Reaper Actions you need in your MIDI Toolbar (746 Sub Special!)

hey how's it going today i wanted to show you my midi toolbar now by default your midi toolbar has some items on it which we will talk about but i'm going to show you some essential actions that i need on my toolbar and i think you would enjoy a lot of them as well if i switch to my non-default reaper this is what it looks like so i have tons of actions on my toolbar and some pretty nice looking icons if i may say so myself so let's have a quick tour of the actions here let's start from the left from my defaults this is my piano roll and if i hit it the notes here change into a keyboard if i'm editing drums or something i can switch to this mode where it doesn't have white keys and black keys well the black keys are slightly darker but the point is that if i named my notes they will show up right here and the last window here is events list and that's this one and the event list is basically the same thing as the midi editor except that it's in this format so any note any like cc event anything that occurs are all in one place i can still select a lot of them i can adjust values from here and the last one is musical notation where we get to notation workflow you can also access this if you press option 1 for piano roll option 2 for the named notes option 3 for events list option 4 for notation so ultimately you can also go ahead and take that out if you know those hotkeys or alternatively reassign those hotkeys those are free hotkeys because how often am i pressing these i don't really need a hotkey for them an option and one i can use to do something else the next three are just how the notes are displayed so right now the notes are displayed with squares and squares tell me the start time and they tell me the end time next up is the triangle view and triangle view just puts a triangle on the onset of the note and nothing else so if you're you know editing drums you don't really care about the duration because usually there's a sample loaded on there and it just plays the sample so all you need to know is where the start time is and i guess the triangle view is better for some people because the diamond falls on two sides of the grid so when you're really zoomed out it's kind of hard to see but as i zoom out it's slightly easier to see it with the triangle view i don't really use the triangle view if you have a use for triangle view let us know in the comments and again these are accessible by option five to seven so option five takes you to square view option six triangle option seven is the diamonds next we got the filter and that opens the filter midi events window which i already covered in a tutorial so link for that goes up there you can also press f to access the same window so again this is something in your toolbar that you can eventually get rid of next is the track list and that's this stuff right here again i covered this before so i'll just link to that but from here i can switch between my different midi instruments i can superimpose them on here so right now i'm seeing them played over here if i want i can get rid of them and just see what i want to see or i can command shift click to just exclusively see one of them i can also switch to them so now i'm editing the piano next up is the quantize menu to show you how that works real quick let me record something [Music] all right something like this um i was way late because right now i'm monitoring through obs for this tutorial usually i'm not this horrific at being in time but you know because we're humans we'll always be slightly out of time if we're playing live and stuff like that so we can try and quantize this i'm gonna set a loop for this let's zoom to it as well and now when i press the q you can already see that something happened but don't worry about that i'm gonna change it to eights because eights was like the smallest value that we played so with quantizations you can you can just use the grid and you can just snap them to grid if you want or you can set manual mode and you get a little more control so i want selected notes i want their positions you can also set position and note length position and note end only no length or only note end as well let's just use uh position and note length and yeah i want to be in eights strength tells you how much quantization is needed so you know sixty percent doesn't fully correct them so zero percent this is how i played it at fifty percent whatever we were off from the grid it would only correct it to half that amount and not full amount so if i was one you know 64th away from the grid then it would only correct it to 1 128 to the grid did that make sense i think that made sense and then 100 is full quantization as you're adjusting your quantization settings these notes will move around but don't worry you don't need to command and see anything because if i hit cancel they'll go back to how they were if i hit it again they will come back to where they were i can always press ok and even that doesn't commit it you actually need to say commit to commit these notes so let's hit ok let's listen to it [Music] yeah that makes sense i can then commit these changes and hit okay and now they are quantized so that's quantization next option is super useful chase midi note ons in project playback right now it's on so let me turn it off and show you if i turn that off and i play this note it didn't play this note it started playing from this note because our cursor started from here and the midi note on message that we're sending through this note this c is all the way back here you won't hear a sound if you do want to hear a sound you just hit it and now again i this was my first mini tutorial so please check that out as well where i explain in more detail also explain why this is not a default setting because i know a lot of people struggle with this like why does my note not play why do i have to go all the way back to the note start well there's a reason for that and the reason is as old as midi itself next is cc selection follows note selection so for that let me go to another lane let's say i made this pitch bend by default when this is off i select the notes only the notes get selected if i delete those notes nothing happens to the midi cc amount if i have this on when i make a selection the cc events corresponding to that note will also be selected and then if i delete them those will be deleted as well so you know if you're working with like live improvisation of midi where you used a lot of cc and pitch and mod wheel and things like that um you should have this on because you know if you're if you're for example quantizing them you want whatever cc events that occur to also be quantized next is whether you want to show grid or not you can also hit option g for it or you know again reassign option g and this is the snap which same as the main editor option and s turns it on and off next up is step sequencing use all midi inputs for step recording so i hit that on [Music] i'm just playing my keyboard and i can use this as my step input you can just really quickly use your midi keyboard to write some notes next is to dock the editors i can basically full screen this then put it back where it was in case i need it it's very useful so full screen when it's off it's docked when it's on next is zoom to content so i selected this clip i can go and zoom to its content next is hide unused note rows and for that let me go back to my piano so i got this very simple melody here and if i go hide unused note rows i will only see the notes that were in this so if you you know if you worked in ableton this will come very familiar to you if i want to go back to showing all note rows i just hit this other option view show all note rows and then if your notes are named and i may not actually want to hide unused note rows because some of those note rows have notes on them that i haven't used yet but they are part of my drum so then i have this other command called view hide unused and unnamed note rows and if i turn that on it will basically only show me the names that are either used or named so while i haven't programmed anything for my right edge it will show and when i'm editing drums i use this and next is toggling the metronome i can always toggle metronome here but in case i'm full screen i can also toggle my metronome from here as well so [Music] like that next is four select notes into key signature and for that let me once again select my piano so right now i have a piano line and it's written in a flat minor so i can just select these notes and then i can go down here to key snap hit it and let's say i want to force this to be into c major so if i hit it it will now only use the notes that were in c major this is save notes and cc names to file so you know in case you named your midi drums or something like that you can always save it through here this is something i covered before so i'll just put a link to that up there as well next up is sws fng show only used cc lanes so i have a midi clip right here and if i hit this it will show me all the lanes that it has any cc information on it so they always have velocity but this one has like pitch bend and mod wheel as well so i can then quickly kind of maybe add some extra pitch bends to it next command is joint selected overlapping and consecutive notes so i'll show you how that works and i'm going to get into step input and let's write a simple chord progression let's do c minor a flat major inverted and let's play an f finish with a g major right say i got a chord progression like this some of these notes have some notes in common right so these two first notes for both of the first two chords are the same then the highest note of my second chord is the same as this so i can select all of these and hit this and now basically the ones that were the same are now one midi note so basically one note on goes for two measures then this keeps going next is the midi randomization tool so let's go to our drums what i can do for example is create some fun kind of drum patterns with the midi randomization tool when i'm feeling really uninspired or something i can let randomness inspire me a little bit so i can select all these notes i can choose the lokasena midi randomization tool and we'll get this window and it says for each selected midi notes let's reduce the chance that these notes will play so only 64 percent of the notes will play the others will be muted so it's always undoable there's also an undo button here for drums chance to transpose is a little weird but let's give it a 5 chance of transposing as well and i can hit go now we get like a new pattern let's hear it maybe even reduce this go one more time so hopefully you'll have your own uses for this it's also useful for sound design when i feel really uninspired when i'm making music i always kind of throw some randomization in the mix next up is the create scale the use for this is pretty niche somebody once on the forums asked me how to only see notes from a certain scale so i actually don't use this but i created this kind of in a pinch so what i can do is i can hit a note let's select the scale like c pentatonic and then when i go create scale it duplicates the notes up and down for the notes in this scale and then i can kind of duplicate it up and down a few octaves and then i go hide unused note rows and now i'm only seeing notes that are in this key of c pentatonic [Music] like that so if you don't know music theory this could be a really useful tool for you this custom action is available on my blog post as well as my entire midi toolbar which you can download if you want i'll put the link to that in the description as well so next up let's go back to our drums and we have the archie midi editor set velocity selected notes user input so basically say i got a bunch of notes here and say i like the sample of my snare edge when it's at 100 so i can just select the notes i can hit this and then i can set them all to a number that i said next is a way of selecting notes diatonically so let's come back to where we had our only c pentatonic scale and i want to write a melody like this let's hear it and then i can adjust them diatonically so i can use the script lokasana duplicate selected notes diatonically i hit it and then i can go up or down as many degrees as i want so let's do a third and i hit go and now and then i can keep going as well i can maybe let's go one more time up a third so really good for harmonizing melodies and things like that usually i'm really bad at kind of making vocal harmonies so when i write a vocal melody i play it with something then i can just come here and play around with what harmonies work best for it so like what about upper fifth it's pentatonic so everything sounds good together but with other scales you got you know there's a little experimentation to be done so really useful script duplicate selected midi notes diatonically next up is the script archie midi editor show instrument and if i hit that it will show me the plugin that's associated with the midi window i'm editing so this is really useful if you want to do kind of edits on the fly let's say you're in full screen mode and you're playing this you feel like it's too bright or something you can just quickly hit this so i can just adjust it a little bit hit escape and then super useful command as well called archie midi editor show instrument next is the chord gun now chord gun is cool i will link to a video by kenny joya that explains this in detail but essentially a chord gun you select a scale so let's stick to our c pentatonic i can press one to five to hear the notes like this i can also just click and hear any notes i can shift click on any note and it will be inserted in my timeline based on my grid size so let's set our grid size to one bring our thing here i'm going to select this and then i can go let's go c e let's go at g sus4 resolve it to g a minor seven and now it's writing all these chords for me uh super useful tool if you don't know music theory next up is this really useful script lokasana midi note selector let's say i have these hi hat notes and they're just playing like this all the same velocity i can come here and i can for example select every second note or every third note or every fourth note or whatever so let's select you know every second note and you know do you want to start with the first note or the second note let's start with the second note and i hit go and now it selects only the second note from the passage that we chose so i can then kind of create an accent like this so now now it's a pattern like this i can even create more variation on this or maybe let's select every fourth note starting with the first one and then slightly bring up their velocity and then from here i can then humanize adjusting the velocities just a little bit create kind of a very human sounding hi-hat pattern super useful lokasana midi note selector next is show tempo and time signature markers so right now it's off if i hit on you can see that the time signature markers that i have on my project are shown here as well this is useful to have on and finally is to open midi toolbar 5 and my midi 2 bar 5 is a very simple midi toolbar it has numbers 1 to 16 and each of them is set channel for new events so again i explained this in another video i'll link that up there any kind of extra toolbars that you have you can put them up in your main toolbar and then this is your kind of command center so these are some commands that i find really useful for different applications what i highly suggest you to do is to go to your actions list from up here in section go to midi editor and look at all these actions and some of these actions you know are more appropriate to use hotkeys with some of them are more appropriate to put in your toolbar some of them are useless but whatever like go through them and see what works for you because these were just the ones that i find useful or i thought that you would find useful so default cc shapes if you're you know doing a lot of cc work or other commands that you may want or you can put a whole transport bar in your midi window if you want or you may want your grid values all in your midi toolbar or in a secondary midi toolbar which you can pull up you can download my custom actions and midi toolbars and things like that in my blog post and i think this concludes our tour of the media editing window again if you think that reaper's midi editor window is very bare bones there's just a ton that you can add here and there's a ton from the defaults that you can remove if you learn the hotkeys and so on and a very special thanks to my first 746 subscribers glad you all are here hope we'll get to a thousand very soon so i can make some money if you do want to support me i do have a buy me a coffee.com link where you can honestly you know just go and throw me one dollar two dollars if you can and help me out a lot you can always download a bunch of my stuff for free this will always be for free but you know if you want to help me out i would really appreciate it thank you bye-bye

Channel: IDDQD Sound

Views: 2,363

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: reaper tutorial, reaper tips, reaper toolbar, reaper toolbar docker, reaper midi editor, reaper midi drums, subscriber special, reaper midi toolbar, reaper custom actions, reaper sws actions, reaper custom toolbar, reaper custom midi toolbar, reaper midi actions, reaper midi chase, reaper midi quantize, reaper midi quantize doesnt work, reaper randomize midi notes, reaper midi randomizer, reaper plugins, reaper midi tips, reaper midi editor tips, actions, MIDI Toolbar

Id: NnnBNTQLQKs

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/iamhelltothee]

I found this super useful. Thank you very much for sharing.