Reaper DAW 101:- The Basics - PART 1

hi everybody Adam Steele from hot Pole Studios here and today we're going to be doing a tutorial about the very basics of how to use Reaper the da W digital audio workstation basically how to get sound coming through making sure that your recordings working properly how to make sure that you're hearing what you're supposed to be hearing so that you can get up and running recording your vocals recording lead guitars drums whatever it is you want to record we're going to do it right from the very beginning we have done a tutorial on this before which you can find on YouTube that's got many many thousands of views but originally that was supposed to be kind of a one-off thing it was done on our webcam so this time we're gonna do it properly in the studio and I'm gonna make some notes and make sure that everything is crystal clear as possible so without further ado um we go [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so we're going to talk about setting up Reaper right from the very beginning so apologies in advance if any of this feels a little bit like it's condescending or anything like that a lot of people watching this video especially the very start of this video will have no experience of any production equipment or any sort of production methods at all so I'm gonna go through this step-by-step very soon though probably within the first 10 minutes we'll be past the basic setup and into how to actually use Reaper as a digital audio workstation first things first um if I was going to try and show you how to use Reaper on some crazy machine like this thing behind me with all the thousands of pounds of gear and all that kind of stuff hanging off it that would be a really complicated way to do it what I'm gonna do today is this setup right in front of me this is a Lenovo ThinkPad and it's several years old now I only got this this week specifically for videos like this because it's a fairly sturdy machine it's never had any audio production software on it at all it's got a completely new install of Windows although you can use Reaper in the very same way they were about to do here on Mac OS and even on raspberry PI's now and so we're going to talk about what you really need is the absolute minimum for music production so what do you need you need a machine a computer to work with whether it be a Windows laptop a MacBook iMac even a Raspberry Pi you're really going to need some kind of audio interface today we're using the audience sano which is a fantastic interface that I have on loan from audience usually for small projects I would use an ID 4 which is their little one microphone input USB powered box but today this is what I have on hand so we're using the sanno go interface a bit more expensive than I would use as an absolute beginner but it's from the same family as the ID for the ID 14 which are really good interfaces so the principles and practices are exactly the same and last but not least you to need something to listen to what you're doing with which is are there gonna be headphones or studio monitors I'm gonna talk about plugging in both of those things so the first thing we're going to want to do is to get Reaper installed on our machine so I'm going to show you the screen of the laptop nothing has been installed on here apart from basic things like Chrome so the first thing we're gonna do is open our web browser whichever one you prefer like I said I'm using Chrome here and we're going to go to Reaper dot F M that's the Reaper website if you're downloading from anywhere else I wouldn't trust it could be some sort of dodgy software packet in with it Reaper FM is the official web site and right at the top here no messing about download Reaper the very latest version as of making this video is five point nine seven eight so I really suspect the Reaper six is around the corner and I'll probably make a video on that as well so you'll be choosing between Windows Mac OSX and Linux today I'm on Windows this is 64-bit Windows as our most modern versions of Windows same for OSX if you can I highly recommend downloading the 64 bit version of whichever one of these you can if that won't run on your system because your system 32-bit then go back get the 32 bit version they work identically except that as you start to get to bigger productions the 64 bit one has more memory available to it which means that more samples and that kind of thing can be loaded up and also a lot of plug-in developers now for external plugins aren't making 32-bit versions anymore because 32-bit operating systems are pretty much yesterday thing and it's a lot of work to concentrate on so we've downloaded it we'll get this installed it's simple enough process we open it up same on OSX yes I agree yes all the necessary tick boxes want to keep everything ticked doesn't take long at all completed run now no because there is another step we have to do and that is the audio interface that I was talking about the next thing that we'll have to do pretty much no matter what in face you have it's highly recommended if not absolutely essential that you go to the manufacturers website for the interface and get the latest drivers for that some audio interfaces a lot of people will say oh well I can plug it in and it just works I highly recommend you don't do that because the drivers that whoever has made this interface has made for it are designed to work the best they can possibly work and in audio production it's a very important thing to have things running as efficiently as possible with all the features available to you because that will then make sure that it's working properly with minimum latency which is a whole thing that we've got to talk about and with the least amount of problems your pops and clicks and crackles and features missing that kind of thing so for audience who make this interface we're going to audience com if yours is made by odd and I'll focus right or that be focus right comm or antelope universal audio whoever they are find their official website so we're going to go to the supports page for the sanno and somewhere down here I can see on the links at the top i saw downloads then which means if i find that somewhere on this page there we are downloads just a little further down the page so further down on this downloads page we have a Mac OS installer a Windows installer which of course in this case we want the windows one that's not gonna take very long to download at all for us that depends entirely on your internet speed so make sure if you're in an area with poor internet that you get your drivers a head of time so you're not wasting time when you want to be producing music okay so that downloaded and now I'm getting installed yes next I agree is going to install some extra stuff which if we're using the sun'll to its full capacity will be really useful but today they're largely irrelevant for the purpose of this video by the way while this is installing you really can run Reaper on any old hunkajunk computer pretty much back to like Windows XP the newer the computer is the more tracks it will handle efficiently the more processing you can do but I did actually do a video for fun a couple of years back of running Reaper 4 on a very old iMac like the really old kind of screen on a swivel things and it was running quite fine on that okay so that's don't finish and close our browser we are done so now that our drivers are installed next thing to do is plug in our interface which is currently not plugged in this one's a USB one but if yours is firewire or anything like that it's slightly different now is the time to plug that in and make sure it's turned on so that's the first thing we're gonna do is double click the Reaper icon and wait for it to give us the nice pretty load screen while it takes a little longer than it would usually because this is the very first time it's ever being run on this machine and of course it says you have not yet selected an audio device would you like to select one now yes so it comes up with this screen which looks terrifying but don't be too worried your first choice is audio system right at the top and there are all these different choices on Mac OS I would be using core audio but on Windows I want to be using one called a co a Co is the system that the guys who make Cubase made Steinberg which enables computers to use stuff very very quickly and not use too much processing power doing it which means that the interface takes over a lot of that work next thing is we choose the a co driver in this case having literally only installed one which using the audience USB audio driver and if you had used in the past different interfaces from different manufacturers they would be in this drop-down list here and you just have to choose the appropriate one then we've got enable inputs which the first one is number one and we'll choose the last one as the very last one you can choose a custom range I'm not entirely sure why you would but the opportunity is there and the same with the output range which I'm gonna use all of them one two four and input ones at 12 while we're here we're going to talk about sample rate briefly because there's a tick box here to request a sample rate I'm not going to go into huge depth about sample rate because there are videos talking about this including one for myself that talked about this very long amount of time in a lot of depth all I'm gonna say is if you choose 44 100 which is 44 point 1 kilohertz that's generally the sample rate that I think you should be working out if you're intending to work for CDs as your output format and 48 thousand which is 48 kilohertz which is the sample rate that I think you should be working at if you're looking at producing stuff DVDs and film or YouTube because of video production the way that works arguably if you're working with Spotify and iTunes the iTunes white paper for mastering says that you should be using the highest sample rate possible which could be 96,000 96 kilohertz for me that's a bit overkill but I like working at 48 thousand and I've ticked the box request sample rate which says to your interface hey can we please work at this sample rate is that okay the rest of these aren't really important to us right now but if we hit OK then it's going to come up telling us hi this is Reaper Reaper is not free you get a 60 day trial at the end of that 60 day trial it does keep working indefinitely so a lot of people do keep using it although really you should be paying for what you use but it does mean that you can use it wherever you like so I hit still evaluating a for me I have a copy of the Reaper license on the machine behind me and a separate repo license on my main laptop for the purposes of this video I'm not going to get another one because this is just showing you around the software nothing is blocked off or walled off in the software because it's a trial everything is available to you so you can do full production even in an evaluation version of Reaper apologies everyone I'm going to interrupt myself here very briefly just to mention distro kit we're not being paid to promote distro kid in this video but if your music is now ready to release or if you're getting to that point then you need to use some kind of service to get it onto iTunes Spotify Deezer all these kind of streaming services and distro kit is a great platform to do that from a for a single user they charge 19.99 for a year and you can even get a few percents off that if you use our link in the description and from that you can then release as much of your own material as you like all year round and so if you want to do one song cool if you want to do ten albums also cool they can also start you out with licenses for cover songs so if you I do cover songs it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg like it used to do they can do pretty cool things like if somebody else covers your song on YouTube they can make sure the money's collected and comes to you and then there's also things like if you've got Shazam or series it can actually listen to what a music piece is now you can have them for a little extra have that so that that comes up so someone says hey Siri what's that song and it goes hey it's that song by by you so I think that's pretty neat and it's all relatively easy to do if you click that link in the description below as well it does help us out a little bit so for every time that you get money off and you sign up to distro kid we get some help as well thanks and let's get back to the tutorial sorry for interrupting I know it's a pain off we go so I'm gonna make this fullscreen and it says at the top right audio device closed the first thing I'm gonna do is on this timeline here in this big blank section of the screen top right I'm just gonna click the left mouse button somewhere and I'm gonna hit the spacebar which is play there we go and what that did is that woke up the audio interface it asked cake and we work at 48 kilohertz and when I hit play that started moving and on the top right importantly we can now see 48 kilohertz which is what we asked for 24 bit wave which is the default that Reaper records at which for me is perfect and then it says the number of samples which is to do with latency and then the number of milliseconds there 15 and 12 is how long it's taking to get audio in and then how long it's taking for audio to come back out latency is important because if you're working on a mix say and you're not recording anything you can just hit play and a bit of latency means that the interface and the computer and every part of this that's involved has a little bit of time to scramble everything together and then present whatever part of the song to you when you hit play the problem with high latency is that if I was recording something and listening back to that in real time then if I was to be in front of a microphone and let's say I clapped the latency is the time it takes for that clap to be picked up by the microphone and then turned into something by the interface and then turning something by Reaper come back out the interface into the headphones or out of the monitors and if that's too long it's really quite upsetting and disturbing and can put you off playing so if I was to go clap with a highlight as you it actually sound like good good and if I can get the latency really low then it comes out of the headphones seemingly at the same time I'm doing it there's always a tiny tiny bit of delay even with like Pro Tools HD systems and that kind of thing there is some latency but if it's really really really though the human brain doesn't pick up on it and it doesn't matter which means that if you're working with a very low number of samples of latency which is the buffer of how much it the computer in the interface have in terms of time to scramble together and make sure everything's right then it can make the difference between something that's recordable and something that's very very difficult by the same token if you are just mixing and your computer struggling a low latency because it's trying to scramble to get all this audio together if you're not recording you can then make that latency a little bigger that give it a bigger buffer a bit more room to breathe that can help in quite a lot of circumstances so what we're going to do now is going to adjust the latency because as far as I'm concerned 512 samples is too much for me because that's as we can count here 27 milliseconds in total by adding those two numbers together that's too much to me that's a noticeable cooker which especially if I'm playing guitar can really mess with my head so what we're going to do is we're going to click on this on the top right and that's a shortcut to bring us back to this menu that we saw before now there's a button that we didn't press earlier on there is a co configuration now for some devices this brings up a big menu for some of them it doesn't and as I've just noticed for the sanno that didn't bring it up which is annoying but we have to be in this menu to release the audio interface so that we can tweak and mess around with things it's kind of the equivalent of turning off a car engine before a mechanic goes underneath and starts working on it it's kind of a safety thing and make sure that you don't get horrible noises coming out of the speakers or headphones and in that regard it makes things easier to work with so in the Start menu there is a little s and that little S is for sano that's the Audion driver this could be different depending on what manufacturer you're working with but if we right-click on that we have options like set AC or buffer size set sample rate which we've already Requested set clock source which is only an important if you're using more than one digital piece of equipment so for today we're going to breeze past that maybe talk about it another time so set a CEO before size is the important thing for us and I'm gonna try 128 samples so I clicked 128 and then I'm gonna hit OK in our Reaper menu and there we go that's changed now to 128 samples appear 5.1 and 4.5 millisecond latency that's still a little more than I would like but in terms of working with USB interfaces that's really quite reasonable to get much lower than that you starting to look at firewire interfaces which aren't really made anymore Thunderball interfaces or PCI Express which is basically a card that's like straight into a computer which is what I'm using behind me with an RM e ray dat card so that's something for another day so let's look at the reaper window so the top half here is the tracking window if i hit plus and minus i can zoom in and out and you can see the numbers on the timeline getting bigger and smaller and the bottom half is the mix window so i'm gonna hide the mix window for a minute and we're going to come back to that so we can see more on screen without the mix window so that means that we can work with a nice piece of mind and a clear head so we have a digital audio workstation ready to go what we're going to do with it first thing you're probably going to want to do is get some sort of sound out of it so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a track and then we're going to play something on that track that was pre-recorded whether it's a an mp3 of one direction or something that i've previously recorded off whatever it is which means that then we're ready to go let's say that you're using a karaoke track that you want to sing to that's then ready or if you're just using this to test out the system which is what we're gonna do now then you've got something to work with so this big dark section on the left what I want to do is double click in here and a track came up it's that simple there are other ways to do it like if I was to right-click here there's insert new track or the quick shortcut ctrl T but it's a nice shortcut here that really saves me a lot of time is that I can just keep clicking like a madman and if I just click more and more and more tracks turn up I'm going to hit undo which is control and said a few times to get rid of those and just for illustration purposes I'm going to make this one track that we have really big by getting the bottom of that track and the mouse changes to that up and down and we just go drag that down to make this bigger so we can see what the flippin heck is going on before we go any further I'm going to do something that you should always do with every project you can open Reaper and you can just start working straight away which is great but you do run the risk if you just go straight away of losing things if the computer sets on fire or somebody throws it across a room and for whatever reason the computer crashes I find that Reapers really quite stable but bad things happen so make sure you save your work before anything so what we're going to do is we're going to go to file and save project so by default you're in documents and Reaper media I like to have a separate hard drive that I save stuff to but that's my way of working and let's just call this tutorial audio and there are little tick boxes so it can create a sub directory for the project which I'm going to tick which means that it's going to make a little folder for that and then any work that we do any audio that we record anything like that will go in that folder and there are little options copy all media into project directory or move all media so if you've already started working on a project and gone oops I really should save this then by ticking one of these boxes you can then make sure that when you save the folder save the project somewhere else anything you've already recorded is put into that relevant folder so you're not going to then lose it later on very handy so we're going to hit save and then our project is done so we're going to have a track ready and as you can see there I accidentally moved the left mouse cursor and selected a region which we're going to come back to later on that's not necessarily the most important thing right now but what is important is if we insert a media file so we're going to go to the insert menu at the top and hit media file the shortcut for that if you're already on the right track is literally the button on your keyboard that says insert so that brings up the menu in for import file into project so I've just downloaded a sample called sample audio not entirely sure what this is but I'm playing it and no sound is coming out we can see the meters moving on this channel but we can't hear anything what's happening well something that I really must explain at this point is that when you're using an audio interface all the sound will come out of and go into that interface so anything like the sounds coming out of your laptop or your desktop or any speakers or headphones plugged into that machine will not be making this noise because all the sound is being sent to the interface which means that at this point I have to either plug in headphones or monitors and so I've plugged the two monitor outputs on the back of the sanno what I would usually plug straight into speaker monitors and make sure the volumes up at a reasonable level today I've got plugged in to the system behind me so that you guys can hear it but generally that is what I would do is be plugging the monitor outputs straight into monitors and this is what we get so it sounds pretty so it sounds pretty horrible but that is just white noise as a test tone and that means that I know that's gonna work so that's step one if I was to replace that with anything like an mp3 which I use WAV files where you can but you know or you can get any other kind of sound in here that will just play out of the master outputs which by default is set to output 1 & 2 which is the speaker outputs and headphone outputs on this box and then you make sure that you know that's all wired up appropriately depending on what interface you're using that's step one done something I should probably mention at this point is that if this sound is coming out too loud for you you might want to use the volume control on your interface you might want to use the clip volume control on your monitors but you also might want to control the volume from here and if you look at where this file name is for the track name that's automatically named itself based on the file that put in there but if I was to call that track of stuff that is then renamed there's no file name limit or anything like there is in some programs and next to it is the volume which if you hover over it says 0 DB and then it can go from that downwards so I could go all the way down to minus infinity which is nothing and then bring it slowly up hit play so I can hear it cool so there's plenty to be changing and then just to the right of that is the pan knob so it can make it make it go on the left or the right respectively which is how you get your stereo panning of your left and right for different signals and get a big stereo image another thing that's really important for me at this point is being able to just replay a certain section over and over and over so let's say that we've got a little section here where I drag the left Mouse and ended up setting a little bit and then I can click on the timeline just above that which is where all these numbers are that determines where we're playing from but then the white bit is the selection if I hit the button at the bottom there's stop play pause record and then repeat if I click that or use the R key when when it gets to this little white section it will go round and round and round it I find that's quite useful if you're working on a song and you just want to listen to the same section over and over and over again it can be accidental be careful if you just like to tiny a little bit like this and then end up stuck in a loop that's usually what's happening if you've you've got a DA double units going ding-ding-ding meaning meaning it's usually that you've got a tiny little selection on loop so you can either make the selection bigger by destroying a bigger box anywhere on this track screen including at the top at the bottom anywhere or you should be able to just right-click remove selection or use the Escape key and that will get rid of that or hit R to take off loop one quick thing to note here is this particular file that I've got if I decide that I don't need it I don't like it I can hit the Delete key off it goes done if that was a mistake I can hit ctrl + Z or Apple + Z to undo that and that's back okay so I've replaced the white noise we've a track called Dark Tranquillity that I've got a few two ball what a reference just here for you made it but now let's say I want to record something with that and so it could be a vocal it could be a guitar part in this case I got the old ironing board base out which I thought was kind of funny and I'm gonna plug this right in my interface here has a DI port if you're recording then you're gonna have to look into what it is that you want to record whether you're using microphones or whether you're using di injection that kind of thing because how to record audio is a conversation for another day let's say you've already decided what gear you're using for guitar whatever you've got the microphone in place are you recording like this so if I was to plug in to the DI track and start playing nothing happens and the reason nothing happens is that even though we've plugged in here we've not told Reaper what to do we've not given it any instructions as to what our intentions are so the first thing that we're going to want to do is open up a new track now that is a little bit big for this screen I'm gonna just use control and I'm gonna use a little plus and minus in the corner to make the screens tracks bigger and smaller if I was using a proper Mouse and I highly recommend getting a mouse for using Reaper I could use the mouse wheel to make everything bigger and small and much more quickly and not so now we've got a track and the first thing that we want to do with this new track is name it I'm gonna name this bass which you know track naming really helps down the line and so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna hit record and still very little will happen so I've plugged this into the relative Channel and playing away I can now see the meters moving but I can't hear anything so that's the next stage why is that so I can't hear anything because monitoring is not enabled on that channel monitoring is getting the sound through the interface back through Reaper and then back to you whether it's on the headphones are on the monitors and that is this little icon here which is a speaker icon you hover over it says recording monitoring off give it a click record monitoring is on and now if I play when the meter moves we should hear it from here if we go to a section of the track we can record stuff now so if I hit play from the start of this song [Music] and hit stop again that's not recorded anything and why not simply just because we don't have just because we have a track armed for recording doesn't mean it's actually going to record it's a safety feature so what we have to do is actually hit the record button which is the big red one down the bottom or ctrl + R which is a shortcut I prefer to use because I feel it's quite definite it's quite definitive and safe but in this case I'll hit record okay so when I hit stop it comes up saying files recorded would you like to save them would you like to delete them I personally change this behavior when I'm doing it personally it says prompt to save on stop or on punch out and play I want it on stop so that it saves automatically and I hit save all for me that means that every time of record and hit stop but the files are automatically kept and I'm not having to go through that menu every time now one thing that you may notice what if I hit play we will hit here that bass part now if I want to only hear that that's where the m and s buttons have come in M for mute will mute a track and you can see it go dark s will solo a track and all the other tracks go dark and go silent so that only the ones you hit solo on or what you're gonna hear so if I hit solo and listen to play now you may have noticed that the bass I was playing slightly out of tune there I certainly noticed it that's something I'm going to come back to in a minute because I can use effects here to bring up something like a tuner and I don't mean auto-tune or anything like that because that's also an option if you buy that separately I mean actually bringing up like a guitar tuner so you'd ask pay for an extra one you know it's in built into reaper you may as well use it so the next thing I'm going to talk about here is the mix window because now we have more than one track going the mix window will become relevant if we go to view mixer we suddenly see right down the bottom where there was nothing before above the master track there are now two tracks the way that this works is the Edit window the bit up top all the tracks that you make they work from the top down they all play concurrently but the way it works is kind of going down equivalent this is the mix window and this goes left to right with exactly the same tracks just displayed going the opposite way and if I was to make loads and loads and loads of tracks just by double-clicking in this blank space is another nice little shortcut if I then use the bit of the screen just at the top of it where I can change just under this bar the numbers I can change how big and small the areas are this will start to look a lot more like an analog mixing desk because you'll see all the faders going left to right all with the different names here few buttons and then here are two very important parts the inserts and the sends and this is where effects come in so I have my base track ready to record with here if I play we can see it going it's out of tune I could get a pedal tuner or a clip-on cheer but instead I'm showing you a feature of Reaper which is there has this inbuilt where it says track insert effect in this top part here this is where we can add effects there's more than one way to get here you can also click the effects button down here I like this way where I can just click in an empty block and it gives me a big list of every plug-in that we have and you can whittle them down into vsts their own format which is jeaious I can make this window a bit bigger so we can see more there are different categories so if you know exactly what you're looking for you can whittle it down there or there's a bit at the bottom that says filter where if you know exactly what the plug-in you're looking for it's called you can start typing that out and it will slim the list down to only things with that piece of the name it so you can very quickly even with thousands of plugins find exactly what you want if you know what it's called I use this day in day out it saves me hours of time a lot of other DOW programs you're looking under this category for that category for this and so here I can just go the plug-in I'm looking for is a tuner called retune re4 reaper tune so if i got our e a i'm already in the j s category scott so let's go back to our plugins re t you and there's only one result retune so if i double click that that will come up as a tuner it's flicking the g10 at me i can make this bigger but if I play a note I can then chin up and yes I know this instrument has far too many strings that's a conversation for another time I do love it this seven string bass yes that's a thing [Music] if you're tuning a bass by the way you can change retuns window size to be bigger to allow for lower notes there we go right so that's now in tune more or less but that was a fancy insert effect it didn't actually change the sound let's right-click on that and go to delete effects how about something that does change the sound so let's get rid of that and look at our big list so we've got loads and loads and loads of things that Reaper can do and which this VST if you purchase I'll get hold of free or paid VST plugins' they all come up here which is to say custom third-party plugins I use loads I use the slate everything bundle I use a lot of wave stuff I use ice on top so zone ru so now works as a VST which corrects everything I use loads and loads and loads of those but Reaper is kind of the heart of what I'm doing that hosts all of these vsts so let's do something a little bit crazy let's compress the life out of this using re comp which is Reaper zone compressor if I double click on that and play nothing's gonna happen because everything's set to be fairly neutral if I go to a preset let's say spanky base [Music] that's still not doing anything because the threshold here isn't doing much better bring that threshold down we should get [Music] you can see those levels really going and you should be able to hear the bass kind of pumping that's the kind of thing we're looking for with separate plugins so we can affect things or we can use something a bit more run-of-the-mill if I put an EQ in here instead and I use Reapers re EQ all the time make this a little bit bigger so we can see what's going on let's say I want more low-end I can drag this up to be more low-end let's say one less of that honky high-end I can find it I can use a shelf to really remove all the top end and make this proper dubby [Music] so there are so many possibilities just with an EQ and a compressor but then any separate plugins that you get their delays there are reverbs there are all sorts of things which are covered in separate tutorial so I'll not go too much deeper into that something that we can do I'm going to make a track and I'm going to call it the reverb this is a good example that I'm going to use earth how to use ascend because the insert that I used there what happens with inserts is that you've got a sound and that one channel L all of the sound from that channel goes through every insert effect completely one by one by one until it's done with them they are inserted into the signal path so it was going to go from the base to Reaper now it goes from the base to those effects and then out sends mean that you're sending sound out to a separate track and what you tend to do with this is something like if you've got delay or a reverb you might want those to be separate so that instead of having twenty or thirty channels in a mix and trying to put reverb on each separate one you can have one reverb that's on a separate track and just send little bits of say each separate drum each separate bass guitar keyboard whatever it is just a little bit to that separate channel that way not only is it better in terms of using the processor but it's also better in terms of your mind because if you want to change something about that reverb all you have to do is go into that one reverb and change one thing once so what you'd want to do is this this track of the reverb let's put something in called reverb eight it's let's use a preset send wide wide that sounds cool there are there is a different reverb being here but reverb eight is really simple to use and so that's what we're going to do oh so we're going to remove the dry signal so that the reverb of the reverb is only making reverb and not carrying any of the original signal that's what the dry is and then we're going to use these sends so if I click in where it says track sends it'll bring me up the routing menu now the routing menu has all the stuff we've already seen in terms of the volume and the pan and that kind of thing that we saw where we've got the pan here in the big fader for the volume but under Sens we can add a new scent and it tells us the track names here so we're sending this to the reverb and it comes up now as an extra send here with all the volume and pan that's associated just with that so that's currently going out full volume and what's going to happen I'm sure is if I play this it's going to sound really echoey [Music] now what we can do is we can change the amount of the base that we're sending to the reverb by either sliding this slider up and down or you can see behind the routing window there's a little thing here that says going to the reverb and a little knob the little knob just says this is how much and you can change more or less so with loads that happens and we end up with something like a monster out of Mass Effect or something like that or lower down we can just have a little and doing this this is how you get a really nice reverb on vocals but maybe you want more reverb on the backing vocals less reverb on a certain feature vocal now you can just have a one reverb channel and use the sends like we've just shown you to send a bit of this one more for this one less for that one and you can even using something we'll talk about later using automation change the amounts during the song and that's where automation really makes life easy but then also these sends are what makes life easier as well I'm quickly going to just hide the mix window again so we can see more of this screen because there's a lot going on something I'm quickly going to mention is if you can get two screens for your computer what you can do if this is really cluttering things up then where it says the word mixer down here this is the docker and what you can do if I right-click on it is where it says dock mixer in docker I can UNTAC that and now the mixer is free it's separate which means if I just make that as big or small as I want that can go somewhere else on the screen or in the next screen if you've got two screens or three screens like you see behind me you'll see over my shoulder that this screen up here has the mix window on and the big one right down there is the one that's got the Edit window on it and then I like to have things like effects on the other screen which is currently capturing the and by the by so we're gonna hide that again now because it's in our way that's that's why attend to have it on another screen so it's not in the way you can see here that there's the track the reverb because like we said it's just represented top to bottom instead of left to right you could record audio onto that same channel that they're the the reverb is on I personally wouldn't maybe that's a bit crazy but you can something that's really important about Reaper is unlike other workstations it doesn't have audio tracks instrument tracks aux tracks this kind of track that kind of track it just has tracks and that means that you can send audio from one track to another like you can on analog desk simple you can even send MIDI from one track to another dead simple same way it doesn't care if the audios mono doesn't care if it's stereo if it's mono it just plays it out of both speakers if it's stereo great you can even have multi-channel going you can have surround sound if you set up a channel there's a button where you can see where it says routes if I click that it says track channels 2 that could be 4 6 8 however many you want you then have to find a way to route those out through different speakers but that's another conversation for another day but let's say we want to make a MIDI track and a MIDI track I'm just gonna unarmed the record on the bass and put this down because it's heavy really heavy so I've called this track which I'm going to put MIDI on the MIDI actually you know what I'm gonna get a MIDI keyboard from behind me right now and we're gonna plug that in do a practical demonstration okay so I've got this monster plugged in next to me this is an M audio USB MIDI keyboard if you've got a keyboard that's got MIDI in and out but doesn't have a USB specifically for that you can get USB MIDI boxes that will translate from MIDI to USB I've got a couple dotted around but they're kind of right now this is a big one that Moe to make I've also got a little amore deal one around it's got two channels in two channels out this is a five channel one but it's a bit overkill for what I need if you're a synth guy this might be more what you need okay so this M audio keyboard is now plugged in it's not going to do much to begin with because we again have to tell Reaper that it exists and that we want to use it because if you've got other programs running like I don't know a reason or something like that you might want to not have Reaper involved with them at all and let the MIDI go to that other program it's quite common so we have to go to our options menu and right at the bottom of options is preferences which is where a lot of this stuff in the back end is and you'll have seen this window earlier on this is the audio device menu this is kind of our default just below that is MIDI devices now if you've used the MIDI box you'll have to connect the MIDI cables to the ins and outs if your keyboard that kind of thing but here our audio key station has come up so if our key station made noise which it doesn't we could set the MIDI output so that we could send MIDI to it I've got something like I've got a Yamaha dx7 in the background which I could use I could send MIDI audio to it and it would kind of play itself like those old kind of windup organs from the Wild West that can be quite useful if you're running kind of a hybrid analog setup where you want the synthesizer gonna play in real time and you want to change the notes but not have to edit a different way we're going to leave that alone today but the MIDI input it's got two of them and we want the first one it just so happens that this key station for some reason has got to and if we right click where it says mode disabled we can enable input and we can also enable input for control messages which you don't have to do what this keyboard has stopped playing record buttons on which means that we can save ourselves a nice bit of time if we're recording near the keyboard and we don't wander had to run back to actually press buttons on the computer so we need to hit apply I usually hit reset all MIDI devices which is here and hit okay so recording the MIDI is exactly the same as recording an audio channel in Reaper so we've armed our track by hitting record on it which now says record and is glowing red we need to change our input so if we go to the input drop-down originally our input was mono it was that bass which happened to be channel one if we hadn't wanted it to be anything else we would have chosen that here or stereo you would have chosen if say are you using stereo overheads on one channel that's all here as well but then the next one down is input MIDI so you're just choosing what's going in and now that we've enabled that key station 88 it comes up here and then it gives us an option of which channel to use you can get really clever with MIDI and use different channels for different tracks I personally don't bother I just go with using all channels because nothing interferes with this Reaper track that we've made unless we specifically tell it to which can get confusing so I try and keep them all separate now if I start hitting keys you can see a red line that's coming up and the harder I hit the keys the bigger the red line but there's no sound if I hit the monitor button there's still no sound why is that the reason that there's still no sound is because MIDI is not a sound in and of itself MIDI is just an instruction that says play this note at this volume and then stop there's a little more to it but it's just information so what we have to do is we have to have some sort of plug in virtual instrument that is being told what to do now Reaper does come with some very very basic ones quite often you'll find yourself buying if you're into doing this kind of thing something like contact the Native Instruments Komplete set Artorius v collection you'll find yourself getting hold of virtual synths quite a lot of them are free quite a lot of them are not free generally speaking the ones you pay for it better but let's just get something going right now so where this little effects button is let's bring that up clear our filter from when we were searching for reverb earlier and we can see if we go to all plugins vsti is what we're looking for and right now let's just use Rhys synth so Rhys synth is a very very basic synthesizer let's come up and you can see we've got our monitoring enabled we've got the right keyboard enabled if I start hitting keys so every time I hit a key something happens and we can change things like the release which will make this go on longer and we can change the waveform [Music] [Applause] so now we can record that in and if we go back to where we were in our track so we can see a few things I'm gonna move this Luo MIDI track I'm literally just gonna grab it on the left without mouse click I'm gonna drag it a little further up and I can just let go and it'll move this means that as we go if we've got any tracks like the reverb where we don't really need to see the track it will just end up down at the bottom and that's how I like to work is kind of drums bass guitars keyboards vocals effects right at the end because I only want to see them every now and again just to check things and change things so the MIDI if I just go back to the start and hit record because that's hard [Music] okay so the horrible farty bass aside which I should probably mute because that's really getting in the way you can see here now on this channel that's not audio that is MIDI notes represented going left to right and you can actually see where I was tapping it you can see the lower middle and upper octaves of what I was doing this you can actually see high and low going on on MIDI if you don't have a MIDI keyboard like I've got that's fine what you can do is if I go to view and virtual midi keyboard i can actually have a MIDI keyboard on-screen which i can click with the mouse and then I can change the input for the MIDI for that track from key station 88 it's a virtual midi keyboard so then and I can even use the the keys as denoted in this tiny little writing [Laughter] and then I can use the arrow keys to change Channel and that's really fast and that that means that I can tap something out without needing a MIDI keyboard of course it will be more expressive and much more natural using a real keyboard but if you're in a pinch it's nice to have this now the next thing to know about MIDI is this MIDI piece here if I double click on this I get treated to the MIDI editor now in the MIDI editor I can see each and every note and I can zoom in and out with plus and minus and I can see how long they are I can see how loud they are not only based on the color of each note but you'll see little white line and you see this particular note that I dragged as I make it quieter the number gets smaller it goes greener and also the bar gets smaller so the three visual ways to see whether a notes going to be loud or not I can double click anywhere to add another note I can drag the very starts and ends of notes you'll see that the mouse changes to make them longer shorter I can just pick up and up and move it around to the right place if it was the wrong note I can move it to the right note there is so much that I can do I'm not going to go into again huge detail because there are things like quantization that you can do if you want to but now I've shown you the power of you don't need to be a master piano player or even if you are and you make one mistake you don't have to do the take all over again you can go back and correct that one mistake by other deleting or no changing it to the correct pitch whatever it is that you decided to do you can even drag if you right-click a box around these you can drag multiple notes and you could do I don't know you could change the octave of them you could completely change the key whatever it is that you want to do it's all here one thing that's worth noting is that all of these notes will snap to the grid as I move them you can actually see the starts and ends moving to the nearest 30 seconds note because at the bottom that's what the grid is set to is 1/32 and I can change that maybe to an eighth if I'm going to be making really like robotic house music or something whatever it is that I'm doing and there's a little magnet up top which if I tick that all bets are off and the snap is gone which means that if I want a note to come in exactly a certain time or finish an exact certain time grid aside I can just turn that off now that brings me on to the next thing which is the grid on the rest of this so as it stands that snap has been on all the time here so if I was to grab grab the very left hand side of an audio clip that would then if I drag that along allow me to cut the start of that off but as you can see it's going dip-dip dip-dip and it's catching on the start of every bar which if I've got everything working to a click might be great but if I want to do something very particular and let's just zoom in here if I want to do something very particular it won't let me it will only let me go between bars so what I have to do is on the top left this snap enabled I have to click that that's now disabled and that means that this same piece of audio is now allowing me to do very very fine control so let's say that I stop this at the start of this beat this should now without the intro let's just turn off that MIDI track I've just managed to edit off the entire intro of that song just by making sure that it starts exactly just before the start of that now let's bring that back and have a little bit more intro what if I wanted to fade that in that's also easy where I'm dragging at the side of this file if I go to the top of it the mouse changes to this little curve if I drag the mouse inwards from there you'll see that that's now making a big curve and what that's going to do if I hit play from before it is that's bringing the volume and gradually now where that white line is that's where you can go back to to move that if I right-click on that I get a choice of different fades so there's kind of a quick one there's a slow one there's once a straight line especially in a mastering context I find that these can really help you out to make it not as obvious that you're doing kind of Who's Afraid so you can be much more subtle and the last thing for the basics tutorial is let's say that I wanted a section of this but I didn't want the rest of it I could then go in and find the exact point that I wanted to cut up this file and hit the S key Esper split and that splits it right there into two pieces so I can now if i zoom out grab one piece and move it around not affect the other if I undo that I could then grab the other delete it and I find that saves me a lot of time rather than having to go right the way to the end of a file or the right the end of a clip I can then just go split here get rid of that thank you done so that's saving me a lot of time so hopefully you've enjoyed the basics of this I'm gonna go back to me in the studio and hope you're looking forward to the next part so thanks for watching and there will be more parts of this tutorial probably out now in the description if not coming out very soon in the short term I'm going to link below to the older Reaper tutorials because this stuff about routing audio how to export files in certain formats clever tricks and tips that can save you loads of time how to work with virtual drums and make sure you get separate drums on separate channels all that kind of stuff that can be really quite important to somebody who's just starting out in audio production and wants to get a grip on things fast so they may already be the updated versions if not the older versions are still this all the information is still relevant hope that you really enjoyed this if you have click the like button because that really helps the channel out subscribe for more of this kind of content and gear reviews we do guitar amps guitars microphones headphones interfaces all sorts of stuff so stick around check that out and thank you everybody one more time and if you really really really liked it subscribe to us on patreon where you can help us out and really help to keep the lights on and keep this whole world turning round we are ever grateful for your views and support so thank you everybody I'm Adam Steele for hot Pole studios and I'll see you in the next video thank you 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: 731,231

Rating: 4.92801 out of 5

Keywords: reaper, daw, basics, tutorial, getting started, pro tools, logic pro, reaper daw

Id: JwDcTPn2dvc

Length: 63min 8sec (3788 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/yellowmix]

Now in the sidebar as the primary getting started video tutorial.

[u/[deleted]]

Big fan of Adam Steel's tutorials. I've watched the original series and now I'm watching his updated videos when he publishes them.