How to Record / Mix a Song in Reaper DAW - Part 1

hi and welcome to reaper TV in part 1 of this new video series we're going to be taking a look at how i tend to build up an initial idea of a song so we're going to take it from the step 1 where we've got a rough idea of a riff we're going to put down a rough scratch track we're going to look at different methods of checking your time and we're going to look at how you can do things like setting the tempo everything you're going to need to do right the way up to having that rough mix at the end of everything to get a good idea where the song you work and always worth continuing with so let's take a look at how we could do all of that right now ok so the first thing to say before we start doing any of these things is that the way that I do it is not the only way there are multiple ways you can do any of this and whatever works for you is the right way so with that being said I'm going to show you the rough idea that I tend to sort of work with when I'm putting down a scratch idea for a song so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get an idea of what the riff runs like and then I'll either record a scratch track into Reaper and then I work at the BPM the timing for it or I'll sit in a play a tile and tap out roughly to get an idea of where I need to be it doesn't need to be perfect because we can adjust that inside Reaper at any time so don't worry too much about that so I've already record the track I know the idea of where I want to be and my BPM is set around 180 now you've got two ways of doing this you can either insert the number directly in and set your BPM for the track alternatively if you want to just tap out what you think is going to be close to where you need it to be then you can use the tap to tempo option that's built into Reaper so if you don't know this if you take your mouse over way it says BPM you'll see it changes to tap and you can now use that for tap tempo so all I need to do is just tap with my left mouse button roughly in time where I want to be as you see as I tap then my timing changes and I get close to what I wanted to be and you see everything else adjusts accordingly so I like I say I know this needs to be 180 or round 180 so we'll use that as our starting point so there's our BPM set them to start off with so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create my first track which is gonna be my guitar scratch track so we'll just double click to create that will set monitoring on there and we'll set an instance of easy mix on that so I can put in a guitar track so let's just bring up easy mix and I'm going to use one of my favorites so I'm just going to favorites and I know choose aggression so there's my guitar track set up and I'm going to quickly just click on guitars to color code that now the next thing I want to do is put down my rough scratch track for the drums now you can work with drums if you want to alternately if you're comfortable working with a metronome then you can use that as a click track and then you can select you set your tempo you can then just go into the metronome option and you'll see that if we right click on that we have a whole host of different options available we can change the metronome sound from the default clicks so if we wanted to we could easily put in drums in there we can change the beat pattern so you can see that the the first note is always the louder note and then the three subsequent notes are quieter you can choose any of those that you want you can have all of them be in the same level you can have just one note every four bars of sort of four loud notes you know you can customize that to whatever you want to do you can specify whether you count in before playback and or recording so you can do that and you can also set the primary level and how many measures are counted in before you actually start recording or playing back so you've got a whole range of different options in there I'm not going to use the click track I'm not going to use the tip of the metronome I'm going to set up a rough drum track so I know like I say I've set my BPM to where I want to be so the next thing I'm going to do is just load in my template for my drum track now again you don't need to do this I've just set this up because it makes my life quicker and easier so if I right-click and come down to insert track from template you can see that I can choose default drum tracks that will load up everything in place for me including the instance of ez drummer with the patch that I've set up now I'll cover this in a previous video which we linked in the description below so if you want to set this up for yourself with track templates check that video out and it really does help speed up your process of doing anything but for now we've got the initial things put in this the drum track is ready for us to start working so I'm gonna scroll back to make sure by beginning make sure that I've got the snap enabled and I'm going to run that back to make sure I'm right back at the beginning that are simply going to highlight the block probably more than I need and then I'm going to come up and I can go to either insert and choose new MIDI item alternatively I can just go to the keyboard or the shortcut that I've set up on here which is insert a new MIDI item so that will then set up a blank MIDI track ready to start taking MIDI data in on the selected track which in this instance is my easy drama track so I hit that and there we go so now everything is set up I just need to double-click on the MIDI and I can now load in my MIDI editor and once I've done that I can set up some of the parameters in here so I'm going to specify that we're dealing with one eighth notes that's fine I'm going to come to file and I'm going to choose note names and load note national file and I'm going to use the ezdrummer to MIDI note names these are all freely available from the repo stash so you can go and get most of the commonly sort of sad commercial and free drum track editors so you've got ezdrummer with different patches in this superior drummer and so on slate drums and things like that you can obviously if you want to set up and customize your own text files that have all this information in there now I've set things up in a customized way so I can quickly just go in and say this is the drum track I want to work with or in drum mode and all that does is set up the shape of the cymbals they're going to denote the drum track so I prefer to work with the diamonds because it's easier than working with the the bars and so on which are better when you're dealing with media so it's like pianos and keyboards and synths and things so you can see now I've got all of my drum track all my all my individual MIDI tracks labeled on the left hand side and we've got the timing setup so I'm just going to come in and I'm going to hold the control key down and zoom with my mouse wheel to make everything just a little bit larger to make life easier when I'm working with this so now the next thing I want to do is find my kick drum there you go I'm just going to start dropping in notes now to get my time in where I want to be as my my sort of drum click track so I know specify that we want like so I'm going to just right click drag on there then hold the control key down and I'm just going to duplicate box a couple of times so I've got my rough drum track ready so that's not the entire MIDI track that's just part of it so I'm gonna do the same again we'll just drag that over and get the next part in there so there we go so if we listen back to that now we just got a simple kick drum in there that's going to be used in my time in so there we go not worry about velocity because this is just a rough track that's there for time and once we've got that down we can start fleshing out and creating a proper drum beat but for now it's all we need so let's just close that dab and as you can see we've now got the first part of it set up probably isn't long enough but for what I want to demonstrate right now it's going to be more than enough so the next thing we're going to do is just go and record that rough guitar scratch track on top of this I'm not dealing with left and right track and not even bother if it's gonna be perfectly in time I'm just roughing things out to get my time and get everything set that before I go in and do the full-on recording session so let's move on to that now okay so before I hit record to start recording this scratch disk or the scratch guitar track couple things I want to do first thing I want to set the metronome because I want to use it for my timing but I want to use it by Counting at the beginning so I'm going to right-click set that as to make sure that the metronome is set to play back doing recording to set it to counting up to two measures and that's fine so I can just okay that switch that on make sure that's enabled the next thing I want to make sure that my track is record armed ready to start recording so everything is now in place to start recording that scratch guitar part so let's do that next you okay so there's our squash guitar track done ready to move on to the next part so let's listen to that just to make sure whether it's it's sounding okay so we run that mark now I could take a quick listen so let's take that there we go that's the rough first guitar part just put down together and ideally we want to be so you can start structure my song around this now if I wanted to I start fleshing out the drums a little bit to have a bit more than just that kick just sort of giving us a time and straightforward time it should start to sound bit more so we want to be but I don't know about that for now what I'll do is I'm going to use that as a rough scratch track now to monitor with and then I'm going to go in and record the second and third guitar takes so we can then pan that off left and right and just the sound so let's do that next let's just disable that one I'm going to create two new tracks so we just insert a new track ctrl T so there's my two other tracks so I'm going to set this to be guitar left and this would be guitar right let's just name this guitar scratch so we know where it is so there you go so the next thing I want to do is just pan this off left pan this off right come up and choose another instance of easy mix and for this example we're going to do the same again we're going to come in without an aggression on there on the one track but on the second track I'm going to put a different patch just so I can get some difference in sound so on this one we're going to set up the middle earth XXL so we'll use that one which is just kind of thick ascending guitar so not bother too much about what they are they just there for now to use this as an idea so what I'll do now is I'm going to record those other two guitar parts left and right just to get my initial guitar parts put in there now I know only concentrate on a small portion of the song but the principle is the same right the way throughout and we'll start to look at some other guitar parts later on and flesh this out a little bit more but I just want to give you a flavor for what I'm doing and how I work so here we go we've got that set up so the next thing is now let's just arm this left track and let's record the guitar part for that okay so recorded both the left and right guitar parts now and I've panned those off left and right we've got two different guitar tones on there so everything is in place so we're going to do is I'm going to play that back now would take off the guitar scratch track and you can kind of see where we are at this point they're not perfect I would go back and spend a lot more time recording these and I would then go through and time a line and make sure that everything match except where I'd want to be but this is roughly where I want to make a say at the mole we're just demoing this out to get the structure together we can tweak and fine-tune overdub and all those things later on okay so I'm going to play the track back now and I'm going to leave the script our scratch track in it to start off with and I'm disabled that so you can see where we are with the rough sounds on there so let's check that wait so will this guitar parts down and the kick-drum everything in place I want to go in and just quickly flesh out a little bit of the drums just to show you what I do they now we're going to this in more detail in the second and third video and so on but I'll just show you roughly how I'd work with this so open up the MIDI drum track let's find out what it's near there we go so what I would do now is I listen back to this I'll see where we are in the track and see where I want to start bringing some other drums into it so let's let's take a look at that now okay so stop it at this point now because what I want to do here is start doubling up the kick drums just to give it a little bit of flavor so we start to build the momentum in the song so I've got a kick drum second kick drum there so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start adding a second kick drum in so let's take a listen to that yes I study what I want to be I would still go in and flesh out a bit more but it's getting the rough basics of what we want in this so once you get to that point we're now ready to start adding in a little bit of a drumbeat as opposed to just to kick drum so let's start building that up now and I'll take you through and I'll just show you what I would do step by step just to get it roughly where I want to be you can see we start to add this in it's pretty highlighting some areas in the song that or the guitar part that could do it bein fine-tuned and this is why this is the scratch phase where you don't worry too much work anything perfect you just get everything in roughly in place so we've got the kick we've got the snare drum in there for a bit more of an interesting partner we'll put some high hats in there and then I probably flesh it out with a double that will kick drum every now and again maybe a drum roll or two like I say let's just keep this simple sewing up with the high hats in now and we'll wrap it up after that pie so let me go and do that so there we go you can see now I've started to flash up the drumbeat we've just got the basics of that put together and hopefully what you can see is how quickly you can start to build up an idea of a song so we're going to wrap this first part of this series up at this point and in the next video we'll take a look at where we can go in and start adding the bass in there will then come in and start to actually tied up the guitar part and move on to some more guitar parts in there as well as looking at how we can actually put tempo changes as part of a song well I hope you found this video useful if you have please hit that subscribe button below to be kept up to date with all of the new content we add if you've any comments questions or feedback on this video please pop those in the comment section below we read everything you post and try to answer as many questions as possible and until next time happy mixing you

Channel: ReaperTV

Views: 95,471

Keywords: Reaper, DAW, Home Recording Studio, Mixing, Mastering, PsmegTV, ReaperTV, Recording Guitar, Recording Bass, Recording Drums, Recording a Song, How to record a song, mixing a song, Mixing Guitars, Mixing Bass, Mixing Drums, Programming Drums

Id: _mcKC1btdak

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2016