The Chord Gun (MIDI) in REAPER

[Music] hi i'm kenny joya welcome to another one of my tutorials in this video i'm going to show you how to use the cord gun or the midi cord gun in reaper now the cord gun or the midi cord gun is a script created by the user pandabot on the reaper forum basically it allows us to create midi chords especially complicated chords very easily and very quickly in reaper it's a free script but he will accept donations right here now because it doesn't come with reaper we do need to install it first so go to your browser and search reaper stash click this link and then search cord gun this file should show up click it and then download the script then go back to reaper and go to the options menu and go down here and choose show reaper resource path then find the scripts folder open it and then find the file we just downloaded and put it in the scripts folder then we can go back to reaper go to the actions menu show action list then go to new action load rescript then find that file and double click it to load it into reaper then find it in here and double click it to run it and it should open a window that looks like this this is the cord gun or the midi cord gun i'm gonna make it a bit bigger then right click it and dock it so we can see it in the upper right corner over here now we can see the script and the arrangement window at the same time so i created a project over here with a piano pad and a few drum sounds now it's important for this that we set up the midi input using the virtual midi keyboard this is how the script communicates with our midi tracks or we can just choose all midi inputs all channels so now we should create a midi item to place our chords into hold down control on the pc or command on the mac and just draw in a midi item then we should double click it to open it because we need to see what chords we're placing in this item so the way this works is we can just click these chords over here to hear them or shift clip them to place them in our midi item right up here we choose the scale or the key c d whatever key we want and the scale we can choose right here major minor pentatonic and we can see the resulting notes from that scale right over here so if we choose pentatonic these are the notes in that scale let's put it back to major so like i said if we just click on any of these chords we're going to hear them or audition them now we should know some keyboard shortcuts the zero key will turn off the note that we're hearing which is kind of helpful for this script because it plays the note indefinitely like this here's a c chord and it keeps playing until we hit the zero key and the numbers up here show which chord is chosen in that scale so in a c scale the second note is a d the third note is an e and so on and we could use those numbers to hear each chord instead of clicking them so if i hit one we hear the c chord hit three we hear the e chord and in this key it's an e minor so this is really helpful for making sure our chords are in the key of our song with alternate chords as well these are the typical ones we use in this key but there's alternate ones down here making it a lot easier to try different chords for our progressions let's keep it simple and create a chord progression in the key of c major we'll first choose the type of notes we want by changing the grid let's change it to whole notes and now it's going to record or place whole notes if we shift-click these buttons or hold shift and hit the number that we've chosen over here so if we shift click the c it puts that c major chord right here then it moves the cursor over ready to place the next chord in the progression so let's choose a g but this time we'll hold down shift and five because the v chord in the progression shift five and that places that chord over here then let's add an a minor shift click and finally an f major shift click or shift 4 and just like that we created a chord progression in this midi item let's hear it back sounds pretty good if we wanted to change the octave of our chords we could change that up here we could also change the inversion over here for example this c chord is a bit low compared to the others so if we want to change that inversion to be a bit higher just put our cursor right at the beginning and swap it out with a different inversion we could hear it just by clicking this and we can also see the inversion by looking over here let's try this one instead shift click and replace that chord in this section with that inversion of the c major so it sounds like this i think that's a bit better and we could also swap out our chords just by selecting them marquee select these notes and just shift click any change we want for example let's change the second chord instead of being a g let's make it an e minor shift click and replace that chord right here and because it's still selected we can swap it out until we're happy with that chord let's try an e minor seven instead and that changes that chord on the fly and we can swap each chord out that easily let's change the third chord to be an f let's change this one to be an f minor and that sounds like this so just like that we could swap out one chord at a time just by selecting those notes and shift clicking the different chord variations let's try a different rhythm let's change this to be quarter notes let's change the progression to start on the a minor shift click but we'll do that four times to create four quarter notes in a row then we'll switch it to the f four times then the c then the g and that adds some rhythm to the part and we can shorten the notes by selecting them all trim them or holding shift or duplicate them like this [Music] or just play on the upbeats we can still swap out our chords even if they're playing a different rhythm let's change this to an e minor or an e major or an e major seven so it's very easy to swap out our simple chords for something more complicated and we can also play a rhythm with a midi keyboard and transfer that to chords like this let's go into record and play a midi [Music] rhythm now we can keep this rhythm but just change it to a chord progression let's select these three make it a c major select these three make it an e minor change these to an f and these to a g so you can create your own rhythms but still use these chords and swap them out for more interesting chords this easily let's change the f to be an f sus2 and the g to be a g sus4 [Music] so just like that you could play around with different voicings or more interesting chords in our progressions and we could also perform our chords using the script let's delete this all again go into record and just play the chords we want and that records the part as chords and we can also record the chords just by hitting shift and the numbers let's make a chord progression using our c our d minor our e minor an f sus two and a g sus four and now if we use the numbers up here we can trigger those chords in real time let's delete all this and we'll perform shift 1 shift 2 shift 3 shift 4 and shift 5. [Music] and just like that we performed those chord changes based on the chords we selected let's shorten the notes a bit [Music] so that's pretty much it that's the cord gun or the midi cord gun in reaper i hope you learned something hope you can use it and i'll see you next time thanks [Music] ah

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 43,245

Rating: 4.9765658 out of 5

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Id: -v5oE79NJMg

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020