The Major Parts of REAPER on a Mac

hi there this is stephen gonzalez with steven gonzalez voiceovers how are you doing today if i don't know where things are in a daw then it can become a really frustrating experience very very quickly and so to alleviate this i'm going to introduce you to the major parts of reaper and that's what's next on reaper for voice talent in this video we're going to be looking at the major parts of reaper starting from the top and going all the way down and then we're going to be looking along the way at what dockers are their advantages their purposes all this good stuff and then also we're going to be looking at the reaper theme adjuster this is something that's new with version 6 and it can be a very very powerful friend or an extremely powerful enemy depending on how it's used and with that without further ado let's get started here we have a project within reaper at the very top we have what's known as the menu bar this is that ubiquitous menu bar that mac always has depending on the application what's different about reaper as you can see we have all these nice menus here if you don't like the menu you can throw it away and start from scratch there are certain things within reaper that are configurable and there are certain things that are extremely configurable and then there are certain things that are completely configurable the menu system is one of those completely configurable things now with version six they did clean up the organization a great deal but still some people may want their own type of menu system while it can be done and in a course video i'll show you how that's done to the right of the menu we have what i'm calling the interface information button here we have the sample rate 48 kilohertz we have the bit depth 24 the format which is wave we have two in and two out channels we have 10 24 samples per block and then we have this thing called latency it takes time for the signal to get through the microphone to the interface and then from the interface to the computer then from the computer back to the interface and then from the interface to the cans what those two numbers here are saying is the delay that it's estimating from the interface to the computer which is 24 and then again the return which is from the computer to the interface again 24 milliseconds this is going to come into play when we discuss about record arming our track which is going to happen in this video something called monitoring echo it is one of the most um interesting experiences that you'll ever have as a voice talent trust me it's amazing beneath the menu bar we have the title bar and the title bar has the title of the project whether it's modified or not if it's saved and there have been no modifications since the last save then this disappears then we have of course reaper version number and the architecture type should be 64 should not be 32 and then the license level beneath the title bar to the left this is going to be probably your best friend if you're doing something repetitively within the same project or you're doing the same thing from one project to another then that action might be a good candidate to place in the icon toolbar which is what this is i say the icon toolbar but if we pull up the toolbar's context menu and we go to switch toolbar we see that it's actually one of 17. i've seen some reaper users both voice talent and musical people do each toolbar at each phase of the creative process for example in the voice talent realm we could have toolbar one all about recording then we can have two bar two all about editing and then two bar three would be all about processing toolbar four could be all about rendering and delivery beneath the icon toolbar we have what's known as the tcp or the track control panel you're going to hear reaper users say tcp and mcp all the time the mcp is a mixer control panel and we're going to be getting into that in just a few minutes it's sort of the cousin of the tcp with version 6 we have something called a theme adjuster and that's going to come into play later on in this video now the track control panel contains these the track controls and this track control you can see has the record arm button the label the volume the effects for playback whether it's bypassed or not the envelope automation button engagement whatever you want to call it this is the volume indicator in other words how much higher or lower is this volume knob being turned then we have the panning which kind of interests me because you don't see a pan button anywhere this is just a reminder hey i'm still in the center here for voice talent this should almost always be in center now if you're doing podcasts or something like that where you want panning then we can talk about panning later and then we have this blank space here there's some hidden things there which we're going to get to in just a second we have the mute we have soloing and we have phasing as voice talent you'll probably never use it to the right of the icon toolbar and the tcp starting from the top here we have the region lane or the region row and it contains regions which is what this is a region is an object that indicates a time frame and in a later video i'll explain much more in depthly what a region does and how we can use it in voice projects beneath the region lane we have the marker lane and again you guessed it it contains markers instead of a time frame markers indicate an instantaneous point in time i use markers and regions all the time in another video i'll show you how markers work beneath the markers lane we have what's known as the timeline or the ruler yours actually might look like this remember reaper's meant primarily as a music production software package but that doesn't say that it can't be vo friendly and what i did to change the units here i pulled up the timelines context menu and at the bottom of the menu we have units and i can just say minutes and seconds and there we are much more user-friendly for voice talent within the timeline we have two things that are very very important the first one this upside down triangle with a vertical line underneath this is the cursor it can be one of three cursors actually it can be as it stands right now the edit cursor or it can be a record cursor if you're in record mode or it could be the playback cursor which would be without the upside down triangle if you are in playback mode also we see that there is this kind of triangle pointing to the northwest and then another triangle pointing to the northeast and then you have this barrier in between and it's shaded underneath this is what's known as a time selection without time selections it would be extremely much more difficult to work in any kind of daw what time selections in reaper allows you to do is things like auto punch where whenever you hit record it won't record unless it's in the time selection and then once it leaves the time selection it goes back to playback mode generating regions that's how i generated this region i said i want a time selection here i hit a certain keystroke and it generated a region underneath the timeline we have where you're going to be spending the majority of your time this is what's known as the arrange area inside the arrange area you're going to have things like envelopes and all this good stuff but you're also going to have this this is what's known as a media item a media item is a very very important part of reaper this is what allows reaper to be what's known as a non-destructive daw or non-destructive editor you'll note that above this media item you have a file name for a wav file this isn't actually the way file itself it's a representation of a wav file think of maybe your house and the living room let's say it's in the corner of your house you have a window in the front and you have a window on the side and you look through the front window and you see your sofa let's say and then you go around to the side of the house you look through that window and you still see the same sofa but it looks differently because it's a different point of view that's what media items do the only time that reaper actually touches a wav file is in one of four things either recording gluing freezing or something called stemming those are the only times that reaper actually touches the wave when it's generating those waves other than that the media item is what reaper uses and here's what i'm talking about i'm going to do is called a split and now i've turned this one media item into two i separate this in a destructive daw what i've just done is introduced a bit of silence in the wav file itself but if i untrim what's doing what's called an untrim you'll see that the original audio is here it's not taken away it's just hidden this is the purpose of media items and this is what it means to be non-destructive beneath the tcp and beneath the arrange area we have what's known as the transport bar the transport bar contains the ubiquitous transport controls that all daws have play and record stop pause loop left and right all this good stuff to the right of the transport controls we have the play cursor position it's usually of the same units as the timeline and then to the right of the cursor locator we have what's known as the reaper status what is going on in reaper right here and now it's stopped right now but it could be in recording mode it could be playing back it could be in pre-roll whatever it happens to be this is what's happening in reaper right now to the right of the status we have the selection area we have the startup selection we have the end of selection we have the length of selection to the right of the selection area we have two parameters which will be very very useful in punch and roll the project tempo and the project time signature now bpm stands for beats per minute right now it's set to 120 which means of course 120 beats per minute or two beats per second 4 4 says there are four beats in a measure so therefore given that the bpm is 120 a single measure is going to be worth two seconds we're going to be making some adjustments some tweaking to those numbers in the very next video so that measures equals one second to the right of this i really have never used the automation global override so we'll bypass it to the thing that can cause extreme confusion if for some reason you're playing back and all of a sudden you sound like you're on helium and talking really fast or if your store is showing large you know that that type of thing generally you need to look at your playback rate control which is what this is if it's sounding like your own helium it's probably greater than 1.0 as it is now if you're talking really slowly in that kind of low kind of thing then it's probably less than 1.0 luckily all you have to do is double click on this knob and it'll go back to 1.0 beneath the transport bar we have a docker now i know it looks like a mixer but it's actually a docker and i can tell that because of this tab right here now what exactly is a docker well a docker can allow you to do one of two things it can either allow you to position certain functions on the screen in certain positions or and or it can allow you to sort of have two functions share the same amount of real estate on the screen and here's what i mean let's say that i don't want the mixer here on the bottom that i want it on the right side of the screen well i take the tab and i drag it and you'll note you'll see this rectangle watch what happens with this rectangle as we approach the right side of the screen it snaps and it elongates you see it spreads out throughout the entire height of the screen and whenever i let go of it there's the mixer and i can do things like adjusting the width of the docker and therefore adjusting the mixer inside of it now let's say that i don't want the mixer here that i actually want the mixer on top well i can drag the tab again on top and again it snaps and it spans the entire width of the screen as you can see here when i release the mixer is there that is the first definition of docker where you can position certain functions on certain parts of the screen but you'll note something here there's so much wasted real estate here maybe we can put something else that we use all the time here like the effects browser let's say so we go to view and we go to effects browser or shift f and we're greeted with the effects browser i can come down here and i can say doc fx browser in docker and now it's sharing the same real estate as the mixer height notwithstanding but you can always adjust this you see and now it won't scoot like it did before but there's still so much wasted real estate here we're going to be solving that in just a few moments let's put a third function the video window in this docker so we go to view and we go to video and again it says floating window and we pull up its context menu and say doc and now the mixer the video and the fx browser are all in one docker you may have noticed i did something just now i just dragged the video tab when it was in the middle i dragged it over to the right that's how you can adjust the order of the tabs you just take the tab and you drag it over whichever way you want to go see that let's get to ordering things let's say that we want the effects browser in the middle we want the video on the site over here well we first take the effects browser and we drag it to the upper right hand corner and unlike last time which the indicator the location indicator span the entire width of the screen you'll note now it only spans half of the screen when we release the effects browser is now to the right of the mixer and video tabs now let's take the video and do the same thing drag it up to the upper right hand corner you'll note that the indicator doesn't even span halfway that's because we're not going to be going halfway with it and when we release there we are the three dockers are in line and this is what i'm talking about positioning and sharing real estate and all that good stuff let's go ahead and get rid of all of these dockers here and put the docker back down here and now let's talk about what's inside this docker the mixer control panel or the mcp before version 6 the mcp was quite literally the mirror counterpart of the tcp and it still is to a certain extent for example if i hit the mute button here on the mcp well it's indicated in the tcp now if i unmute and the tcp and i solo well whenever get back down to the mtp you see that it's there this actually breaks whenever it comes to this route button you'll note there is no route button in the tc this has to do with what's known as the theme adjuster and that's where we're going next we can go to options themes and theme adjuster color controls and we're greeted with this thing that could be either your best friend or your worst enemy depending on how it gets out of your control this is what's known as the theme adjuster so let's say for example that some people's eyes are still sensitive even though it's muted colors the eyes are still sensitive maybe we like working in the dark or whatever and we like darker themes well we can take this gamma slider and we can slide it all the way down and notice what happened to the theme now it's dark dark dark now if we ever want to come back to this line here we can just simply double click on the fader and there it is and you can knock yourself out you can do some very unfortunate things like that for example and we can double click and bring it all back let's hit this arrow here and go to the track control panel adjuster and this is what i was talking about earlier you'll see that there's a bunch of real estate here that's got some hidden stuff and here it is you can see it and this is what i'm talking about as far as the route button being here in the mcp but not in the tcp because the theme adjuster says if the mixer is visible hide the routing button in the tcp we click on height to unhide it's a toggle and now you see the route button in the tc right there now you'll note that the effects button and the automation button moved out of the way so that the route button could take its place now whenever we hide it everything adjusts back to where it was and same thing with pan and width if i want the pen knob there it is if i don't want it i can always hide it to be honest unless you're a podcaster i would keep it hidden because we don't need pan and width if the track is not selected hide labels and values what does that mean note here this indicates where this volume knob is located and center is where the pan is at the time so if i unselect you'll note that disappear that's because if track is not selected which it is not now then hide those values if i select it again they appear again if the track is not armed hide all kinds of stuff but if it is armed don't hide it i'm going to introduce you to something that is going to knock your socks off and i'm being very sarcastic here when i say that it's what's known as monitoring echo starting with version 6 kakos has monitoring on by default when a track is being record armed and what happens is this latency that i spoke about earlier that 24 24 milliseconds is going to come into play whenever we hit this record arm button we're going to see a vu meter along with a peaks indicator here we're going to also see the record mode we're going to see the input where it's getting its stuff from in other words and then also we're going to be looking at the record mode the input where it's getting the input from all this good stuff okay let's experience this monitoring echo in three two one now how you like this this is monitoring echo okay basically what's happened if you see you have the input which you can always change it and then we have the in effects here this is basically what we would call outboard effects in other words whenever you're recording something what's applied to the audio before it gets put into a media item and it you can't take it out don't even worry about it normally this is empty and then we have the monitoring here what is it monitoring and then we have the monitoring mode if you will let me uncheck the um record arm now and sanity ensues again we're going to be experiencing monitoring echo again when we get to recording now let's go to the mixer control panel and again it's analogous to the tcp you can do certain things if the track is selected if it's not if the track is armed if it's not all kinds of border issues you know that type of thing you can do a different layout you can do different sizes that type of thing then we have the custom colors knock yourself out because i'm going to keep it on reaper six and it goes to envelopes which we're going to be getting into in another course video and then finally back to global settings and speaking of global settings that's actually going to be our next topic in the next video when we talk about tweaking some areas within reaper that'll make it even more vo friendly now the link to the maccentric playlist is in the description below and if you found this video educational if you had if you enjoyed it then click on that like button subscribe to my channel hit that notification bell sending it to all so that way whenever i go live or i upload a video then you'll get a notification and again if you have any comments or questions please put them in the comment section below i'll try to get to them as soon as i can this is stephen gonzalez with stephen gonzalez voiceovers wishing you all all the best and i'll see y'all in the next video

Channel: REAPER for Voice Talent

Views: 591

Keywords: reaper daw, reaper tutorial, how to, digital audio workstation, download daw, best daw software, cockos reaper, Steven Gonzales Voiceovers, SGVO, RFVT, Reaper for Voice Talent

Id: oSRgFtzRejA

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020