REAPER 5 - Getting Started in REAPER // Setup, Loops, Editing, Recording Audio, MIDI

hey everyone this is music tech help guy in this video I'll show you how to get started in Reaper 5 for this video I'm using version 5.98 4 and I'm working in Mac OS but I'll mention Windows specific shortcuts and I'll try to mention some other windows specific things as well along the way so if you're a Windows user you should be able to follow along just fine so in this video specifically I'll demonstrate how to set up an audio interface or a built-in microphone and built-in output how to navigate Reaper using the transport controls zoom controls and just generally how to get around in Reaper how to use tracks to work with audio loops so importing them editing them and syncing them to tempo how to record audio using an audio interface and a microphone and also an introduction to working with MIDI and virtual instruments so keep in mind that everything in this video is really basic and I'll dive into some deeper topics in later videos in this series now Reapers popularity seems to really be growing because people who are new to recording find that it's a very affordable digital audio workstation or da W or da for short and it has a long 60 day trial period others who have experience with other DAWs have decided to make a switch because of how well Reaper runs and how it doesn't bog down your computer with unnecessary features Reaper does exactly what it's supposed to do without any unnecessary whistles and bells and it does it really well so to get started you need to set up your audio input and output device to do this go up to Reaper preferences and then go to audio device in the menu now if you're working on a PC you won't see this Reaper tab here so you'll have to go over to options go down to the bottom of the menu and you'll see preferences so right here under audio device you can see that I'm using a Scarlett solo USB audio interface this is from Focusrite it's a really cheap one it's a little over a hundred dollars now your audio interface is important for recording because it handles your input information and your output information so input being things like plugging a microphone into it plugging aide di instrument into it like guitar or bass or keyboards and output being able to send the signal out to speakers or headphones and having a built-in volume control so I highly recommend that you get an audio interface if you don't have one and you're looking at getting into audio recording for really any reason now if you're trying to use the built-in microphone on your computer and use the built-in output what you're gonna want to do is click this allow use of different input and output devices and then what you'll do is for the input device you'll select your computer's built-in microphone and then you'll select the built-in output which is just the main speakers on your computer or if you plug headphones in it'll switch to headphones now if you're a Mac user there's one really important thing you have to remember to do even before you open up Reaper go up to the Apple icon go down to System Preferences and from here go to security and privacy and then under the privacy tab go to microphone and make sure that you've given Reaper access to your microphone if you don't do this you won't be able to get any signal when you're trying to record either with your built-in mic or an external mic with an audio interface now if you're a Windows user you may need to download a separate driver to get your audio interface to properly communicate with Reaper this can be a driver included with your audio interface from the company that made your audio interface or a third-party driver that's universal like ASIO for all you can get this at ASIO for all Org so make sure you install your device driver a for launching Reaper your Windows device panel will look a little different than the Mac panel if you're using an audio interface your setup might look something like this but it'll vary from device to device if you have more than two inputs and outputs on your audio interface you'll want to set the first and last input and output on the device here to make sure that all of your available input and outputs show up in Reaper next I'll show you how to navigate Reaper as well as how to work with loops so I have a drum loop here I'll just drag this right into the timeline in Reaper and this will automatically create a new track for us to playback the loop can use Reapers built-in transport controls here or better yet you can memorize a few basic shortcuts for these to play you can press spacebar or Enter or return on a Mac and then you can press spacebar again or return or enter again to stop the difference is that when you use spacebar this starts and stops playback and you'll see that the playhead returns to the beginning or it returns to wherever it started so you can click anywhere up here on the ruler for the timeline and you can set the start point for the playback of the audio and then when I press spacebar again the playhead goes back to the starting point if you use return for this instead the playhead will move forward so this is a pause control rather than a stop control you can also set the playhead back to the beginning by pressing W so this makes it really easy to jump back to the beginning of the project no matter where the playhead is set you can drag over the ruler up here to create a selection with these locators up here and you can click here to toggle the repeat function or loop function and it'll loop the area between the locators continuously you can also use the shortcut R on your keyboard to toggle this so I'll set my locators to a range of exactly eight bars so you can see right here this says eight point one point zero zero so this is the eighth measure or eighth bar of the session and you can see it's split up into four beats we'll talk more about the grid and editing to the grid in a later video but you can see that the loop does not match up exactly with the tempo of the project I actually got this loop from splice comm and the loop actually gives you some information about the loop just and the file name the 140 is actually referring to the tempo of the loop so if you come down here you'll see that the beats per minute or BPM of the project is only a hundred and twenty so you would think that if I change the tempo to 140 that the loop would now perfectly conform to that eight bar selection but it doesn't in Reaper audio regions will automatically conform to any tempo changes you make it to the project so this loop right now is actually gonna playback faster now there is a workaround for this so I'll double click and I'll set this back to 120 bpm and what you have to do is right click on the track header go down to track time base and change the time base to time in short the time base controls how a track conforms its information to timing references so if I use the project time base it's going to stretch and compress as I change the tempo if I set this to time it's no longer going to conform to those tempo changes so now I can go back here and double click on this and change the tempo to 140 and you'll see now the loop perfectly conforms to an 8 bar loop now right now I can see the entire loop here in my view another important feature to know in Reaper is how to zoom the content within your project so down to the bottom right corner here there's a horizontal zoom right here and then there's vertical zoom right here however it's kind of a pain to have to use your mouse to zoom in and zoom out so there's a few really helpful shortcuts to remember for this so horizontal zoom is the minus sign and plus sign on your keyboard that's your horizontal zoom and then vertical zoom is page up and page down I have a small keyboard without page up and page down on it so I can't demonstrate that here however if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel you can scroll up and down for horizontal zoom and then you can hold command and scroll on a Mac to vertical zoom and you can hold ctrl and scroll on a PC to do the same thing and you can also manually adjust the height track right here so let's say that you want the loop to conform to your project tempo rather than the project conforming to the loop tempo let me just change the tempo to 130 bpm so just to touch slower and you'll see that the length of the loop is a little short and repr there's a built-in trim tool if you hover over the left or right side of any audio region and you can click and drag to trim in or trim out and if you go further than the duration of the loop or the audio region it'll automatically loop the loop so you'll see like a joining point right here also you'll notice that when I use this trim tool it snaps the edits to the grid you can actually turn off your grid snap right here or you can use option S on a Mac or alt s on a PC to toggle this so then you can edit freely on the grid without snapping to anything so this next thing I'm going to show you I do want the Edit to snap to the grid so I've got my grid snap turned back on if you hold option or Alt on a PC while you trim this will actually allow you to time expand or compress and this works with any audio region so what I can do is stretch this loop out to be exactly 8 bars long at a hundred and thirty bpm even though the tempo of the original loop was 140 bpm and now you can hear that the loop is playing back a bit slower one thing to note too is that you can see here that the track is clipping so you can click on that clip light to get rid of it but what I'm gonna do is go down to my mixer and pull down the level of my drum loop to keep it from clipping and also to keep the master output from clipping as well so for each track you have up here in the main window you'll see a corresponding channel strip down here in the mixer and then all of your channel strips the sum of all of those channel strips go to the master output or master fader here you can also press command M on a Mac or ctrl M on a PC to toggle the mixer now let's say that I only want to use half of this drum loop maybe I want to get rid of everything from bar five all the way or at a bar eight well I can use that integrated trim tool again to trim off the back four measures of the loop and now I just have a four bar loop to work with and if I want to repeat this I can click and drag while holding command to duplicate the region you'd hold control on a PC to do the same thing I have another loop here I'll pull in it's just a keyboard loop and let's see what this sounds like it's obviously not at the same tempo so it's probably not gonna sound too great yeah so they don't match up at all so I could do two things here one I could hold option and drag this out to eight bars and make it slower and match it up at the tempo of the project or I could make this a shorter four bar loop so I'll pull this in to be exactly four bars long I think it sounds better as an 8 bar loop so I'll go ahead and pull that back out to 8 bars so it sounds like the keyboard loop is a bit out of time and a couple of these notes here now there is a way to correct this with stretch markers which I'll demonstrate in a later video but another way to fix this is to simply replace these first two repetitions with the third repetition here which is in time so a way to separate your audio region without using the trim tool is you can just press s and this will separate the region wherever you place the playhead so then what I'll do is I'll place the playhead here as well select the region and then click s again to separate then what I'll do is I'll just simply duplicate these over by holding command while moving them like I showed you before and now I have three repetitions of the same part of the loop and then the ending part of the loop [Music] when you have more than one track in your project you may want to mute or solo a channel so that you don't hear it or that you only hear it so I can press the M button here to mute a channel or I can press the s button to solo a channel Reaper makes it incredibly easy to transpose audio regions so let's say that I want my keyboard loop here to be in a different key so what I can do is click on the first one click on the last audio region while holding shift just to select them all and there's a quick shortcut for this shift 9 will transpose the audio region down in semitones so you can see here it says pitch -5 so it's being transposed down a perfect fourth which is 5 semitones and if I press shift 0 it'll transpose it up in semitones so here I am pitch shifting it up a minor third which is 3 semitones so the cool thing about using loops from splice is not only do they tell you the tempo of the loop they also tell you the original key of the loop so you can see here that this is an F minor I want this to be an E flat minor so what I'll do is transpose this down one half-step to go to E and then one more half-step to go to E flat [Music] by the way I'm actually a splice affiliate so if you want to check out splice and sign up for an account there you can use my affiliate link below and any purchases you make there I'll actually get a kickback and it helps support the channel now before I go any further I want to save my project so I'll just press command S and this will pull up the save dialog so you can give this a name up here I'll just call this first reaper project and I'll put this on the desktop but what's really important here is there's two options here that I always use the first is create sub directory for project what this does is it creates a separate folder with all of the included files for your project in a single folder rather than creating just a single file to store everything next I always click the copy all media to project directory this is important because it makes a copy of all of the audio files that you drag into your project if you don't use this option and you move from one computer over to another computer or maybe you relocated your loops and samples library your audio files won't show up in your project so I always make sure to check this next up I'll show you how to record a audio with a microphone this also works for DI instruments like electric guitar electric bass and keyboards so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new track so you can do that by either clicking track up here and clicking insert new track or by pressing command T on a Mac or ctrl T on Windows you can also do this just by simply double clicking down here I'll double click right here to give it a name I'm actually gonna record acoustic guitar and then next you have to set the input for the channel so you can do that right here right now it says input 1 but if you had your microphone plugged into a different channel like input 2 you would select that here keep in mind any time you're using just one microphone this is a mono recording you don't want to use stereo unless you're actually recording with two microphones so I'll just set this to input 1 and then you can click here to arm the track for recording and you'll see signal coming through the channel that's actually me just talking right now and then if you actually want to hear the channel while it's recording you have to click here to turn on input monitoring so now I can hear myself speaking through the microphone just make sure you use headphones while you record otherwise you'll get a pretty nasty feedback loop typically what I like to do is give myself a measure or two at the beginning of the project before I have to start recording so I'll just hit command a to select all and I'll move everything over to start at measure 3 rather than measure 1 so this will give me two measures of time to prepare myself before I start recording you also want to turn on your metronome right here so you can keep yourself in time while your record when you're ready to record just press command R on a Mac or ctrl R on a PC to start recording [Music] [Music] after recording this dialogue will pop up and you can click save all to save the recording I'll try a second identical guitar part to double up the recording [Music] [Music] all right so I'll separate both of these by pressing s so I'll just delete this XS on the front end and you can do the same for the back end so just separate these and then delete all this extra here now in addition to a built-in trim tool on the end of each region there's also a built-in fade tool so I can add a bit of a quick fade-out on the back end of these and to fade in on the front end of these and this will get rid of any extraneous background noise at the front end and the tail end of these regions now what I like to do with doubled recordings like this is I like to hard pan them left and right for a bit of a stereo effect so for the first guitar I'll pan this hard left and for the second guitar I'll pan this hard right you don't have to do it a hundred percent you could do it like you know know maybe 80% so I'll do 80% left 80% right [Music] sister recordings really dry and really basic right now we'll talk about adding effects and enhancing recordings later but let's give this a listen with everything in next I'll give you a really basic introduction to working with MIDI and using virtual instruments sometimes called software instruments or software synthesizers so first I'll create a track I'll go up to track and I'm gonna use this option here that says insert virtual instrument on new track then this dialog will pop up and it's asking you what virtual instrument you want to use now unlike some da w's reaper doesn't come with a bunch of stock instruments there is one it's called the Reese synth but it's really basic and I don't want to use it for this project however there is a plethora of free VST instruments out there and obviously some for purchase as well one free one that I found that's pretty cool is called cheese machine - it sounds really cheesy but it's actually a really nice string instrument now I'm playing those sounds from USB MIDI controller a MIDI controller is generally a keyboard device that can send MIDI information into your DAW usually over USB I'm using a Novation launch key 25 so it's a pretty small MIDI controller and it's pretty cheap as well but in order to do this you're gonna have to set up your MIDI controller so I'm gonna close this window out I'm gonna go up to the Reaper preferences again and instead of audio device I'm gonna go to MIDI devices so this shows all of your MIDI input and output devices I need to make sure that my launch key is enabled as a MIDI input device and the way you do that is you just right-click and then choose an able input so I enabled the input for both of these launch key devices here then on your track like we chose an audio input before we have to choose a MIDI input so you'll just click here go down to MIDI and you can either choose all MIDI inputs or you can choose a specific MIDI device so this is helpful if you have multiple MIDI controllers hooked up to a single computer and then with the track armed you should be able to play your MIDI controller and hear back sound from your VST instrument and then you just record like you normally would I'm gonna use these strings sort of like a bass instrument [Music] now when you work with MIDI you're not recording audio regions like you would have the microphone you're recording musical control data so a MIDI region will look a little different than an audio region the cool thing about this is because it's just musical information you can double click on a MIDI region to open it up in the integrated MIDI editor and you can see each of the notes that you recorded with your MIDI controller now you can see just from looking at the front end of each of these notes that the notes are a little out of time I played a little ahead of the grid so it's really easy to quantize your MIDI recordings to set them in time quantization will correct timing issues typically at the front end of notes but Reaper can also do this at the back end at the tail end of notes so this is really easy to do down at the bottom of the MIDI editor set a grid value that you want to quantize to I'm gonna set quarter note so all you have to do now is right click and drag over all of the notes that you want to quantize if their notes aren't already selected and then press Q and this will pull up the quantize events dialog and it'll also automatically quantize all of the MIDI notes so you can see that the front and back end of each of these notes is quantized to the grid so the reason why it's quantizing to the grid is because the settings are set to use grid now in a future video I'll talk about manually quantizing notes and all of reaper's other MIDI functions and quantization functions but for now to keep it simple I'll just choose use grid I also have this set to quantize the position of notes and the note length so if I set this to just position you'll see that the tail end of the notes is not quantized so I'll set this back to position and note length and then just hit OK [Music] let's say that I want to loop out my whole musical arrangement one more time so what I'll do is just hit command a to select all or control a on a PC then I'll hold command while I drag these over and duplicate this whole selection one time starting right here at measure 11 so now this will play continuously and repeat itself once so I've built out just a really basic musical arrangement now let's say that I want to export this whole thing as an audio file so I can listen to it outside of Reaper so what I typically like to do is make a selection with the locators and this selection is going to define the range that I want to export so to export just go up to file render or you can press option command R on a Mac or option control R on a PC where it says bounds here make sure you choose time selection because this will use the locator range as the export range then you can give this a name I'll call this Reaper demo 1 you can choose where you want it to be saved to so I'm just gonna choose the desktop and then you can choose a sample rate you can choose your output format I'll choose wave you can choose your bit depth right here and then click render 1 file after it's done rendering I'll just click show and finder and this will open up the window that the wav file was rendered to so that's how to get started in Reaper 5 keep in mind that everything I demonstrated in this video is pretty basic and in future videos I'll show you more recording editing and MIDI functions so subscribe to the channel to see more of these videos and if you'd like to follow me on social media you can check me out on Facebook Twitter Instagram and if you'd like to make any monthly contribution to the channel you can also check me out at patreon.com ford slash music tech help guide thanks to the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 83,192

Keywords: reaper, daw, musictechhelpguy, getting started, tutorial, reaper tutorial, loops, audio, recording, midi

Id: dme3Kr4lMRE

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019