Reaper: Tracks Fundamental Primer Tutorial

hi and welcome to another episode of Reaper TV in this video I'm going to show you the fundamentals of working with tracks in Reaper now you may be new to Reaper or been working with it for some time we're still worth sticking around as you may pick up a tip or two from the content in the video if you are new to Reaper then you're going to love how easy and flexible it is to work with tracks inside Reaper so let's take a look at that right now now there's one area of Reaper that can cause some confusion to new users or those moving over to Reaper from an alternative digital audio workstation like Pro Tools is the way in which tracks work now in a program like Pro Tools you specifically choose a track type when you create a new track so for example a stereo track or a MIDI track whereas in Reaper you simply create a track there's no need to choose a stereo track a mono track or any other kind of track and once you've created it you can simply choose the input method for example one channel stereo MIDI etc and then you're done so pretty straightforward now this video is going to cover a lot of different tools and a lot of different options and ways of creating and working with tracks obviously if you've got something you know yourself works really really well share that in the comment section below so we can all pick up some new tips and tricks well let's take a look at how we can start working with us on the basics of just creating a track now when you start working with Reaper one of the things you'll pick up is the fact that it's incredibly customizable and there are multiple ways of achieving the same end result so how you get to it is entirely up to you and whatever feels the most intuitive so I start off by creating a track now we're going to cover four methods in this we'll start off with a simple and easiest method which is just go to the track control panel which is this section on the left hand side and double clicking and you can see that now inserts a new track for us so a quick and easy way of doing it we can also do exactly the same thing by coming down to the mixer control panel which is this main area at the bottom of the screen it's in double-click there's our new track or very simple we could all you also use the keyboard shortcut of ctrl or command + T and again you can see we now create a new track we can also go in for the final method and right click and choose insert new track so again you can see very quick very easy now if you locate the person that likes to work with a menu system then you can do exactly the same thing there you can come to track and you can see we have insert new track so there we go various different methods of achieving the same end result of creating a track now to delete the track again we've got multiple ways of doing the same thing we can select the track you want to remove and simply press the Delete key that deletes that track for us or we can select a track and we can right-click and we can come down we can say remove tracks and you can see the track is now gone alternatively we can click on the track itself come to the track menu from there we can say remove tracks so you can see all very quick very easy or pretty intuitive that's great if we want to insert single tracks or delete single tracks but how about if we want to create or delete multiple tracks well Ripper's got us covered on that one as well so we want to insert multiple tracks we can simply come up to the track control panel on the left hand side right click and say insert multiple tracks that brings up a simple dialog box that says how many traffic you want to insert to a name them do you want to put them after the last touch track or at the end of the project so you can see we've got a couple of options so let's create three new tracks in the I will leave everything else as it is except for the at the end of the project click on there there's our three new tracks very simple quick way of doing that what if we want to get rid of those tracks well we can do that quite easily we could select the track we want so let's just say we want these three then we can right-click and we can come down and say remove tracks and there we go there's our tracks removed now we're not limited to just that method if we want to we could select the tracks we want and then we can just press the Delete key and again there's our tracks removed so as you can see multiple ways of achieving the same end result then when you start to work with the project in Reaper you're going to find it instances where you want to duplicate a track the multiple reasons why you may want to do this you might want to double up on a particular part you may want to just take a track don't need the actual content of the track itself but you like the way the effects parameters and everything is set up so instead how to recreate that you can quickly just duplicate the track so let's take a look at how we can do that next let's just create a new track and give it a name so we're going to call this sample one and we'll just apply something to it sisters coming the effects panel and we'll just use anything from it doesn't really matter too much where it is we live instance of easy keys in we close that down so we've now got a track that has some information on it you can see we've named it we're going to play it an effects to it well we can select that track and we can right click and we can say duplicate tracks and you can see once we do that we get an identical duplicate name the same with the same effects on this if we open that up you can see there's our instance of ez keys that we can delete that if we want to we can do the same thing again now do a different method so we can select the track we want and we can go to the track menu and from there we can say duplicate tracks go to couple seconds and there we go it loads that in now if you notice it says duplicate tracks as in plural so we can do exactly that let's just say we select these two tracks and we do either of those methods doesn't really matter sets to the right click method so right click on there and we say duplicate tracks we now end up with four copies of the same track so for instances of the same track with the same effects with the same name and so on so a quick and easy way beyond to take the source track and duplicate it a number of times so now that we've taken a look at how to create tracks let's take a look at the track types so as I said at the top of this video Reaper doesn't force us to create a specific track format when we create it we do have to assign some basics to each track and we can pick between the normal more track a stereo track or a MIDI track and these are the majority the tracks habits you'll be using in a typical project so see how easy it is to assign a track type right now so let's start off with a mono track a mono track is what you'd normally use for a guitar or a vocal but it can have many different uses but to do this we simply need to ensure that we set the correct input so we click on the input type for a track with selects at track 1 first of all we can choose the input type from the list you can see we have mono stereo MIDI and none so we need to do is ensure that we choose the right format so in my instance I need to set this to channel 1 & 2 so you can see it's already set up that's the default so using this and Leslie to record using the first input on my audio interface this is a default value actually need to arm the track and start recording where mine line level instrument a guitar Oh Mike for example is inserted so as you can see there's a mono recording so as you can see by simply just choosing one channel we now have this recorded in mono to recording stereo it's pretty straightforward so to create a stereo track all I need to do is set the track input to be stereo and choose the second input from my interface arm the track hit record and now we have a stereo input so let's take a look at that so then choose sample track I'm going to come under there and you can see at the moment we have it set to Mono using the default values taken at the stereo you can see that default to both of the values of my sort of two channel input interface if you have more you'll have different options available in here where you can choose any of those two adjacent tracks so let's choose that and now if we start to hit record aside the record something will now have a stereo track some guitar and some vocals at the same time giving us a stereo track so you can see is pretty easy to create both mono and stereo tracks in Reaper so next let's move on to MIDI and see how we can work with that so working with vidiian Reaper is a little different but the basics are pretty much the same however you have two options when it comes to creating a MIDI track you can right click the TCP or the track control panel and select insert virtual instrument on new track and it'll immediately create a MIDI track view so if we come down to an empty area right click and say insert virtual instrument click on there that will ask us what's the virtual interview you want to use so we're just going to choose ezdrummer for this is the art it's too easy key to this easier if you double click that now inserts that in there for us and we now have an instance of ez keys all set up with the right MIDI channels and everything configured for us this is great and if we're working with something like a drum sequencing software that maybe uses 8 or 16 channels it's a very quick way of be able to create all those multiple channels simultaneously well that's moving a little bit too far ahead for now just to know that if you want to you can use that method the second method let's just delete that is to actually assign this to become a MIDI track so we've got the input and output like we did earlier on we took a look at setting out to be mono and stereo we do the same kind of thing with MIDI so to do this all you need to do select the input to use your specific MIDI device so we come up to the arrow you can see we have input MIDI and anything that's available to play MIDI on your interface or your setup however you've got things configured it's option in here to go and choose to assign that so for this example I'm going to use all MIDI inputs and I'm going to say all channels that now creates a MIDI channel and you can see all MIDI track and you can see now let's assign everything in there so if we come up to this and we want to just select a small area and insert some MIDI in there we can click that now that creates a placeholder for our MIDI and if we double click on there we can start adding our MIDI information into it start sequencing our software now a useful little trick at this point is if you're dealing with a MIDI sequencing package for example easy keys that has its own MIDI tracks in there we can start to utilize those without having to have the interface itself open so it's going to show you this this is a little bonus tip should we say so we've got easy keys set up bonus tracks let's just open that up and as you can see easy quiche ifs with a whole ton of MIDI information in your libraries and so on this works the same with things like superior drummer ez drummer a whole range of different MIDI based applications so what we can do is we've got this piece of MIDI information as part of a track if I want to use that and start working with that without having to have ez Keys open I can simply come to this MIDI information drag it up onto a MIDI track and you can see once I let go close this down you can see that MIDI information is now inside there and we can start manipulating it so if I wanted to I can double click on that that'll open our MIDI editor we switch it over to make sure into sort of a keyboard view and we'll specify that we're going to be dealing with piano roll so you can see all our notes and information is all there so we can start editing this and doing whatever we want with it but all inside Reaper itself as opposed to have it to have easy keys open so pretty cool very useful especially when you want to start building up MIDI information pulling it from libraries and so on and using that as the basis for the song or a piece of audio that you're working with so let it go that's pretty much what I wanted to cover in this video it's all about showing you different ways of creating tracks assigning different kinds of order you want to work with and just showing you the many ways that Reaper offers you for creating and working with tracks there's tons and tons of other things that I could show you when it comes to this and we'll move on to more advanced topics in a future video but for now this is great just to show you exactly how you can work with tracks in Reaper well I hope you found the video useful if you did please hit the subscribe button to be kept up to date with all the new content we add give the video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it thumbs down if you didn't if you any comments questions or feedback on this video or as I said the top of the video you've got any ideas or suggestions on how you work with tracks inside Reaper pop those in the comment section below and share the knowledge and the skills with everybody else well until next time take care

Channel: ReaperTV

Views: 22,042

Keywords: Reaper, DAW, Home Recording Studio, Mixing, Mastering, PsmegTV, ReaperTV, Reaper tracks, how to add tracks in reaper, how to delete tracks in reaper, how to add multiple tracks in reaper, how tracks work in reaper

Id: EcTnoVINS7U

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2017