Recording Your First Vocal Track in REAPER

[Music] hi I'm Kenny Choi welcome to another one of my tutorials in this video I'm going to show you a record your first vocal track reaper now the purpose of this video is to help beginners record your first vocal track so it's not going to be a lot of advanced features in this video but it's really meant for singers we just want to record some vocals now you probably boy a computer what are you into face like this with a few inputs and a place to plug in your mic right here so you'd want to install all the drivers that come with your interface and once they're installed we can then open Reaper when it opens up it should give us this dialog asking us to select our audio interface so hit yes and should open up with this window now if a dozen we go over here to the options menu and choose preferences then we can scroll down under audio to devices this is the same dialog from before now I'm using a Mac so my dialogue looks like this where I'm going to choose my audio interface right here then I'm going to choose the request block size right here I'm gonna change this to 128 which is gonna affect the latency of the interface in other words how long it takes the vocal to go into the computer and back out to my speakers or my headphones and if you're using a PC it's probably gonna look more like this we could set up the audio system to be ASIO choose a driver right here and the ASIO configuration right here and if we open up this we could just the latency there as well or we could choose request box size from here but again on my Mac so I'm gonna choose it right here now we could use a lower number to reduce the latency even more but that may cause glitching in the audio if your computer is a bit older or less powerful so you want to find the perfect balance between the lowest latency and how fast or powerful your computer is and 128 is a good place to start so it said okay this is what Reaper looks like our tracks are going to go over here and our mixer is down here now if you don't see the mixer show up go to the view menu and just choose it right here now to put the mixer down here with our tracks up here so I could double click to create a new track let's name it focal double-click over here then we're going to set the input to this track we'll go into record by hitting the record button then right over here we can choose our input but mono right over here we see our inputs my interface has four one two three four you might have two or a or sixteen and I'm gonna choose and I'll go on which on the interface would be input one right here just the gain or how loud a microphone is with the gay knob or similar on your interface so let's try singing into the mic or having our singer sing into the mic and see how loud it shows up on the meter [Music] the perfect level for recording is right in between minus 12 and minus 18 any louder and in my clip and any lower we're not getting enough signal so right in between minus 12 and minus 18 and it's just the gain to compensate [Music] that looks pretty good so now we had some effects to the track to make it sound better and to make the level more even so we'll go right here to the track effects they're going to add effects that are applied after the recording so we could always change them later click this button let's go over here to the caucus effects and the first effect we're going to choose is react aam which is a compressor just double-click it it opens up this effect which is going to compress or reduce the dynamics of a vocal so the router notes will be quieter and the quiet notes will be louder making it sound more even and more usable in a mix so you choose the preset aggressive vocal then we could readjust our threshold to get about three to five DB of reduction right over here bring it up and down to compensate [Music] [Music] that looks pretty good next we're gonna add an EQ to adjust the tone of the vocal this is gonna change depending on the mic you choose and of course the sound of your voice let's just make it brighter to start double click over here this time we'll choose RIA EQ double click it now the EQ gets added after the compressor and here's the EQ right here you can boost the top-end to make it brighter well the low-end to make it deeper and again we're gonna adjust this to taste but could always change it afterwards so don't worry if you boost or cut too much it's too Bumi you could bring it down but for now let's just boost a few DB of top-end at about 3 kilohertz that sounds pretty good for now now we'll let it delay or an echo to the vocal once again we'll double click over here and this time we'll choose RIA the way double cook it we're gonna turn down the length musical to zero and in the delay time in milliseconds let's use 180 milliseconds what's paying it to the left let's create another one by adding a tap pan this one to the right and change this to 200 and 10 milliseconds which will create a stereo effect then we could adjust how much delay we're hearing with the wet control that's a bit too loud let's bring it down and again we could change this later to just how loud our delay is compared to the vocal and finally let's add a reverb to the vocal the bigot sonic gets recorded in a big open space double-click over here this time we'll choose RIA verb' double-click it I'm gonna set the room size to be about 95 the dampening or how bright the reverb is to be about 8 then we could adjust the dry by double-clicking to keep it full up and the way to decide how much reverb we're hearing that's a bit too much let's bring it down to about 23 that sounds pretty good and now we're ready to record some vocals let's close our effects let's bring in an instrumental track to sing - I've already downloaded an instrumental track right here so he dragged it in from our hard drive and drop it right down here under the tracks that's gonna create a whole new track right down here with the instrumental we dragged it we could adjust the levels of our instrumental track against the vocal in our mixer well the knobs appear let's bring this down a bit to make room for the vocal so we could just hit the play button over here we'll hit the spacebar on a computer keyboard [Music] [Applause] [Music] so now we're ready to record our first vocal track we can hit the record button right here and just start singing or use the keyboard shortcut which is control R on the PC or command R on the Mac just give it a shot [Music] [Music] and if we're happy with it we could play it back just like this we can change the effects on playback if we're not happy with this recording just select it delete it and record it again [Music] [Music] and just like that we recorded our first vocal tract in Reaper when you want to do this again and you don't want to start all over or if they do is save this track as a track template so at this track and right-click it save tracks as truck template and just give it a name let's delete this one let's say we're starting over we can just right-click over here insert track from template and choose vocal track now puts the track right here with all the effects where we saved it ready to go and any project we're working it so we could drag in an instrumental right to here and be ready to go right away [Music] [Music] and just like that we're ready to record in any project we want and when we're happy with any of the songs we recorded we can go to the file menu and choose save project as that's going to open up this dialogue where we could save our project or a song make sure we choose these two options right here there's going to create a folder for the project and copy all the media or the audio we recorded into that folder making it a self-contained folder for that song just give it a name and it's safe so that's pretty much it that's how to record your first vocal tract in Reaper hope you learn something hope you can use it and I'll see you next time sex [Music] you

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 72,805

Rating: 4.9617462 out of 5

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Id: dD_xXJC4sJY

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020