How To Use Reaper DAW Tutorial for Beginners on Windows 10

in this video i'm doing a how to use reaper daw tutorial for beginners so if you're new to this great daw or digital audio workstation and you want to learn the basic fundamentals keep watching i'm zane welcome to simple green tech where i do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and reviews to help you conquer the tech and unleash your creativity and if you're so new to the reaper DAW and you haven't downloaded it yet i put a link in the description so you can easily head over grab a copy for yourself the demo is completely unlocked and free for 60 days so here's what i'm going to go over in this reaper tutorial first i'm going to quickly look at setting up your audio interface if you have one and don't worry if you don't have one you can still use the reaper daw then i'll look at setting up your midi controller if you have one and again if you don't don't worry you can still get started with reaper and after the hardware setup we're going to get into recording audio then i'll look at working with audio in the timeline things like chopping up loops and arranging them in the timeline and after that i'll get into midi recording and editing in the piano roll and this will also include using virtual instruments in reaper and then i'll show you how to save your track as an mp3 or a wave so you can share it and all of this will give you a basic understanding of working with the reaper DAW so you can start creating some great music now let's quickly set up your audio interface if you have one so you want to go up to options and then go down to preferences and then under audio click on device and if you have an asio audio interface be sure to click asio as the audio system and then if your audio interface doesn't automatically show up in the driver area click the drop down menu and then select your device from in here if you're using your computer's built-in sound card or a sound card that doesn't have an asio driver for it you may want to download Asio4all it's free and you can use that as your driver here and this may give you a little bit better of latency and better results when using reaper but if you are using your built-in sound card and you don't want to use asio4all you can just leave whatever the default settings are in here and you don't have to worry about it if you are using asio and you start recording and you notice the latency is a little much you can click on this asio configuration here and that will bring up the asio control panel for your particular audio interface and then in there you can adjust the buffer size the smaller the buffer size the lower the latency but the more it will use your computer's resources so you may want to play around with this a bit and see what's best for your computer another thing you may want to change later on is the sample rate by default i think it's set at 44.1 which is cd quality and this is great for starting out so i recommend sticking with 44.1 for now and then later on if you decide you want to go up you can but 44.1 is cd quality so it's still pretty good and if you don't have a midi controller to set up you can click ok but right now i'm going to show you how to set up your midi controller so you want to click on midi devices and then in this section here which is your midi inputs you want to locate your midi device so mine is the usb axiom 25 you can see it says disabled now if i just double click on this and then click enabled right here now click ok it's now enabled and i can get out of here now by clicking ok and now your hardware is all set up okay so let's create a new project and record some audio into it your screen should look something like this and you can toggle this mixer view at the bottom on and off by going up to view and clicking on mixer and you can see it disappears down there and you can also press ctrl+m on your computer keyboard and that will bring it up and down now let's create a new audio track so you can right click in this area over here and then click on insert new track you could also go up to track and click on insert new track from there or press control and t on your computer keyboard and we now want to arm this track for recording by pressing this red button here and once it's armed for recording you can see some new options appeared so down here you want to select the input that you're going to be recording and i'm recording to input 2 so that's what i'll select there and one thing to keep in mind is if you're recording a microphone or a guitar or bass or some instrument like that it is a mono source because it is only one input don't worry when you export your track you can export it to stereo but when you're recording you want to record to a mono track another one of the options that you're going to want to check is this speaker icon right here when you hover over it you can see mine says record monitoring is on if yours says something else you may want to click on it then it turns it to auto or off and if yours is off where it's not filled in it's just the outline of the speaker you want to make sure it's on that way you can hear what it is you're recording so now i'm going to strum something on my guitar and we can see if i have a signal going in and it looks like i have a nice strong signal going in there if your signal is too hot or too low you want to adjust it by using the knob on your audio interface not by using the slider in the mixer in the software you want to adjust it on the audio interface itself or else you'll still be clipping you're just going to be turning it down if you're using the slider now i'm going to turn on the metronome by clicking here you can see it's on and then when you're ready you just want to hit the record button down here and then you can either press the stop button here or press the space bar on your computer keyboard to stop the recording and when you press stop a little window might pop up asking if you want to delete selected tracks i turn that off on mine so you don't see it pop up on my screen but if it does pop up on yours and you want to turn that off you can just uncheck the on stop box and it won't pop up anymore so that was recording audio into reaper which was pretty simple now if we want we could add an effect to my guitar maybe something like guitar amp sim and you could do that by clicking on this effects icon right here and if you have some third-party vst plug-ins installed on your computer and you don't see them in the window that popped up over here you may need to click on options then go to effects plug-in settings and then go down to vst and in here you can click on edit and then add the folder that has all of your vst plugins into it and once that's done you'll see all of your plugins in here so i'm just going to open up a guitar amp sim this amp line free one and now when i press play you'll hear the guitar going through this guitar amp sim and the cool thing about recording guitar that way is you're not stuck with just one sound you can change the sound later on if you want and if you were to have the mixer view open you would also see the plugin right here so you could click on this to open up the plugin interface or you could also click on the effects here and it's going to open the plugin interface in there and if you were to have more than one effect you would see the list of all the effects that you have on this track in here and you would just click on each one to open up the interface or you could go down here and they would all be listed down here in the mixer view as well all right now let's look at bringing in some outside audio like a loop or a sample so let's create another track you could create a whole new project if you wanted to but i'm just going to create another track and i'll mute this guitar track up here so right click insert new track and then i can just drag and drop audio from a folder so i have a folder here with some loops in it so you just want to drag it and drop it in here and now we have our loop so let's give that a listen it's a pretty straightforward drum loop now what if i wanted to chop this up a little bit so i'm using the wheel on my mouse to zoom in and out i like to zoom in a little bit when i'm doing splits so i'll just split right here we'll say i want to split right there right click and then go to split item at cursor now you can see we have two files here so if i just wanted to loop these two parts together i'll just move this out of the way by clicking and dragging and then if i hold down control on my computer keyboard and click and drag it's going to make a copy of that so then i can drag that there and now we've just looped those two parts let's listen to that now what if we just wanted to leave out the second hit so now we can actually just move this out of the way for now by clicking and dragging if you hover over the edge of the clip you can see that the cursor changes and it looks like this if you click and drag now you've shortened it now we just have this kick part so now let's hold down control on our computer keyboard click and drag click and drag and we'll do this a few times and now let's listen to that and here's what our full loop kind of sounded like so you can really change things up if you wanted to and you'll notice when i'm clicking and dragging that the clip is sticking with the grid it's not letting me go outside of the grid now there's a couple of ways you can get around that if you wanted to go outside of the grid say you wanted to drag this so you just had a little bit not the full length so you could actually hold down shift on your computer keyboard and then when you click and drag it allows you full control of where you're going to drag it to or you could go to this magnet here and that disables the snap and now i can do that i can move the clip wherever i want and i'm not snapped but typically if you're working with loops you will most likely want to leave that snap on and another feature that's kind of hidden in here is the fades so if i hover in the top corner of either side of this clip here you'll see that the cursor changes to this arch looking thing with arrows so now if i click and drag it's creating a fade in and now a fade out and if you right click on that fade you can change the style of it so if you just want it to be a straight line down that's how that fade would be or if you want it to curve like this however you want you can also just drag a clip over another one and you'll see a crossfade appear automatically and you can drag clips down to create new tracks so if you don't have a track already created you can just drag it down and it's going to create a new audio track for you and then this way you can actually layer your loops now before we get into the midi portion of the video i just want to ask if you're enjoying this reaper tutorial and getting some value out of it can you please hit that thumbs up button it really helps my channel out and i appreciate it so much now back into reaper now let's look at working with midi and for this i'm going to right click over in this area over here and then i'm going to click on insert virtual instrument on new track and you can see it brings up all of my vst instruments over here so you would just choose whatever one you want i'm going to choose the free voltage modular synth so i'll double click on that then click add and this synth has multiple outputs that are available and reaper's asking me if i wanted to set up new tracks for all of the multiple outputs i don't want to so i'm going to click no and then i'm just going to select a quick preset here basic arp one and now i'm going to press a key on my midi keyboard to make sure it's working all right so everything's working for me if you're having issues there you may want to go back into your preferences and make sure your midi keyboard is enabled and again if we close down that user interface and you want to bring it back up you would just click on effects here and it brings it up or you could go to the mixer and you can click on the instrument in here and yes this instrument plugin is free i'll be sure to link to it in the description below in case you want to check it out for yourself so once your instruments loaded and you have your patch selected you tested your midi keyboard it's working you're now ready to record some midi in and don't worry if you don't have a midi keyboard i'm going to show you how to work with midi without one right after this so we want to make sure this is armed for recording and you want your monitoring on and then down here we can click the record button and i'm just going to mute this other track so i don't hear it and again you would just hit the spacebar on your computer keyboard or you could press the stop button here and that stops the recording now you can see we have our midi clip here and if we wanted to go in and edit the midi we would just double click on the midi clip and it's going to bring up our piano roll you can click and drag the notes in the timeline if you want you can shorten them by clicking and dragging at the edge just like we did with the audio clips and then down here you can see that you also have velocity information so you can increase the velocity or decrease it however you want you'll also notice that in the actual midi note there's a line in the center and if you hover over it the cursor changes to up and down arrows that's actually controlling the velocity as well so you can click and drag on that to control the velocity there and if you wanted to quantize all your notes you would just press ctrl a to select them all and then you can click on this queue up here and you'll notice that it quantized it i have it set to use the grid and down here the grid set to quarter notes and you can change that however you want you can have it eighth notes and you'll see that they change i like to keep mine at quarter notes that aligns them nicely in the grid and of course you can go in and manually change things however you want if you want to add more notes to this you would just double click in here and you can see a new note was created if you want to get rid of the notes you can either click on it and then press delete on your computer keyboard or you can double click on it again and that gets rid of it so that was recording midi in if you have a midi keyboard now what if you don't have a midi keyboard if you want to add a midi clip without using a midi keyboard you can create your instrument track just like we did before and then you can go up to insert and you want to click on new midi item and now you have a midi clip down here and then you can just double click on it and then here you can just draw in your midi notes so you just double click there's midi note and you'll notice i can't add anything beyond this point right here so if you hover over the edge here you'll see the cursor changes and i can click and drag to make it larger but it ghosts these notes so it copies what i already have in there you'll notice this bar in the center you can click and drag that out of the way now you can continue to add notes however many bars you need and you'll notice that our midi clip is now larger in size out here and we can shorten it if we want just like working with an audio clip you can duplicate them the same just by holding control on your computer keyboard and clicking so now let's say our track's complete we want to save it and we want to share it with our friends or share it on social media or on soundcloud or whatever site you want to share it on you're going to need that in an audio file so what you want to do is go up to file and then you want to go to render and then in here you can click browse to choose where you want to save it to you can also give it a name it is going to show you here what it's going to be called and where it's going to be saved to you can also change the sample rate if you want 44100 is cd quality i recommend leaving it at that as that's what most audio players recognize anyway and you can see the format is here so it's set at wave by default i believe if you wanted to change that to mp3 you would just click the drop down menu choose mp3 you can change the bitrate setting to whatever you want 192 is usually pretty good quality and it keeps the file size small now another thing you may want to note in here is the source which is master mix so that's going to render everything going through your master mix bus right here so you probably want to leave it at that but if you have some other mix you want to use you can click there and change that up if you want and another thing here is the bounds and by default it's set to entire project what i like to do is choose time selection and i'll show you why so in here i usually like to set the time selection by using these because sometimes i have pieces of the song sitting out of the side or i might have a gap at the front because i allow a little bit of space before i start recording so i like to define the time selection in there but of course that can be up to you you may want to leave it at entire project if you want that's fine and then when you're ready you would just click the render one file and you can see it's rendering my audio that's it you now have a song that you can share with your friends post online post wherever you want click up here to check out some free vst plugins or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you like this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this thank you so much for watching for simple green tech i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon

Channel: Audio Tech TV

Views: 148,477

Keywords: reaper, daw, reaper daw, how to use reaper, reaper daw tutorial, how to use reaper daw, reaper daw windows 10, reaper tutorial, how to record in reaper, digital audio workstation, reaper for beginners, how to use reaper for beginners, reaper daw midi, reaper daw recording, recording guitar in reaper, home recording studio, music production software, basics of reaper, audio interface setup, music production pc, reaper windows 10, how to use reaper windows 10, reaper daw tips

Id: EZgHHEkFNIs

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020