Reaper DAW 101 Part 6:- Control Surfaces, OSC and Web Remote

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen Adam Steele from hot Pole Studios here welcome back to the repo tutorial series we've been talking about how to use the basics of Reaper and now we're getting a little bit technical and a bit funky so today is all about talking to Reaper remotely using things like dedicated control surfaces iPhones iPads even separate laptops there's so much you can do to work with this as a remote unit so today we're going to check that out [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so first remote control surfaces like seals flying faders that kind of thing I'm not going to talk about them too much because that's the kind of thing that I don't tend to use if you've got something like a Maki a control unit or something like one of the old m-audio are Pro Tools flying fade of things that uses the h UI protocol then Reaper will work with those and there's a very simple way of setting that up we go to options and preferences and this is where we're going to spend a lot of our time today is at the very bottom of these settings there is a button that's control OSC web now this starts out blank because we're not being controlled externally by anything which then gives you the choice to tell it exactly what you want to do if I click the Add button that comes up with this with control surface mode and we get to choose what type of control we're going to use so quickly the behringer BCF is the Barringer fader unit you literally just like that it's got MIDI in and output which quite often come up as USB MIDI in and out you choose them and you hit OK and that will then work and control your tracks same with the front here alpha track you choose the MIDI the HU ie which is the Pro Tools control old standard then there's the Mackie control Universal which has MIDI input and output and if you've got several of them you can then choose the maquis control extender for the rest of them I know things like the tascam us 2400 which is something I wanted for a long time when I was younger that's got 24 faders so that's 8 faders for the universal then 2 separate Mackie control extenders all kind of tied together into one big unit and they're pretty funking you just choose which same with the presonus faderport you choose which midi channels it's working on even if you've got an old Yamaha or 1x using as a surface for those kind of MIDI controls for volume that kind of thing you just choose those MIDI inputs and outputs here okay and go into the main window of Reaper and you should be pretty much good to go you change banks on your faders for the first eight tracks the next eight tracks the next eight tracks and that's nice and simple and that's done however I find personally I think that's a little bit outdated and is quite restrictive whereas what I do is a little bit more modern and this is where we get into it so the first thing we're going to talk about now is OSC open sound control OSC is in the control world the thing that's replacing midi midi is still useful for things like keyboards and virtual drums that kind of thing oscy is kind of the future for control surfaces because it can do loads and loads of different messages all at once so you can be tweaking things that they don't get in each other's way it's easier to program you can send all sorts of stuff like vu meters track names all sorts of stuff with minimal headache in terms of trying to make specific implementations like all those different things I mentioned before with the different MIDI for different devices and different setups with our FC that's all gone you can just make that nice and easy so for oh I see you have one device that is listening which in this case is reaper and you have one device that's being controlled and in this case I'm going to use my ipod and there's an app that I use I'm gonna get the screen recording going here there's an app that I use called touch OSC touch OSC so the first thing we need to do is set this up so if we go mode so the first thing we have to do is have a device name so in this case I'm just gonna call it iPad if I change the mode to configure device IP and local port then I get to see all the different port numbers and the IPS and all this is the IP is basically like a phone number so the iPad has one the anything that's connected to a network has an IP address and what we need to do if I click the OSC on the iPad is I need to make sure that the numbers here line up with the numbers here so I'm gonna change the device port which is usually 9000 by default to nine thousand five and a local port to eight thousand five just because that's the same as what I've got on this iPad if you've got if you want on here instead you can do so the local IP address on here is what we want to put in device IP so we're going to literally copy this down 192.168.0 0.37 and the local IP here is what we need to change here which is point not point two seven now if you're on a network where you can set static IPS you only have to do this once and then you can set that so that that's now working so I know this is a bit of a messing about what if I hit OK we can now hit listen and then if we hit done here I can press buttons on the iPad and touch osc and we can see that all coming up in the listen which means I know it's working at least going that way which if all the connections are right means it should all work going this way so if I what we want to do now is go back into the settings here and change the layout because there are different layouts and the one that I tend to like with Reaper and iPads is a layout called logic pad which also works with logic funnily enough whereas logic touch is the one that you probably want to use with a phone cuz it's got a much smaller screen so that's specific to touch OS but if I hit OK and did you notice when I hit OK all the settings on here suddenly updated it gave me all the track names all the relative volumes if I hit OK and go out of this I can now hit play on here [Music] I can now switch banks of tracks and it tells me exactly what they're all called which is really useful I can change the relative volumes of everything as we can see if I bring up the mixer window in Reaper you can see as I move something on this screen here it moves it there as well so we can solo tracks we can change our window at the top there's a lot of tabs where I can change the pans of everything the send volumes I can change all sorts of effect parameters and so there's quite a lot of control I have I can record I can put metronome on as you can hear in this instance the metronome isn't exactly in time but that's because we didn't record to a metronome in the first place and so all that control on here is really really powerful if I now want to add my phone in to do a very similar thing I can also add another OSC device let's call this one phone this also works there is a touch OSC app for Android as well so it's not just iOS specific if I want the patent configuration to be logic touch and then change the mode to configure look like ID in local port something that you have to be aware of if you want to use more than one device by OSC they have to be on different ports and the reason they're on different ports is then they don't get the wires crust and try and send the same information to to the wrong device it just makes life a lot easier for the OSC on the computer so if I bring up touch OSC on here she's gonna get the screen recording on here so that's now if I close the listen window because the listen window make sure nothing happens but we can see it on screen I can now [Music] [Applause] change all my different setups on my phone which is much more useful if I'm saying the drum Rima I don't want to mess in out about with an iPad I have a much smaller version of the control and as I press buttons on the phone we can see it all updates on the iPad as well because all that data is being fired across the network nice and easy now OSC's cool and all and it's what i used for years but now there's something even more clever and that thing is that there is now a web-based interface that reaper provides itself and this means that that's compatible with pretty much anything that can have a browser so tablets laptops phones you don't have to be bothered about buying separate apps you can have reaper do a lot of this on its own and you can get very very clever very quickly so if we go back to preferences and control let's now delete those oscy things and we'll add in a web browser interface now so if we've run web server on port 8080 you can add in a username and password so I'm just gonna call it dirt with the password dirt because it's always good to have some kind of password and then there are different interfaces that you can use the ones that I use generally are called index.html which is the standard one which is really nice and then more me which we'll talk about in a minute so where does this access URL at the bottom that's where you want to be going if I was to open on my iPad to say let's get the video recording again so if I was to go to Chrome on here I could put that absolutely disgusting set of numbers in here and that would work although let's not do that let's take this little box called use RCEP FM and in ID we'll give it a name so let's call it hop poll because that's our studio name here and here ply settings and there we go so that's made a web address that we can go to that's much easier to read so five dots HTTP colon slash slash our c-- dot reaper dot F M / hop poll and go on the iPad this should come up redirecting success so if we click on that link it's gonna ask me for a password of course it is because we put one into the user names and dirt and the password is dupe although again you put in what you like and now that's done so we've got our control surface at the top would stop playing nice big record button and we've got lots of different controls further down for separate tracks so I've got every track here monitoring available record arming there is a mode and it might be a different browser that I need where it suddenly does everything really nice and shiny if you do it on a laptop you get a much nicer version of the interface if I rotate the screen it rotates and adjusts accordingly if you do this on a laptop you also get a more fancy kind of thing now if I was to change the default interface to more media HTML now if i refresh I suddenly get an option to select my monitor track which is something that's not very useful in this situation because we've not set our reaper project up to accommodate that but what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna quickly use a project that's up on this machine okay so this setup that's behind me is my usual big studio template that I've made which I will make available as a Reaper project in the description below it may not be perfectly appropriate to what you do you may need to tweak it quite a lot because it's quite a personal setup but the idea is that there are four tracks for headphones 1 2 3 & 4 and all the main groups go to it and once that's been set up in the more me if I look at the iPod screen here it says select your monitor track if I click that and select a tower headphone one that means that I get a choice I would kick snare perhaps everything I can change the levels just for that head phone mix which means if I'm in that other room there in the control room I'm drumkit or if I'm in there with the band we don't then have to ask engineers to change all the mix you can just lean over and change it for your own mix and not affect everybody else it does take quite a lot of setting up to do that or the fact that it's available there and it's even color-coded based on the tracks that I've got behind me is really quite useful it's quite pretty as well but it's more and more than anything incredibly functional and it really really helps so there you have it I'm opening this in Chrome which means I could do that on a laptop I could do that anywhere else in the building so I could do remote control by having the bulk of the processing done by a big computer in a control room and then control it live from somewhere else so I could even give a copy of this say if we were doing a live broadcast I could give one of these with a separate live feed mix control to an engineer that's listening to a live feed mix if they then want to do more or less if any particular element of a mix and not affect what I'm doing for example there are so many possibilities that you can do with this and it's really really useful for me and hopefully there's something in it for you as well so you can also do that with the master mix with the indexed HTML that we were saying there's so much and you can run them all concurrently as well so I could have a separate mix on one have a web interface for the other guys and that all works in harmony and doesn't seem to do much in terms of processor usage either it really doesn't seem to Harman hopefully this has been useful for you hope you've appreciated the wizardry that goes into this kind of thing cuz the guys that make reaper really are doing some clever stuff with some big strides here and I really appreciate it and I hope that you appreciate I was bringing it to you in the next video we're going to talk about backing everything up and not just like save your work but reaper itself has quite a few clever little tricks and tools in it to make sure that if everything goes horribly wrong you are absolutely covered even before you finished a project and copied a backup to any separate files so stick around for that and we'll see you in the next video thanks for watching support us on patreon see you later 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: 50,926

Keywords: reaper, daw, osc, control surface, remote, production, tutorial

Id: QI2jK94Tv1g

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2019