REAPER: Recording Modes Explained

hi and welcome to reaper TV in this video I'm going to show you the three key recording methods when working with reaper so i'm gonna show you all of those and how we can work with them right now the recorded with reaper is pretty straightforward unlike a lot of other doors you don't have to worry about choosing a stereo track or a mono track or anything like that you can literally just create the track depending upon the input signal and what you choose will depend upon the kind of tracker screen being created so you got a lot of flexibility without having to mess about with creating certain types of tracks and then get yourself confused because you may have chosen the wrong one so let's start off by just creating a simple track and I come to the track control panel or the TCP which is the main area on the left hand side I can either double click I can right-click and choose insert a new track I can do ctrl + T or you can go to insert I can say insert new track from there I'm going to double click and that will create my new track for me and there's a couple of things we have when we're working with this particular track first of all we got the record arm we've got the option to choose the source and we can choose whether you want monitoring on or off so we're going to do for this example because I'm recording this with the microphone and recording it on screen at the same time I'm just going to disable that and you'll find that when you create a new track this won't be armed by default your record monitoring won't necessarily be on I've said that one of the Preferences that allows me to do that so when I create a new track I'm already set up for monitoring but all you need to do is click on this little symbol and you'll find this is what you'll see when you create a new track which is it's switched off you can then click once to switch monitoring on or you can take a second time to record the chord monitoring so you can see you have a few options we right-click as well so you can see we've got monitoring pod monitoring put tape auto style and so on we're going to set that back to not being enabled but like I say when you would do in this chances are you're probably going to want to enable the first option which is this one okay so we've got the record option which just arms a specific track but if we click at the top you can see you've also got a record button up there which specifies that we want put a record whatever tracks are armed from whatever point the playhead is on so once we hit that it'll start playing and start recording and we can start creating audio now before I can start recording anything I need to tell Reaper what input I'm using now I'm using a quad capture by Roland so I've got four inputs I'm just going to choose the relevant input for my microphone so you can see which says left at the moment if I click on there you we've got a whole range of options we've got input mono input stereo input MIDI and input none and inside there you can see we've got to fly out and it depended upon the kind of interface you've got set up in Reaper and what it's configured to use and on yours you'll see different options so you can see if I go to MIDI for example you see a quad captures in there and I've got arrange your channels I can choose from however I'm recording the microphone so what I'm going to do is cut to input mono and I'm going to choose right so once I've done that now we see nothing come up on this on the screen once I hit the record arm you'll see this meter will start to show audio input so once I click that you now see that as I speak the audio input levels are showing us there's an audio input coming in there and if we look at the mix control panel at the bottom you can see pretty much the same information so this is the point where you want to make sure that you're not clipping anything so you can see at the moment my signal is sitting around minus six point three DB which is fine not too hot but if you want to adjust that adjusted on your interface to make sure you have no clipping to find the loudest point of whatever you're going to be playing well that's guitar or drums or mic vocals whatever it is find the maximum level you're going to do and then and then set your level on your audio interface accordingly I'll cover this in its own dedicated video and I take a look at that is in the description below but we're not gonna worry about that for now I just want to show you how the recording modes work so we're now all set up ready to start recording if I wanted to apply effects to this I could easily do that and I can have those running alongside the audio as it's being recorded for this so we're just going to leave that plain and simple and just deal with the record input so once I've got the track armed I've got everything set up if I had monitoring all I'd listen to what I'd actually come out of my speakers and we're good to go so that's a countably record button once I click on that will start recording and record from the position of the playhead which you can see at the moment is right at the beginning of the or tract should start playing from that point on I start recording the audio so let's do that let's just press the record button or do ctrl + R on the keyboard so I hit that and once I start saying something you can see now we start to get a waveform up here which shows the audio being recorded as I'm saying or recording or playing the music or whatever it is I'm doing that will be recorded into Reaper pretty straightforward so once we hit stop we've now finished so if I rewind that back and I play it you hear what we just said and once I start saying something you can see now we start to get a waveform appear which show now you'll notice that I also have the record arm is still armed and even though that is armed and I can still see my recording level show an episode is still a feed coming into the track Reaper knows it because I haven't hit the record button that always going to do is actually just play that back so when we hit play it's not going to record anything it's only going to play it back only when we actually hit the record button when we start to record the audio as it's being fed through our audio interface into Reaper now I just have the beginning of the video Reaper gives us three key methods for recording and you see that when we hit the record button it'll just armed the recording however if we right click you see we now get three record modes we get time selection Auto punch and auto punch selected items so if I just choose best to say for example the time selection Auto punch you see we now get a different symbol on the record we now get the sort of marker points at the beginning in the end of the piece of audio we want to work with so what does this do well if we hit record now that'll just record straight at the top so let's just take that back out put in the normal record mode and I'll just hit the record and you'll see that'll automatically at the top and create a second take so here we go we're now doing a second take or another piece of audio and as you can see it goes straight over the top of the audio we recorded once I hit stop you see now we've got a second take uh that's great but it's not always what we want to do so let's just undo that by ctrl command set let's just say for example I wanted to punch in a piece of audio at this point so I've recorded everything up today was perfect and everything that was perfect but this bit had a mistake in it well the easiest way of doing that is to use the other record method so we've got record mode time selection autopunch so what will happen is I'll make a selection we'll put the playhead say a couple of bars before what we want so we can get a sort of count in and now when we hit record you'll see that this piece of audio that isn't selected won't be affected the original audio will stay in place and not be recorded over only when we get to this section that we've highlighted with the audio start to overwrite that piece of audio create a second or third or fourth take and then once we get past that point it'll go back into normal playback mode with no recorder even though we've got the record button selected so let's try that so let's just let's see now we start to get a waveform of P as you can sort it that now stop soon as we get to the portion of audio that we want to record an overdub that will stop the playback and start the recording session so let's just try that again to control commands there to undo it and let's just try that so I'll just waffle on so we go you can see now is on your audio a performer by now we're punching into this new set sorted as I'm say okay so we've done that so let's just listen that obviously is going to make no sense whatsoever because I'm just ad libbing but let's take a listen now we start to get a waveform okay now we're punching into this new section as I'm saying so you can see we now get that new piece of audio in that second take and if we do it again so let's just hit record again and we start to get out way more people a third take so this is a third order as I'm saying or recording or and what did I play that back again and we start to get a waveform for a third take so this is a third option as I'm saying oh this is a great way if you're doing something like a guitar solo for example you want to get one phrase in there you just not get in right you can do it like this so you can play along you'll have no effect with you about what you're playing alongside what's been played back and then once you jump into the portion that's the ultimately sort of the selected piece of audio you will start recording once you go past that it will stop and go back to just playback so it's a great way of doing and like I say we've got takes and we can just audition the takes and choose the best one so just get rid of that go back to where we were get rid of that selection and that's the second option now the third option gives it even more control so let's just right click and say auto punch selected items and you see now we get a different icon again for the record button and it's also punch selected items supercharges the previous option so with that we can choose one piece of audio one area we want to affect we can't do multiple different areas so let's just say to use the example in lasso we're doing a guitar solo and we found that most it was okay but they were too luckily phase it at phrases in there you just didn't like you just want to go over those a few times well it's going to make it easier to be able to select those pieces play the entire piece and then when you get to those points where you want to do the overdub it'll just cut in record that little phrase go to the next bit where you don't need to record it then go to the next bit where you want to record it and repeat and repeat as and when needed so instead of doing the entire thing or doing it piece by piece you can do it in multiple chunks so let me demonstrate that we've got one piece of audio at the moment let's expand that out a little bit so let's just say for example we wanted to do this section and this section so we got a couple of bars but they're not adjacent to each other we've got something in between we're happy with so what we're going to do is we're going to place our playhead during this selection face our playhead where we want hit s to split the track same again so we're just breaking this down now into the component pieces so this piece of audio and this piece of audio need to be overdubbed but the first piece the third piece and the fifth piece are all fine so what we need to do is click on the first one hold the ctrl or the command key on the keyboard down and click on the next one and you'll see that now highlights both of those pieces of audio so in now in a position that when we hit record the record will only arm on these highlighted areas so let's just put the player on that map today let's just hit record like I say making sure that we're in Auto punch selected items mode once we hit record I'll just carry on talking and you'll see that this will be unaffected this will record and affected record and so on so let's just try that once I started saying again you're not affected and this is an area is affect here which show or they will be in record is affected pretty cool or in or play in the music or whatever it is I know Install Now so you can see now we have additional takes on only the pieces of audio that we set up to be selected and then we were working with this also punch selected items mode then we can punch in to those relevant selected pieces of audio so a quick and easy way of being able to edit and you know so create multiple takes on only the pieces of audio that you want well that's the three key recording methods you have available with Reaper I hope this is giving you an insight into how you can use those and I hope it gives you insight of how you can speed up your recording process using these techniques as always if you get comments questions or feedback on this video or anything I cover the channel pop those in the comment section below if you enjoyed the video give it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe to be kept up to date with all the new content we add every single week until next time take care

Channel: ReaperTV

Views: 32,458

Keywords: Reaper, DAW, Home Recording Studio, Mixing, Mastering, PsmegTV, ReaperTV, recording modes, punch in recording, multi punch in recording, recording modes in reaper, how to record in Reaper

Id: c7AYjah8hvI

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2017