How To Customize The Reaper DAW Layout

hi and welcome to another episode of reaper TV one of us commonly asked questions on the YouTube channel and the website is how do i make reaper look the way that it is in my videos so what i want to do in this video is show you some of the basics on how you can do that how you can change the layout how you can change the theme how you can customize the way the theme looks and a whole lot more so one of the beautiful things about reaper is the fact that gives us an almost unlimited way that we can customize the whole layout to get exactly how we want to work and look now there's no way I can cover all those things in this video but what I will do is show you some the basic things you can customize it and tweak it you can then dig in a lot deeper yourself and find it a lot more the things you can do on there but this is going to give you a good starting point on how to get things looking just a little bit more personalized so you can see on screen I've got a normal install of Reaper 5 with the standard theme there's nothing different about other than I've got some icons across the top that are going to be slightly different as I've customized that and I have covered customizing or you're making your own toolbars in a separate video which I'll link in the description below so you can check those out if you'd like to see how to do that but one of the easiest ways to make Reaper look the way you want to look is to install themes now there are tens of great-looking themes from really basic alterations that take the normal version of the Reaper 5 skin and they just enhance some of the things that annoy people so they call the nitpicky Edition right the way through to complete customisation to make it look like a genuine console and mixing desk you know the white tie kind of layout is amazing and if you like that kind of thing then that is fantastic especially if you have bigger monitors but there should be something out there to cater for almost every taste and if not you want to really dig in deeper you can ultimately get in and find out how you can customize and tweak and design your own themes like I say we're going to keep it simple in this video so let's start off with by taking a look at how easy it is to download and install a theme in Reaper 5 so one of the best places you'll find anything to do with Reaper is the Reaper stash as you can see we've got a whole range of different categories that we can go through and we've got the latest options all showing up on the home page and we can search through for things and we can log in and we can you know do a whole range of cool things on here but what I want to do is I want to come down to the themes option I want to do is click on themes that will then filter it out and show us all the different themes that are available now you're going to find that certain themes on you and not necessarily going to work with the latest version of reaper because this kind of stores all of the themes not necessary the most up-to-date so you can see the 38 pages of themes on there so that's a whole hell of a lot of themes we can we can go through and use I would also recommend checking out the RIBA forum because there's a section dedicated on there just to dealing with the skinning and change in the way that Reaper looks and you'll find in development themes that you can take keep an eye on you can follow along you can beat the test then you can even get involved in saying what you're doing don't like things and you could shape the future of how that theme ends up looking but for now let's keep it straightforward and simple you can see we've got a ton of different options on your different sort of layouts and themes that we like so as I said it on the default 5 nitpicky edition for example you can easily go through now and you can browse through those and take a look at what they look like and find out notes and things like that about them so let's just take a look at the nitpicky Edition for example we can go through we can see some screenshots we can find out when it was uploaded the size how we download any comments and things on it so you can browse this and find a theme that you think is going to be what you want alternatively if you know the name of the theme that you're after you can easily come into this and you can just simply type it into the search field hit the enter key and then you'll go through and you'll find it'll go search through for any of the keywords that you use so for example we got default commodify which is the one that I tend to use for most of my videos and earlier videos was default kamala for there's subtle differences between the two there's a light version of the dark version I've got a dedicated video on how you can customize almost every aspect of default kamala and again that'll link in the description below but you can easily come into this and you can go through and find a theme that you think is going to be exactly what you want so I've already got a default command install so I'm going to find something different download it and just install it and show you how the whole process works ok so that a little look through and I've settle upon a theme that we're going to use the basis of this video and we're going to use the Blackmore theme so you can see I just done a search through on the repo stash found the files that I'm looking for all I need to do now is hit the download Blackmore repo theme that will then go and download that to my system for me once that's downloaded I'm ready then to start installing it so let's let that download and then we'll go over and take a look at how easy it is to install so there we go we've got the file downloaded to our desktop and we're ready to start to install that now one of the nice things is with Reaper that over the last couple of years relates to revisions we've had they've just made the whole process if installing themes a double click thing before you used to have a lot more hassle you have to drop it in folders and loads of faff and about to get it where you want but now you literally just double click and it'll then open that up with the style already applied so let's just double click that that will then open up Reaper and you can see that that's already applied the theme for us so we've got the basis of exactly we want to be now some themes are easier to work with than others I mean blackboard and default kamala and so on they literally double click install job done some other ones have a little bit more to that and they're usually the ones that are more heavily customised should we say they changed the way that the Laird of Reaper actually works so you may have configuration files and things you need to load in there so as always read what is posted with the file you need to download check out the forum take a look at there's a thread there dedicated thread that tells you exactly what the theme entails what you have to do and so on and follow along with that they're usually pretty self-explanatory if anybody has any problems there's usually dancer in the forum in that thread on how to deal with it so you've got support and help they should you need it but there we go we've got the beginning of our customization all ready to go so we've applied a feed into it we can now get stuck in and start customizing other aspects of it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to load a project in so we can take a look at what all the different elements that tracks the master control panel the mixer control panel and so on how they all look with information on them and then we can start take a look at how we can customize all that to get it exactly where we want it and then we'll take a look at how easy it is to create screen sets so we can have multiple different layouts for different purposes for mixing for mastering and so on that you can easily call back up with just press of a button so let's take a look at that now okay so we've got a typical project in front of us and you can see a color-coded some of the tracks so I know exactly what's going on a track-by-track basis but there's a few other things we can do and I'm going to start off with the one question that seems to get asked the most other than what theme are using and that is how do I change the position of the master mixing section and put that either fully left or fully right so I'll show you how easy it is to do that right now all you need to do is come on to the master track right click on it come to master track and just choose show in docker and that will automatically dock it to the left hand side of the screen and there we go that's it that's all there is to it simple as that so the next thing I get asked quite regularly is how do you color code the media now depend upon the theme this won't always work but what you can do is you can see we've got a color coded tracks but then that's great when you look at the tracks when you work on a project and you want to sort of be able to see what's going on with the actual media itself then sometimes it just makes life easier to have that color coded so all we need to do is come up to the preferences or press P on the keyboard come down onto media and we see peaks and waveforms and you can see we've got custom colors tint the media item waveform Peaks or tint the media item background so let's just check all the ones to the background hit apply and you now see that they color coded alongside the actual track itself so we've now color-coded that just to make our lives a little bit easier so we can now see all the different color media sections again pretty simple but can make a big difference okay so we've color-coded the media we've got the layout so the basic we want and we've got these different tracks now we can change the way that these look on both the track control panel and the mixer control panel so we can customize the look of this to exactly what we want now these are the kind of things that adjust in the track or the mixer control panel the colors and the shapes and the different things like that are not going to be global they're only based upon the project that you're currently working on so you can't save these as screen sets but they are a great way of customize the way that you mix it with your track control panel displays different elements so for example if we come over to let's just take a look at the tracks a second and you can see I've got the rhythm master is the parent and there we go guitar left and right and so on the child tracks and if we look on the track control panel you can see we've got these little indents these little arrows that show us we can contract and expand to show the master track and we can show the ordinary tracks problem with that is you can't really see that well which is which you can't separate them so what we can't easily do is come down choose the track right click on it and we're going to come up to set track layout and you can see we've got default we've got mixer panel and track panel what the moment we're on the track at the mixer panel so we're going to come onto that and you can see we've got several different options again this is theme dependent some themes have one or two options some themes have a dozen options some themes can have tens and tens of options but have a look at the things we've got all this should give you the ability to be able to change these to some extent so let's just say that we want to use that because that's a master track we just want to put in a big meter in there and we have the pan at the bottom so we can visually see it's a different thing so there we go we now can immediately see that that is a different kind of track and we could do the same thing again for the guitar leads so we can come onto that right click collapse a track layout mix a panel and we're going to come back up we'll say big meter power at the bottom so now we can quickly and easily see visually that these tracks are parent or master tracks or buses or whatever you want to set them up to be so again it's a great way of be able to quickly and easily customize the layout for your particular project and like I say in conjunction with adjusting it and customizing it for the actual the layer that you like to use with Reaper itself so these like I say they're different things one is a track customization the other one is the entire project so let's just say now you've gone through when you set up the way that you like this for your whole mixing process so we might say that we want the mixer to be at the top I'll right-click on this a second and I'll just say that I don't want the show multiple rows so now I've got this laid out I want just a small section the top that allows me to quickly scrub through audio to see what I'm doing but I want them to be the main feature of this and what I can do now is I can set this up as a screen set and that's very easy to do we can have multiple screen sets and we can just use a keyboard shortcut to quickly and easily switch between those different layouts so let's take a look at that a moment so to access those screen layers all we need to do is press ctrl command key on the keyboard or alternately good view and we come down and we'll say we want screen sets and layouts what that'll do is that that will open up a dialog box and that'll show us all the screen sets that we have and the load and save keys now the load key is the keyboard shortcut you use to switch to that layout and if you want to make some changes to it and quickly resave that with the edits that you've made to the layer without having to come back in this box you can also set up a save key as you can see I've basically taken the same key which is added shift to it so it means that I can I'll know exactly when which one is associated with which layout so all you need to do is set the layout the way you want it and then simply come to this click in a blank spot and click Save and then give that a name so we're going to call this one sample layout and we'll just say we want that to store the main window position the tool window positions are so on we don't want the last focus because that's going to be different on a project-by-project basis so you can specify what is saved as the screen sets you may only want to have the layout saved and all the rest of the things that just have to default so you can customize and tweak that to your heart's content and we can just hit save you can see now we've got that in there all we need to do is apply a keyboard shortcut to that so we can quickly do that we can just come over to the Edit shortcuts button and the right-hand side of this dialog box click on the that'll open up the window that allows us to choose the actions and you can see that we've got the screen set section in there so you got screen set load one two three thread with little ten and the same for the save so you could say well let's just click on that and we'll say for that keyboard shortcut we want to add in and we'll say f8 so let's just add that keyboard shortcut in there so we've come to the bottom bring that up a little bit so we come down click on add that'll open up the dialog box we can now just press the key we want to associate this with so I'll just press f4 you can see that we can just now say okay that tells us if you map to something else do we want to overwrite it you can say yes or no depending upon your circumstances let's say no for now just to sort of cancel over this once you've done that that will show the shortcut then in the keyboard section and you can do the same if you want to for the quick save option for any of your screen sets as well let me click on the option that you want click Add and do the keyboard shortcut you want so like I say you can do shift and F fourth you want to so you can see that puts that in there you click OK and as long as that's not associated with anything else and you don't mind overriding it if it is you can save that out and then you've applied that shortcut to it so let's just cancel it without a second we'll just jump back out of this and you can see I've already set up quite a few different layers because I use a dual screen setup I've got different ones to record in while use the one for the mixer panel on the one side and the other ones just the recording screen so I can see exactly what I'm doing great way of laying things out so that's how easy it is to create those different sets on there and like I say you can easily create a multiple sets and then you can switch back and forth between them at any time that you want like I said also certain different aspects of it are project specific what other ones are global to any different project you want to work with so that's how easy it is to start customizing things in Reaper you can see we can easily apply themes we can create custom layouts we can then save that out we customize the layer and we can really get in a customizer almost every aspect of this so let's just take this one step further you can see at the bottom we've got the mixer panel and we've got this little tab that says mixer well we can start docking things in there this is called the docker and we can put other things in there so let's come out to view and take a look at some of the things we can open up so let's just say we want the effects browser we click on that that'll open up this window and you can see that's great it floats away there we don't necessarily want that to be the case so we can easily put that into the dock area and to do that is incredibly easy all we need to do is come to the effects menu click on there and you can see we've got DAF dock FX browser in docker click on that that note puts it into an area on the docker we can now easily reposition that if we want to just by simply dragging that over into the dock area so you can see now we can switch back and forth between the effects browser and the mixer and we can do that again if you want to become view we can say well let's have the routing matrix for example click on that and you can see that is in the dark already we can undock that by right-clicking and easily choose to uncheck the doc matrix window in the darker it now becomes its own dedicated floating window which we can easily reposition resize to wherever we want with it and we want to put it back in there we can easily redock it just right-click on the title bar dock matrix in the window in the docker and there we go it's back in the if we want to reposition that somewhere else we can easily grab the tab what we're holding that down you'll see we got the little box associated with it and as we move to different positions on the screen you'll see we start to get this blue bar that allows us to choose where we want to dock this particular element so we can easily come over to the left hand side you can see we can dog down the top we can dock it right at the top above the actual player itself we could come over to the right hand side and dock it in there you know we've got a whole range of ways we can customize this entire list I can drag that and drop it in there we can now resize that out if you want to and set this up again as an alternative screen set should we we want to do that and as you can see we've got the little docking tab in the right hand side so if we wanted to we can easily come in and choose something else let's say the the browsing matrix and you can see that automatic dog side on the right hand side the same against let's just make sure we've got nothing selected on you go to view and we'll say let's go for the instead for the track manager so there's our track manager you can expand that out we can right click and we can say doc the track manager in the window the docker you can see that now Doc's it at the bottom by default but we can easily grab that take it over and drop it on to the right hand side you can see just above the little tab we've got a little blue indicator let go we've now got another window that we've customized and set up how we want to be so you can see this is very easy to get in and really customize all these different aspects well London doc that we could just literally drag it from there drop it somewhere else we wanna get rid of it completely we just right-click on the tab uncheck the doc that becomes a floating window again we can now close that down and it's so quick and easy so Reaper does give you a huge amount of customization options and we just literally scratch the surface of what you can do well I hope you found this video useful hope is going to give you an idea on what you can do to lay out your copy of Reaper to gate exactly how you want to work with it in different situations if you enjoyed the video give it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button any comments questions or feedback on this video or anything else we cover on the channel pop those in the comment section below until next time happy mixing you

Channel: ReaperTV

Views: 115,697

Keywords: Reaper, DAW, Home Recording Studio, Mixing, Mastering, PsmegTV, ReaperTV

Id: n2DNR292ZKM

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2016