi editor fresh there are a few defaults that are kind of weird there's a lot of things that seem sort of hidden or confusing but i think with this starting point you're in a better place than with the defaults and now at least you know where to go to make any changes to customize this for your own preference so that's it for this video thank you so much for watching please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already follow me on facebook and twitter support the reaper blogs your patreon and visit reaperblog.net for a lot more tutorials [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 4,961

Keywords: the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, jon tidey, cockos reaper, reaperdaw, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, skillshare sponsor, reaper (software), how to set up reaper, reaper midi, midi editor, reaper fresh start, reaper preferences, reaper settings, reaper tutorial for beginners

Id: BGOOjtLWKQ8

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021