The Smart Tool in REAPER

okay how you doing I'm Kenny Joya welcome to another one of my tutorials in this tutorial I want to show you the smart tool in Reaper now the smart tool is one of those features you might not know about once you read the manual or check out a video on the subject which is why I'm making this one now so what a smart tool does is allows us to perform an action multiple times without hitting a keystroke or choosing a menu item one after another let me show you let's say you want to mute a media item let's drag one in let's take a drum loop here let's split it so we have more items to work with now say want to mute them we could obviously do with the keystroke or selecting it and choose a mute right here or even this button right here but we could also do it with a smart tool and it's a bit quicker that way if we're gonna do it many times let me show you let's go to a tool bar right click and choose customize toolbar and here's the main toolbar we can customize it by adding things to it go down here to add which opens up our actions typing mute and there's an action right here toggle mute if we choose this select it it shows up right here with an extra button let's give it its own icon right here change icon let's type in mute and we can choose this one right here now we have this button for muting save it close it I know this button right here and make this easier to see let's duplicate this toolbar up higher and make it bigger so right click choose position toolbar and choose in toolbar docker and we can dock it by dragging it up here and we get the main toolbar up here in addition to down here just to make it easier to see so now we could select this hit the mute button and it mutes it and again it unmute it not the most useful feature unless we make it a smart tool and we could do this by simply right-clicking so right-click it see how it changes the whole area lights up letting us know we're using this tool as a smart tool and also look at the cursor it changes to an arrow with an a letting us know smart tool is activated or armed I can click items and to become unit with this one this one this one this one click them again they become unmuted so if you want a mute or unmute a lot of items very quickly we could do it with a smart tool click to mute or cook them again time you to turn off this function just click it again and it turns off and now we're back to normal now this is a lot more useful if we get creative with it muting is kind of simple we can also use it for splitting items let's heal all this let's say another one right click customize toolbar edie and we'll choose split and we'll choose the action split item under mouse cursor and select right one of the great things about reaper is it gives us many options for one action we could split on the media cues preview zero-crossing under the mouse cursor under the mouse cursor selecting left under the mouse cursor selecting right well under the Edit cursor with no change of selection we're going to choose this one though so it's going to split the item and select the right side select and close it let's give it its own icon type in split and we could use a scissor icon to represent splitting seat it and close it and now we have this tool right here so now we can right click this one but also highlights now just click puts our items which is really handy for splitting items based on that transient let's undo all that and what zoom in let's say I wanted to split these based on the transi right click this click it here click it here and do it on every single hit so you can quickly split our loop based on each transient and off right here we could also use this for trimming let's delete that and start again bring in a drum loop let's turn off blooping the item so we could trim it out a bit further let's make a few more tracks let's duplicate this on your tracks let's say we wanted to clean up these items get rid of the noise over here and over here you could obviously do that by trimming it like this but it's even quicker by using the smart tool so it's right quick customize it hit add let's type in trim edge and that shows us just these actions so let's choose the trim left edge of item under the mouse select that one let's also trim the right edge under the mouse so it can close it let's change the order to be the left than the right save it and now we have two more tools to trim our items so we can choose the first one right click it zoom in just click it and it trims from the left side with this one and this one and it cleans it up nicely to do the right side right-click this one and do the same thing zoom in click the trim it and it cleans up on tracks or items quite nicely and very quickly now we could also use smart tools using the MIDI editor let's tweet these tracks in this item and let's create a MIDI item open it up in the MIDI editor let's add some notes a greatest at the quarter notes so let's add some aren't perfectly on the grid here here here here and here so now they're not quantized which means it out perfectly on the grid but we could do that either by clicking over here and fixing all of them or just fix some of them using the smart tool no note there's a different tool bar and one we've been using with our items there's a separate toolbar just for MIDI with a MIDI editor right-click it customize it and here the default options let's add one by choosing quantize in a filter and we can choose quantize notes position to grid but then close it and save and close so it shows up right here we can click items like this hit the button and it quantizes them but that's one by one if we want to do very quickly right click this makes it active now we can click just the notes we want to quantize this one sounds fine here we can leave it alone click this one it quantize it click this one maybe this one need the other ones alone so if you want to quantize just specific notes this is a pretty quick way of doing it good enough they had any keystrokes well click the item then hit quantize we could just hit it once and it's quantized it's quite a time-saver and click it again to deactivate that smart tool let's close this get rid of this item let's bring back in our loop another thing I want to show you is we can use custom actions that are triggered by the smart tool let me show you let's split these using the tool we created right-click it make a bunch of splits now let's say want to heal those which is something I do a lot I'm using dynamic splitting sometimes it splits the items too much so when I go back and heal them so create a custom action that'll do that to make a new tool let's customize this Edie and over here I have a custom action called heel if we edit it we could see what it consists of it's going to select the next item keeping the current selection so if we click an item it's gonna select that one plus the next one then it's going to heal the split in the two items so this is the custom action that I created and we could trigger this with the smart tool select and close it and it's right here named heal save and close this shows up right here and just click any of these items it's going to select the next one and heal the split all with one click do that one that one or that one well click the first one many times until it heals at all making one item it's quite a time-saver doing it with just one click let me show you one more custom action what's the activate this one let's customize it again Edie and this time let's choose de-esser this is a custom action I created the DS vocals let's see what it does and it the first thing it does is it inserts for envelope points at the time selection then it's gonna move those points down a bit which is one DB I made seven of them so it's gonna move it down seven DB then it's going to remove the time selection because we don't need it anymore so all that's going to happen with one custom action so we can select and close it and it shows up right here save and close it and we have a D s button right here so now if we create a volume envelope for this item right click go to take and choose take volume envelope who's an envelope created right here for volume now this trick works for the envelope on the track just as well we could have done it over here and turn it on for the track but I did it for the item would take now this item is in a vocal but let's pretend so it's right here let's pretend this is an S I believe it's a snare though so let's highlight this by right-clicking it turns on the smart tool and we can select from here to here click the envelope and it brings it down by 7 DB C 7 DB and it did it with one click so if I quickly want to des my vocal hope you just go through find each spot that has an S click it and it performs that action this one and this one so it's a very quick way of de-essing a vocal and doing it with one click and using the smart tool now obviously we could do this all day there's so many different actions to choose from that can all be triggered using a smart tool you just have to get creative with it and hopefully this give you some ideas so anyway that's the smart - and repr I hope you learn something and I'll see you next time Thanks

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 27,839

Rating: 4.9769783 out of 5

Keywords: Reaper (Musical Group), DAW, Tips and Tricks

Id: H2KCSEpOZWQ

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2015