REAPER Tutorial: Audio Editing Fundamentals

hi and welcome to another episode of reaper TV in this video I'm going to take you through some of the basics of editing the audio inside Reaper itself now this is the kind of thing that whenever you're doing any kind of recording you're going to come back and you're going to do a lot of editing so anything that can make that process quicker easier and more straightforward it's going to be a big advantage so I'm going to show you quite a few different methods of working with editing your audio let's take a look at doing all of that right now so when you're working with a repossession there's three different kinds of media the agenda you'll be working with even work with audio you're going to work with video and you're going to work with MIDI now most of what I'm going to cover in this applies to all three but you may well find there's some differences depending upon the kind of media that you're working with so let's start off I want to take a look and we're going to be working with some audio so you can see we have our sample already displayed in front of us I can select that and we can play it back if I play it back it's just simply a little piece of guitar so you can listen to that so there's a bit of audio nothing spectacular but it pretty straightforward so there's a couple of things we want to do first of all let's take a look at how the audio is actually working if we duplicate this or copy it or cut it up in any way it's completely non-destructive and if we do have duplicate version to this it's not multiple copies of the same piece of audio it's one piece of audio reference to multiple times so you're not going to increase the amount of storage you use if you have three or four or five or ten or 50 or hundred copies of this it makes no real difference it's still only one instance on your hard drive so a great way of working Reaper is completely non-destructive so we can work with this we can chop the audio up we can shrink it we can make it longer shorter whatever we want and the original source media is always still there available to us if we need it so let's start things off by just making some duplicates now we could if we wanted to simply select this come up to edit and we can say we want to copy the item or we can use ctrl + C on the keyboard or command C if you're using a Mac still you do not copy it position o playhead where we want that second copy I love your control or command-v to paste a second copy in there and you can see we now have two instances of that piece of audio that's a little bit time-consuming a little bit long-winded so it's a much easier way of doing that we can select a piece of audio but hold the ctrl key down or the command key on the Mac you can see we now have the cursor changing to a plus symbol and now if we drag that out we get identical duplicate of that without the need of doing the control C or command C control Z V or command V for copy and paste so you're going to have multiple instances of this we can easily do the same again so hold the control key down drive a second instance the third instance and so on and so forth let's just delete those a second so we'll do ctrl or command Z to undo each one of those so we've got our audio back to its original position so now if I wanted to I could easily come in to this position the playhead where I want let's just say I want to chop this audio up a little bit position the playhead and now I can press s on the keyboard for the standard split you can see that now splits the audio for us and we now have a second piece of audio there again we do them with Reed Buster with is completely non-destructive so if we move this out of the way just to get rid of that you can see if I come over to this first piece even though we've chopped this in half I can easily come over and you can see that if I take my mouse pointer over to the right-hand edge or the left-hand edge the mouse cursor changes to this double-headed arrow and we can now just drag that out and you'll see all of the original source audio is still there if I drag it past its first point you'll see we get this little indent that tells us we come to the end of that piece of audio and now what we're getting is a second instance of that so it's looping that audio around so we get second third and so on this works exactly the same when you're dealing with MIDI items as well so we can create a short passage instead of having to keep creating that or duplicating it we can simply drag that out and we'll get a second third fourth fifth so one instance of that audio so it's a great way bill to create simple short passages that are going to repeat and then just drag them out and you can have multiple instances of that same piece of audio so that's the first thing so let's just delete that second piece of audio that copied piece now if we want - we can easily create fades at the beginning or the end of our audio and we don't have to do anything special we can simply come to the top left hand corner if we want to deal with a fade in or the top right hand corner for a fade out and you see once we do that the mouse pointer changes to a different symbol again the sort of curve symbol the double-headed arrow all I need to do now is click and hold the left mouse button down and drag that over and you'll see we now start to create a fade you'll see we also get a pop-up that shows us how long that fade is go to the last of the overall audio and you can see we get a default curved fade if we want to edit that we can simply come over to this line the denotes the end of the fade and we can just simply grab that and stretch it out or shrink it depending upon how long or how short we want that fade to be and we can do exactly the same in the top right hand corner of the fade out so we drag that over we get the same line there once we let go we come back over that line and we can easily adjust that just by grabbing that line and moving it over if we want to get rid of that completely we can simply grab that line take it right to the end of the audio sample let go and you see that's completely gone so we just got rid of that fade if you want to change the type of fade that we use it we're not limited to this specific one we can simply come over when we get the little symbol to create the fade right click and we can then choose from multiple different types so we can have a linear option we can come in and we can choose any of these a sort of S option and again we can control exactly how long that fade lasts we're not limited to only having the same fade at the beginning and the end we can easily come over to the fade out choose that you can see we have a completely different fade option we can come in and choose any of the options available so we can mix and match to say to the beginning and the end of any audio sample that we want so again pretty cool we can just drag that over and give her that now you can see that by default it creates this sort of smooth transition curve you may not want that to be the case you may want to use the same curve each time and it's not this one but we can do that as well we just need to go into the preferences and make a couple of alterations there so what we need to do is come up to the preferences top right-hand corner and we're going to come down and we're going to choose the Media item defaults underneath the project which we click on there you can see the default fade in fade out shapes we can click on there and we can choose any that we want so let's just say we want to use this linear one at the default we can click on that click apply and okay and now we come to the fade out for example and drag that over you see we now get that linear fade out so again a real good time saver so let's just clear those off second just drag those over now let's just duplicate this item a second time like we did earlier on or you may have noticed when I drag the one item over like we go now we automatically get this crossfade what reaper's doing is it will automatically try to fade those two pieces of audio together so we get a nice smooth transition you don't get a harsh sort of one ending and the next one starting or where you have an overlap duplicate to the playback here we say but you can override that if you don't want that to be the case before we look at that let's take a look at the crossfade itself you can see as we move that over it automatically sets up how long it sinks that should be which is great we may want to adjust that and you can do that quite easily you can simply come over either grab the top right or the top left to deal with whichever part of that cross stage you want to deal with so we can easily drag that over so we've position the audio exactly we want it and then we can manage the crossfade itself manually so we can make it shorter by dragging it to the left or longer by dragging to the right and we've got exactly same level and control we have with the stayed in and the fade out we can come over to either the fade out or the fade in we can right click and we can choose the type of fade that we want for the specific piece of audio so we can control that quite easily so again we just need to make sure whether we have the little symbol that denotes the crossfade or the fade in fade out right click and choose the relevant fade that we want and once you do that we still have the control over we can still come over and edit that I just be simply grabbing the line on either the left or the right piece of audio and you'll see that we can easily adjust that so again pretty cool now you may not want that to be the case let's just delete that second piece of audio make sure that we've got everything set up and let's do the same thing again before we do let's just uncheck the auto crossfade enable so we'll just disable that we could use alt and X if we wanted to we can just use the icon the top once you click and hold the ctrl or the command key down to duplicate that you'll see once we do that and let go we now get an overlap with the two pieces of audio so let's just take a quick listen to that you can see that will get playback of both pieces of audio start on top of each other [Music] so everything sounds a little bit strange now if you don't want that to happen you basically want to have it chopped out the audio so we just end up with the two pieces where you want them we can do that as well so let's just undo this and do that duplicate so you only got the one copy on it we're going to do is we're going to come up to the options menu I'm going to choose trim content behind media items weren't editing so we're going to click on that that will able add options you can see that's now checked and enable so we can use that do the same against we'll hold the ctrl or command key down we'll duplicate that and drag it over keep an overlap there and you see that now position to the audio and it chops off anything to the left hand side so if you move that over a little bit you can see it's chopped the audio off so we don't end up with that overlap of audio so if we play that back now we'll see a definite chop between the two different sort of audio samples [Music] because this is non-destructive let's just get rid of that piece of audio and just simply restore the piece of audio that we just chopped off we can just literally come onto the right-hand side make sure we get this symbol with the two-headed arrow drag that back over and you can see our audio is all still there completely unaffected nothing cut off at all and the same goes for the left-hand side we can drag that over make sure that everything is in place we've got that full unaffected copy they're all ready to start working with should we need to where we chop things up pretty cool okay so we've covered probably most of the normal things you're going to do when you work with your audio how to chop things up how to adjust things but we're going to look at next is how we can adjust the rate of the audio as it plays back again we're going to use a modifier so we're just simply going to use a different keyboard shortcut alongside the mouse to give us a really cool useful effect now then at the moment this is playing back at normal speed however if we bring over our mouse to the right or the left hand side and hold the Alt key down or the option key on the Mac you'll see that we now get a little hand symbol and this hand symbol is going to allow us to change the rate of the audio at the moment it's playing back at real time so everything is playing back at the right speed however if I drag this over to do to the right hand side we stretch the audio out as you take a look in the top left hand corner it tells us the rate that the audio is being played back at which is 0.783 so the word is being played back at about three-quarter speed so we play that now you're going to hear it's playing back slower [Music] and conversely if we do the opposite such as undo that a second if I hold the alt or option key down and I drag this over to the left-hand side will now speed it up if we take a look at the rate in the top you can see it now says 1.2 oh so that's going to be playing back faster so let's have a listen to that [Music] [Applause] again really quite cool so if you need to adjust the speed of a passage works great with with voiceovers and things you can adjust that quite easily to get make sure that it fits in perfectly with any time in it you have so again that's just using the alt or the option key and dragging it to the left or the right hand side to increase or decrease the speed of the audio as it plays back so you've covered a real large amount of different options but there's a few more that I want to show you just the healthy speed of the process now we've seen how you can split an item by simply positioning the cursor where you want it and pressing s on the keyboard there's a couple of caveats with that the first one is if you just simply place the cursor roughly where you want it and press S on the keyboard you'll see every item is split which isn't always ideal because you end up with lots and lots of split through or multiple items where they're not required so let's just undo that now there's an easy way of doing this you just simply make sure that you've got the track you want selected or the audio you want selected now you can just double click on the track and I will select every item inside the entire track or alternatively you can come down position the cursor where you want it or the playhead where you want it click on the audio make sure that the piece is selected and then when you press S on the keyboard only that splits so you can see we can delete that and nothing else below has been affected which is a really quick time-saver so let's just undo that a second something outside I want to show you is how we can use time selections to make multiple cuts so let's just use this as an example and we'll just select a portion of audio so we've now got a time selection because the audio selected and now if I press both shift + S on the keyboard will now split to that time selections reset of s we use Shift + s we've now got a time selection split so you can see we've got two cuts which is quick and easy just undo that a second now what would happen if we don't have an item selected we do that so we'll deselect the first item hold the shift key down press s again and you can see as before because no media item was selected it creates those two cuts on every track of every piece of audio so you're going to end up with multiple different pieces on there not ideal but it does neatly lead me on to another option that we but gives us so we worry about the other tracks acerca let's just select all these three select these three pieces of audio by right click and drag we then go to the items menu and we have an option says he'll split items because we split it we can do that and that will now rejoin those back together as one complete piece of audio as always there's a little caveat to this let's just undo that let's just say for example that I've changed the speed the play rate of this particular piece of audio will line those back up if I do the same again I'll select those and come up to item and you'll hear your split items nothing will happen because the audio has been changed there hasn't just been split we've altered the timing adjustment on that so it means that it can't heal them so bear that in mind if you're trying to heal an item if you change the length the duration of the speed or anything like that of the audio it has to be exactly the same as it was originally to be able to use that heal option but we do have another way of working with that let's just say for example we have done that sort of alteration in speed and we just get rid of this time selection second what we can do is we can leave those in place we can select those items and instead of using the heal we can use the clue so if we come up to the item menu again and we come down to glue items you'll see that we'll now glue those together to make one piece of audio taking into consideration that change in speed that we applied to it so that will now make a permanent kind of fix to that so that's change that piece of audio grouped it all together and glued it into one piece of audio so let's just undo that again so we can go back to the way it was and we just step back a few times just to go back to where we were to start off with okay so before I wrap this video up over one more thing I want to show you we've seen how easy it is to move the audio around just by simply dragging it around that's quite nice and easy however we can also adjust the position of the audio inside the sample so what we can do is we hold the Alt key down or the option key on the Mac you the arrow no changes to this two-headed black arrow with arrow pointing to the left out of the right now when I hold that down I use the left mouse button and drag that over the audio changes inside it's kind of placeholder so we can adjust that and use that to fine tune it in relation to everything else without moving the actual audio sample itself around our sort of timeline area so that's just hold the alt or the option key down and you'll see that that will then change it over to the two-headed arrow and we can start moving the audio around simple as you can see if we go past the bounds of it it'll keep on going around until we get back to the original position of the audio and that pretty much wraps up all the different things I want to show you about editing the audio when you're using Reaper I hope you found these useful I hope you picked up a few bits and pieces you may not have known about or maybe expanded upon some of the things you did know but with some other ways of working with them when you're getting comments questions or feedback on this video or anything else we covered please pop those in the comment section below until next time happy mixing

Channel: ReaperTV

Views: 185,029

Rating: 4.9077725 out of 5

Keywords: Reaper, DAW, Home Recording Studio, Mixing, Mastering, PsmegTV, ReaperTV, how to, reaper (software), audio editing software

Id: kn2SlBMpzwY

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2017