Switching from CUBASE to REAPER!!! (For One Song)

what's up everyone David here and I do a lot of content on this channel about the Cubase digital audio workstation but I recently had a mixing project with a deadline and I was on the road and I didn't have my Cubase elicenser dongle thing so I decided to pay the 60 bucks and finally get a registered licensed for reaper which is a competing da W that is much cheaper but equally as powerful and I used Reaper to finish the mixing project on time even though I did the mix on headphones don't tell anyone it was a breeze and Reaper as a mixing environment was awesome but mixing is really a small part of what I do and I prefer to be producing and arranging both an audio and MIDI and after seeing the raw power of such an affordable da W I had to ask myself would Reaper work as a production environment so I installed it here in the studio and I went for it and I liked it I I really liked it it has a lot to offer and the question that needs to be asked is will talking leaf media switched to Reaper permanently and the answer to that question which is also a question is and the answer to that question and an examination of the differences between Cubase and Reaper is coming up in the video that follows so stay tuned [Music] now before we get into the meat and potatoes of this video which is comparing Reaper to Cubase and trying to determine which one's better I'd like to talk a little bit about defaults you see defaults are how software comes out of the box and I think a good example of this is Microsoft's Bing you may know it as the thing that you used one time so that you can install Chrome but according to Microsoft the market share for the use of Bing and desktop search in America is 33% and while that seems hard to believe their figures worldwide are a more believable 10% that means that one out of every ten people you see as you walk down the street is a bing user not a Google user and while that may be hard to believe I think the reason for that is because Bing is the default search engine of any device that comes with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Windows is the primary desktop platform of most people in the world so default play a huge role in the window through which you see the world now as a Cubase user there's a lot of defaults that I use that are different in Reaper and in Reaper those defaults seem wrong because they're not the same as Cubase however there's three types of defaults defaults that are better and reaper because they make more sense defaults that are worse in reaper because they make less sense and then the faults that are neither better or worse they're just different and yet they're worse because they're different and you're not used to them but I thought for the sake of argument I should keep Reaper at its default state I didn't change any key bindings I used the standard theme this is the theme that I'm using and people will say well it's all customizable in Reaper and that is a feature of Reaper is that everything you can customize you can customize the look and feel of it but it's also a bug because if you go to the Reaper forums they'll ask you what skin are you using and the way that you would accomplish tasks changes in many ways based upon what customizations you've made your user interface now that can be a good thing if you're a power-user and you've tweaked it to be the perfect audio production environment for yourself and yet you'd have to really be that power user you have more choice and yet it's more difficult to find solutions to problems because that choice allows you to do whatever you want with the software now some people will say when I say in this video I had a hard time doing this or I had a hard time doing that they would say oh that's easy you just use this or you write a custom script and then it'll be available to you but I didn't really want to focus on that I wanted to focus on how does reaper run out of the box and compare it to Cubase and there are some idiosyncratic things that are a bit different for instance the default play behavior we can see right here I'm at marker 3 the default play behavior is to go back to where you initially started playing so we can hear that and whereas Cubase would just pause it at that time where I stopped in Reaper it actually defaults to go back to play where it was and in order to stop it in place you have to hit control spacebar so that just takes a little getting used to I think that's one of those changes that's not better or worse that's just different and it makes sense why you would have a default behavior like that for your cursor but I'm used to the Cubase one so it makes more sense to me and if I kill the mixer here I want to tell you one thing that every software program does differently Adobe Premiere which is my video editor does a different than Cubase and does it different than Reaper is Mouse zooming so in Reaper if you just use your scroll wheel on your mouse you zoom in horizontally I think you have to hit alt and scroll to scroll sideways and then scrolling here I'll expand these that we have more room well scroll vertically but you have to have focus here control scroll zooms vertically and shift scroll don't do nothing now in Cubase control scroll zooms in horizontally that's just what scroll does scroll up and down let's see let's just create scroll up and down regardless of where you are moves up and down in the project that would be zoom on Reaper shift scroll moves yourself left and right and alt scroll doesn't do anything it's the same as the default scrolling behavior so that's another example of not better or worse just different the cool thing about Reaper like I said the customization is that you have options to change your mouse your mouse behavior those are options that are not available to you in Premiere and in Cubase as far as I know you let me know in the comments if I'm wrong but you can change what the scrolling does in Reaper and if I were to invest more time and energy into Reaper I would probably change it to the Q based behavior because that's what I'm so used to and then there's things that make more sense but they're just different and I don't like them like in Reaper to record something and we'll just move to the end of the project here you hit control R and it just records and control ours definitely it makes sense as a hotkey as opposed to Reaper IVA as opposed to Cubase where you hit asterisk on your number key ctrl R makes more sense but I found myself just so used to something that I feel like it's superior even though it's not superior at all so now that we've talked about how Cubase and Reaper are not better are not worse just different let's talk about a few ways in which Reaper is better so I think there are three key key areas where Reaper does shine in the first area where Reaper shines over Cubase is that you don't need a stupid dongle to use it I was on the road I got the license key and it worked flawlessly on my laptop I installed the same license key down here on my desktop and boom no muss no fuss totally registered it is cross-platform and I think they have a Linux beta - so if you're a Linux nerd like me you can install it on some of your Linux laptops even though they're usually older than your Windows laptops and it's one-tenth the price and that's another big thing about Reaper is Cubase is not ten times better than Reaper I'll tell you that much right now it cost ten times as much plus you have to buy a stupid dongle that you have to card around with you so Reaper in terms of value it's offering a whole heck of a lot now in terms of functionally where does it excel over Cubase I think it excels mostly in flexibility of mixing like I said let's take this piano track here and we'll solo it [Music] [Music] so it's receiving input from MIDI all channels now I could actually change that to input from me and unlike Cubase there are no track types so there's just a track and you hear the effects I have as I monitor it in addition to the instrument so let's record so what you end up with is a track that can do both MIDI and audio on the same track it's more flexible so tracks can be groups they can be effects tracks they can be MIDI tracks they can be audio tracks a tract it's just a track and Reaper and but that gives you a little added flexibility if you don't want to add an audio track with the same symp signal chain as your piano you can just record audio into that track and where it really shines is in routing so every track has a little route button and you can route anything to anything in Reaper and make sidechaining even VST to plugins it makes mixing and sidechaining and routing you have to understand routing to be able to do it here but I mean I immediately took one look at this and said ok I understand what's going on it is as robust as cubasis system if if not more robust it's more robust and it it makes perfect sense to me and it's sort of the way that I wish Cubase was that you could just route anything to anything but most importantly I think most importantly for sure is that you don't need a stupid dongle to use it it's 2018 you know I got this license I was able to install it on my laptop and my desktop without having an extra piece of hardware and when you're producing on the go and you have you know an external hard drive may be with your sample libraries you have an audio interface and a MIDI controller they don't make laptops with all that many ports these days so you're gonna have to dongle it just to bring a hardware DRM and if that elicenser dongle gets broken you're out ten licenses of Reaper but those are the three advantages I think Reaper has over Cubase no dongle one-tenth the price and actually a more robust routing system and a more welcoming mixing environment and now I think it's time to get into what makes Cubase better than Reaper so Cubase does have some clear advantages over Reaper and I think that's undeniable one thing that you'll notice when you install Cubase is that you have a drum module groove agent SC you have a romp ler Haley on sonic se you have a bunch of synthesizers reaper does come with the synth called Rio cent it's a little janky but I had a bunch of notes that I was going to talk about about Reaper and the things that I found irritating about it a lot of that was just learning curve it wasn't it was user error not program error for instance there was a time when I was working and this output for master track panning I was clicking around because the panning was screwed up and this had gone to zero and it was so infuriating because panning didn't work at that point so if we solo this guitar [Music] it didn't work because this was at zero but it's really just the stereo width and that was a user error type thing so I can't really get too upset about it one thing I did find trouble with and I didn't read the manual too much was doing volume automation so as you can see here I just free drew it in the way that I felt it should be because I had a hard time if we look at something like this if you add I'm gonna just zoom in here if you add two points hey it won't honor that second point I mean it's it's strange or behavior that I'm what I'm used to or it's different maybe it's not stranger but it's different so I mean it sort of makes sense but it's different than cube it's where you just drawn one point you have to have like two stop points and that I found that a little bit frustrating to do the volume automation here so I just drew it in freehand which they LeDoux let you do that's why it looks so messy but that was a sort of better better or worse not different thing I feel like automation and Cubase automation in a reaper it's a wash but to be completely honest what cubics does shine is in MIDI editing I I did this bassline on my laptop and I wrote it in and now if I wanted to select those notes I don't have to ctrl click on them I can't just click and drag them and delete them the key editor in Reaper is not as good as the key editor in Cubase I'm gonna just say that right now the drum editor is not as good they look the same they're similar they have a lot of the same functionality but judging by defaults in Cubase there's all these expression parameters these coordinating parameters that are not available to you there's it's it's a more robust environment for MIDI sequencing in my honest opinion and yes it's a little bit different it's a little bit different but navigating with your arrows and making changes annually believe it's not just that I'm more used to Cubase I feel like it's easier and it makes more sense in Cubase than it does in reaper and that makes sense because Cubase is really sort of I think the best-in-class in terms of being able to sequence MIDI for da ws so I give Cubase the tip of the hat and basically for that reason for sequencing MIDI for coming with instruments and sort of providing a more complete and robust all-around production environment I think that I'll be sticking with Cubase from here on out but that's not to say that Reaper isn't a fantastic value that you can't accomplish good work in Reaper I think that it's the best bang for your buck da W on the market today and it's worth checking out it's just that there's a lot of things in Reaper that are not better or worse they're just different than Cubase and I think with any DAW the key is to choose a DAW become as comfortable as you can with it and then hope that they don't go out of business and in the case of Cubase hope that the next version gets rid of that stupid dongle so my name is David I hope you've enjoyed this little discussion about the differences between Reaper and Cubase if you've enjoyed this content please feel free to like or subscribe and take care of yourselves number one peace [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Talking Leaf Media

Views: 44,556

Keywords: Talking, Leaf, Media, Cubase Pro, Cubase 10, Cubase 9, Cubase, Artist, Elements, Reaper, DAW, Music Production, Mixing, Mixdown

Id: ZWzR-XVgVLU

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 14 2018