My 5 Favourite Reaper DAW Tricks

hi everybody Adam Steele here and I as you may know I'm a massive fan of Reaper the da W and I'm doing a massive course with pro-mix Academy to tell you everything about it from the very beginning to the very end it's gonna be absolutely huge and today I wanted to show you some things that make me really excited about using Reaper as opposed to other digital audio workstations so here are my five things that really stand out and make it absolutely brilliant for me [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so these are not the basic things these are things that are kind of slightly high detail that make it stand out compared to something like Pro Tools or logic or Cubase something that I really like to use is something called linkable automation so let's say I'm an absolute nut for automation the fact that it's linkable what that means is say I've got delay that's going on on this vocal here it's not the best vocal but it's a vocal of mine so it's what we've got and it'll have to do and so if I hit play here [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so let's have a look at this I've got an EQ on my vocal and I've got a multiband compressor on the same vocal that's quite heavy but let's say that on a particular part of the song I want to push the mid to a little bit but at the same time I want the whole thing to pop out and the DS is going a bit heavy so what I could do is if I look at my multiband compressor and touch the threshold just by clicking it on that middle band where the where the DSO is kicking in if I've got this band here let's say band five on the EQ so if I touch threshold and then got to parameter top parameter modulation a MIDI link I can then link that from a parameter make sure that the baseline value is exactly where it was before and then link that from the req from the gain of band five on that EQ so we need an offset so now what happens is if I go up and down with this EQ you can see how that's really OS going maybe too much so I'm gonna take my scale down and I'm gonna make sure that if I push that the DSR lifts as well so I can do now they're linked if I wiggle that around you see there I'm wiggling the EQ and the compressors changing and what I can do now then is actually show my automation in the track envelope so that's game four band five so let's say on this big note here I wanted to lift the mids a little bit and we'll see that this is now as I hit play changing everything and I've not automated the dis here I've only automated the EQ [Applause] now that makes seem a little superfluous but you can link anything any parameter of any effect on any other channel as well you can really really dig in and you can really start to send things like you can send audio control signals to a plug-in parameter you can have something have an LFO so that it automatically just moves all the time which can be good for things like an hour chorus or a delay having a slight movement you can add all that into any plug-in that didn't have the option of moving things you can now just add that in if I just untick enable there then that's turn off thank goodness one of the things that I like about Reaper is all the shortcuts that it has that essentially borrows a lot of them from different da w's so anything that works really well gets kept good example in logic I know that if you were to record arm a track say this bottom left if I click that and then drag I can record arm on as many tracks as I like all at once with one quick swipe and the guys who make Reaper saw that and thought oh that's good we'll have that and then there are things from Cubase that are also here like folders that's something where they weren't oh we like that we'll have that too so all these shortcuts that you like are all there and that made it feel really familiar to me from day one when I moved from originally I was on mostly Cubase and a little bit Pro Tools I moved over to Reaper I was straight at home because everything seemed to work very quickly if there's a keyboard shortcut that you want there isn't there you can assign them so let's say something that I like to do a lot is if I select a few files I can press a shortcut that that becomes the time selection and that can be really powerful for either exporting a little bit of audio or doing what if you would do with time selection I went into actions and show action list now if I was to right-click on the top bar here I could set selection to items that's what I would have had to do originally was click on that bar but I do not so much I wanted a shortcut so in the actions menu if I go set selection that starting to whittle it down to ie terms and that should be in there there it is set set time selection two items at the bottom and I added a shortcut shift and zet which then the next thing that I did which I borrowed from Cubase as well was how was it yes remove contents of selection moving later items if I'm doing post-production on something like an audiobook I'll quite often want to do a thing that's like ripple delete in Premiere where if you delete it everything that's to the right of that then shoves across so you've really quickly kind of closed the gap without having to select everything and move it and move all your automation there I can just basically put a little section in the graveyard as if it never existed and everything then shifts over automation audio the lot and so for that I was it called remove contents of selection I added a shortcut Alton's ed for that and you can do that for anything that you find in this massive action list there are thousands of actions in here that you can do that will for whatever you're doing be relevant and you might want to put them on keyboard shortcuts and you can just add them if you've got a MIDI controller hooked up you can add them as a MIDI CC control or a MIDI button you can add special shortcuts you can do all sorts of clever things just using that another thing that saves me loads of time is being able to export render bounce what if you want to call it loads of different files sections even different projects all in one big go something that saves me hours I'm a very busy man and I don't have time to be going right well I need this song but I need these files but I need to do have an mp3 version else so they need this song so I need to come back know the render queue saves me hour of time so what I can do is if I go to file and open render queue this gives me a queue here so if I go to if I close that down I can go to file and render and I can choose to make master mix or stems if I've got things selected name them using the wild-card format choose my output format there and then add when I'm done with everything set up to the render queue and then when that's done I can add project regions I can open a whole different project and then add them to the render queue when I'm done I can then open the render queue and hit render all and I can go off and make a coffee talk to a client reply to emails do whatever I've got to do and it will give me all those files without me having to constantly be vigilant and monitor it and it can save me loads and loads and loads of time and that's absolutely massive for me efficiency is everything in my world last but not least I like to be able to see exactly what frequencies are happening on a track at any one time and that's something that's relatively new in Reaper and that's spectral waveforms if I look at this vocal for instance I can see a blue bit here that's sibilance I can see dark bits there lower end so I'll bet you if I play this back that little bit there's gonna be a sound so that fast that's on the first was that blue bit there and I could see that and that saved me loads of time if I'm looking for siblings if I'm looking for low-end Rumble if I'm looking for anything in particular that saves me tons and tons of time I know that's a base without looking even the name of the track because the color of it tells me that that's full of low-end and that's something where if I go to view and if I got two peaks display settings I just change it from your regular Peaks where it looks boring to spectral Peaks and that might take a little time to make me a new set of peak files if it's not already selected by default but that really really helps meet work everything out and if there's something to do with the colors that you don't particularly like I'll go back to that menu I can change how much they change in terms of brightness I can change whether it detects something is just noise I can even rotate the color spectrum around a little bit so that if it wasn't a particular color set that worked for me I can make it work and that then is very very useful so I hope you found this really interesting if you've not checked out Reaper in-depth before please do I've done the ultimate Reaper course with pro-mix Academy the link is in the description below really really really check that out because it's something that I've spent months of my life on and it's hopefully the most in-depth Reaper tutorial you are going to find anywhere and it will give you everything from the absolute basics of how to make a project and hit record right the way through to some of these rather advanced tricks right here and there's all sorts of stuff going on that will help you become better at your craft so check that out thanks for watching I'm Adam Steele for hot Pole studios and I'll see you in the next video goodbye thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this feel free to check out our other videos as you can find here or check out our Facebook and Twitter or our patreon page which helps us to make more videos like this thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Hop Pole Studios

Views: 39,235

Keywords: reaper daw, spectral peaks, parameter modulation

Id: o8vO84DzMoQ

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020