I Lost So Much Time In Reaper | Beginner Tutorial

hey guys welcome back to the channel today i want to give you five tips for working in reaper now these are geared towards the beginner if you're just getting started with reaper trying to figure it out i've got some things here that are gonna save you some time they're gonna make your life easier everything is gonna be better it's basically five things i wish i knew when i was starting out that i found out later and i'm like man i lost so much time with these things my name is isaac hernandez i study teach and make music let's get started [Music] so the very first thing i want to show you it's very basic but i legit did not know about this and it's when you're saving your project is to keep everything organized and i'm telling you this is gonna save you so much time so look all you have to do is very very simple right here right you're saving your project make sure that this box is checked on default it won't be so everything is just going to go into the folder that you assign it very simply create sub directory for project now check this out what that's going to do now here is a project that i was working on it's a video on guitar pedals and i've got a bunch of things this one audio clips it's for all the recordings that i made now let me show you all files these in the in the file folder for all my audio stuff these are the render tracks like these are the ones that i was gonna use for the actual video right what happens if i didn't check that box all my project files would be here and i would have literally like 30 more files here what uh reaper does is when you check that box it creates this folder that says audio you could name it different things but it's fine with audio these are the actual project files like you see these these are the wave this is the reaper file and then the uh wav files to match it this is like the actual recording and look you don't you don't want this like look at the name of these things this is what i named the tracks and like all these numbers and time stamps and stuff like that you don't want that in your main folder like could you imagine like okay now i gotta pull my regular my rendered files right the ones that i actually need now trust me on this one guys i didn't know about this for a while and i know it's super simple like one check i just i didn't know i didn't bother to look i just named my files and it must have been like my first like eight months in reaper it was i still have the folders just like a mess of a files and it was terrible so check that box number two is gonna be color coding your tracks when you start getting more into it your projects start getting a little more intricate you wanna start keeping things organized and it's color coding and also you could add icons i'm gonna show you how to do that okay so say that you have a bunch of trucks obviously there are no files here but look what's going to happen i'm going to highlight all of them so here right i select and you can do this one at a time as as it goes out and you go to track color right set tracks to custom color random color to one random color so there are a couple things i like to use this for random colors let's say if you have like four different things right so say i'm gonna use this track maybe for guitar then the next one for vocals the next one for drums and then the last one for bass right let's say it's gonna be that okay no problem and then here another you could take this another uh level set track icon and reaper comes with these like really cool things so you could pick an amp and then boom right you could for vocals so what's cool about this is that you don't have to do this every single time one one cool thing is that you can save this as a template so save tracks as template and look you see i don't have many because i only i literally just use the one and it's pretty much this but like say if i go sample two boom so now every time i can just go into the right and i can insert from a track template and you see a sample too and it's gonna show up from there so you don't have to do the icon thing every single time now this is gonna go right into tip number three which is making track folders and this is another way to organize your project a little more because you can start making this and say that these are all going to be guitar like this is a rhythm guitar right and then um and then the other one is going to be lead guitar right and then maybe you're gonna record um the same rhythm guitar too and it's the same part but maybe you want to start panning left and right and right this is i don't know like lick guitar i don't i don't even know what that is but let's just say you have a bunch right instead of having all your tracks here um what you can do is okay you have a master guitar track here so look you just drag and dock it underneath right and do it right you see that's just gonna put it there and then if i if it when the line shortens see it goes underneath that so i'm gonna take all of these and dock them here now they're part of this like guitar folder you see that that way you can keep everything organized and here i went through this and it was it was painful in the sense that i would have like 15 tracks or like a lot of parts you get samples and stuff like that and what happens is like you're scrolling up and down the whole time then you're moving things back and forth it gets messy that's that's the thing like at the beginning maybe you only have like three tracks four tracks but once you start getting good you start getting more intricate with your projects you want to start you want to be organized and then here for example you can set these to a a random color and look if say you go to attract color set tracks to one random color so they're all going to be the same i mean say this is gonna help this helps me visually because like okay all these green ones now they're all guitar right as opposed to you know like all my vocals like if i have multiple vocal tracks guess what color they're gonna be whatever i assign it to that right if i go underneath here okay boom and then now i go here track color subtract to one random color that would it's it's just all uniform okay turn it to like a yellowish one that's fine but now i know it's all that one color right what other two i know i'm really going into the colors here but i just i really like doing this and you can pick the color if you instead of random you can pick custom it just takes a little more uh time i don't really care about it but if you want to make it like super legit you can do that and tip number four is use the stock plug-ins that come with reaper especially if you're just getting started you don't want to start dropping money left and right there are thousands of paid vsts out there and but reaper comes stock with super powerful plug-ins so take advantage of those especially if you're learning use the free ones to learn okay so one of my favorite plug-ins and i'm gonna put it here on the drum track is eq re eq i think i'm saying that correctly it's a multi-band eq you can always just add bands remove bands but for four seems to do it and um what happens here without getting too much into it the eq here you have some presents like if i select band number one you can do a high pass and stuff like that like that's pretty standard for eqs i can do a whole video on just the eq and if if you would like that please let me know i i'd love to if that's something that you guys want but another one that i like a lot and i'm just gonna keep it here um just for time sake is a compressor one thing that got me at the beginning and i don't know if this matters to you that much it's like the interface i was like wow this looks not so good like like windows 95 and i might have said that before but i don't underestimate it that was the first thing i was like are they really good and then i really got into them come with a bunch of presets but there's nothing like really crazy about this compressor it just it does what it's gonna do it has all the parameters obviously you have to i could do a whole video on the compressor as well and like what all these controls do again if you want to see that let me know i'd love to do it um but it's it's it's legit especially i like i'm not a an expert when it comes to mixing and using all these tools but these i spend no money and i'm learning a lot just from these tools that are free and they have all the parameters that you're gonna find in most compressors and tip number five is freezing your tracks this is something that's very useful when you're using really heavy plug-ins that are draining your cpu so let's say i have a vlc that's like really draining my cpu especially when they start to pack on it can slow down your your computer and your project your workflow so what you do is freeze the track now you right click render freeze track and you do freeze tracks to mono what that's gonna do is gonna render the audio and turn it into a wav file so this is again not the best example because it's it's a wav file to begin with but if you had a sense and it was a midi file it would turn it into a wav file and lock it and it takes your vst offline so that way you're not running it anymore and render that uh that that little clip into a wav file and then so you can still hear it it's processed but it's not being processed at that time so and if you want to tweak it again it's super easy you just go render tracks and unfreeze all tracks you're like okay i want to mess with the effects and it comes back online and it starts using your cpu again so if you have a lot of stuff going on in your project this is gonna save your computer and it's gonna let you keep working at the speed that you need so those are my five tips for beginners if you guys have any questions please leave them in the comments if you would like me to make more videos please let me know in the comments as well don't forget to like and subscribe i'm coming out with these every week and i'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Issac Hernandez

Views: 3,557

Keywords: audio, basics of reaper, beginner, beginner reaper tutorial, cockos reaper, daw, getting started, guitar, home recording, how, how to use reaper daw, reaper daw beginner tutorial, reaper tutorial, recording, recording guitar, recording studio, recording tips, tutorial, how to, reaper daw, issac hernandez

Id: VbyGFV7PeHc

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021