How to swap beats 2 & 4 with custom scripts (Rapid-fire REAPER Tutorials Ep78)

hey how's it going welcome to rapid fire reaper tutorials all info no fluff and today we're looking at how to swap beats 2 and 4. they're all the rage these days everybody's doing them and it's cool because it plays with the harmony and melody of your track in quite an interesting way and it can actually give you ideas for arrangement and stuff like that and it's the exact type of thing that would be really easy to do in reaper and very annoying to do in most other daws we're gonna talk about a bunch of really cool scripts that you may have a use for so keep watching or don't i don't care he does care so first things first let's grab a song and i don't want my videos to get copyright claimed so i'm actually going to use one of my shitty songs i don't write a lot in 4 4 this is a lot more easy to do in 4 4 but i have one song that i've recently written in 4 4 so let's grab that baby put it on our timeline now the first thing you need to do is to make sure that your project tempo matches your track tempo and that it's on grid and in time and i have a tutorial for this so i'm just going to blast through this part but i'll put the link to that tutorial up there for you to check out in detail i'm going to put my time base to time on this track hit apply change my tempo to the song tempo which is 85 and then just drag this bad boy to measure one so let's just check somewhere random to see if the track is in time [Music] all right sounds good or i guess sounds on grid whether it sounds good is subjective so the next order of business is to change the grid size to quarter notes again this is something i've shown in another tutorial so i'll put the link to that up there but i got a nice sub menu right here that i can click at any time and set my grid to quarter notes so now we have gridlines on every quarter note here's our first useful action split items at timeline grid and i have a hotkey for this but i'm just going to run it from here ship laps and now the song is split into quarter notes very cool next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select this track and i'm going to run this custom script select every nth item within time selection you don't actually need the time selection for this and this is a custom script by spk77 so you can download this custom script via repack we've gone over this hundreds of times but if you don't know how to do it check the blog post for this episode and i'll have some instructions there so with this track selected i'm gonna run the script and i'll get this little window right here if i hover my mouse over this first thing and move my mouse wheel i can set it to select every fourth item so now every fourth item on this track is selected we first want to kind of mark beats two and four right now it's selected beat one of every measure so again i'm gonna hover my mouse over the offset value move my mouse wheel a little bit and now the offset is one meaning every second of every fourth item is selected so that's our beats two while we're here i'm going to group these items and i'm gonna give them a random color one more time i'm gonna just move this offset value to number three you know offset zero is beat one offset one is b2 and offset three is beat four the same deal i'm gonna group these items give them a random color maybe let's give them quite a different color the next thing you need is to go to your top toolbar right click on this little chain icon here and make sure that selecting one item selects the group while we're here i'll show you also a really cool mouse modifier and that is in preferences mouse modifiers in the context of media item and left drag and i have control set to move item vertically if i start moving my items i can't move them left or right and thus i won't be able to make a mistake and screw this up if you have snapping enabled you're probably safe but i like to be extra safe and i like to give you extra tips so now we got b2 of the song on this track let's now select beat four of each track and again i'm gonna control and drag it down to this track and call that beat four so we split our track by every quarter note we took out beats two and four and grouped them and the rest is probably super easy and you can figure it out by yourself double click on any track and you will select all its items we also have this enabled so we didn't really need to do that but just an extra tip for you and i'm gonna move these bad boys to beat four double click on this track to select all its items and i'm gonna move these babies back to b2 and then again holding control i'll move these up i'll move these up and now i have swapped my beats two and four let's check it out [Music] and that's it seems to have worked the only other things to watch out for is if you want select your items and holding shift just introduce a tiny bit of fate to them and additionally if your song has a tail that is less than one measure long as i do here you will have this rogue extra beats 2 there which you can just kind of get rid of if you want so i can just select this and get rid of it or i can bring it back to b2 if i want i can also just glue this into one single item here's our song beats two and four swapped so that's it for today thanks to ejv for the awesome suggestion i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you learned something from it if you want to check out my music i'll put some links in the description this song hasn't been released yet but it will be in september i got other albums then you can listen to them if you have any questions put them in the comments i make tutorials out of the most interesting ones but i answer all of them and if you like the work i do please subscribe if you really really like the work i do you can also donate to me through buy me a coffee.com the link of that will be in the description join me tomorrow for another live stream on scripting and otherwise take care of yourselves and i'll see you soon bye

Channel: IDDQD Sound

Views: 289

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: rapidfire reaper, rapidfire reaper tutorials, reaper daw tutorial, reaper sws extensions, reaper tips, reaper tips and tricks, how to swap beats 2 and 4, reaper swap beats 2 and 4, reaper custom scripts, spk77 scripts, how to select every other item, reaper select every second item, how to split items by grid, reaper memes, reaper advanced editing, reaper useful custom scripts

Id: LD_HFJATtQs

Length: 5min 24sec (324 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021