The Ultimate Reaper Beginner Tutorial for Electronic Music Production

what's up guys and welcome back to gabe miller music today i'm going to take a stab at doing the ultimate beginner tutorial for making your first electronic song in reaper i'm going to walk you through the interface briefly there have been other people who have probably done better more in-depth explanations than i can give but i want to just show the process and talk you through kind of what you'll need and how to go about it so let's start off by right-clicking and inserting a new virtual instrument on a new track you can start with drums you can start with since you can kind of start with whatever you want in this case i'm going to start with a synth so let me quickly talk you through the concept of plugins a plug-in is essentially a small program that runs within a bigger program you've got instruments effects and all that kind of stuff so a virtual instrument is one kind of plug-in and then there are also effects plugins that you can add to shape that sound and there are a bunch of built-in plugins that come with reaper many of which are quite good and then i've augmented those with a couple that i've gotten for free that i will talk you through in a bit and a couple that i've paid for but i'm gonna try to stick to free plug-ins since you're probably just getting into this and want to see if producing electronic music is even for you or something you want to pursue further so ignore the rather staggering number of virtual instruments i've got in here in this case i'm going to go for helm which is a free synthesizer plugin so this is the interface it looks somewhat intimidating but for starters we can just go to presets so these are sounds already created with the synth that you can go in and use and tweak to your heart's content so i'm going to start off with some kind of lead here and just pick one at random and see how that sounds [Music] that'll work and i've got a midi keyboard here this is not necessary but it can help especially if you're used to a more hands-on approach to making music but i'll show you how to actually just program in notes in a second so the first thing i want to do is just bring the amount of delay down because it's a bit much that's too little so just and i'm not going to tweak too many other parameters i like this preset as it is so let's go ahead and change our bpm aka the speed of our song to 128 beats per minute this is kind of the standard edm tempo there are no hard and fast rules but this one's very common so i'm going to turn on my click aka my metronome let that record a bit and it's way too quiet right now so i'm going to go ahead and right click on the metronome icon and i get access to all of its parameters so i can actually go ahead and let's just crank this so that i can hear it over this rather loud synth also note that in order to record i've got this track armed if i disarm it i can hit buttons on my midi keyboard and nothing happens if i arm it that means it's ready to take an input same goes if you're trying to record an audio signal you need to arm the track to allow it to accept a signal in this case it's taking midi which is basically how uh keyboards and other stuff like that and computers talk to each other so if i hit a note on my keyboard it actually activates that in the computer the keyboard itself has no sounds built in it just sends signals to the computer and goes from there once again not necessary but i find them super useful so so i messed that up a little bit so i'm going to go ahead and edit that after the fact to split something you hit s on your keyboard and then i can just delete that and move this over here so i double click to get to the piano roll editor the name of it's derived from actual rolls of notes that would be put into like a player piano and then people kind of adopted that for digital audio workstations and often people who come up using digital audio workstations will get so used to piano roll notation that they'll be able to start to audit it aka see what music is indicated by how these notes are laid out i don't know how to read music even though i know a bit of music theory so piano roll notation is what i'm definitely used to at this point having worked in digital audio workstations a lot so i hold down right click and then drag to select all the notes at once and then i can hit q to quantize this will tell the notes to all align perfectly to the grid and be in perfect time so i'll hit okay there's not really anything i need to change about that and now i can start changing notes also note the little pencil icon here if i want to put in a new note i just hold down boom there's my note and i can drag it out all that kind of stuff so i had the wrong note there or a note i didn't intend to let me turn off this click it is obnoxious [Music] so that's going to be good enough for now i'm not really trying to make any art here this is just purely for demonstration purposes so i'm going to disarm this track for now and insert virtual instrument a new track again bring up another instance of helm because it's free and i like using it for demonstration purposes because i can very easily recommend it go to base and get a base patch so i'll just use that as its default for now bring that click back but turn it down a bit because oh my gosh it was loud one two three four so i've got this bass part here with these two notes and i'm going to go ahead and copy and paste this copy and paste this as well that way i can have this run through slightly more of a progression something like this [Music] there we go and then if i want to loop my section i just hold down my left click drag out this little section and then hit the loop button down here and may as well change these couple of notes so i have some variation so [Music] that will do for now so let's jump into adding some effects also note that if you want to program something in completely from scratch you can go up to insert and hit new midi item and that will create a blank midi item like one of these so let's add some effects let's say that i want this base to be even more distorted than it already is this is using a paid plugin but there are plenty of free plugins out there that will do this this is defacer it is a distortion plug-in it's pretty affordable [Music] it gets some pretty intense effects so once again go back to add i want to add an eq this is like a fancy version of in your car stereo you probably have an eq where you can cut base and you can cut out treble so an eq is that but on a much more uh specific level think of it as volume controls for different frequencies let's say this has way too much bass in it i can start to cut some of that out or if there's one kind of frequency in there that's like painful so imagine like a baby crying they cry at a frequency that's very painful for the human ear because you're supposed to be able to pick it out out of any noisy environment because oh the baby's crying you gotta help it out so um what you can do here is like boost around to find a painful frequency and then cut it so that kind of hurts so i'm going to turn that down so that's a super quick and oversimplified introduction to eq and i've cut too much loan here so dial that back that will do for now once again i'm not trying to necessarily make a banger here just a quick thing for demonstration purposes so now let's bring in some drums and there are a few ways you can do this um you can either just drag in audio files and start to place them or you can actually use plugins for this and i'll show you both i've got a free sample pack that i've put out that i will link in the description no download gates or anything like that all i ask in return is that you like this video and subscribe for more electronic music production videos let me pull in a kick that'll do so i can just grab this right here drag it in and it'll show me an audio file and then if i want to have it play like a four on the floor pattern i can shorten it a bit here and so start copy and pasting it along the grid giving me the other way you can work with drums is with some kind of sampler plug-in there is a built-in one in reaper called the sample omatic 5000 which is fun to say so you can drag a sample in and then you can tell it to distribute itself to your keyboard or not you do it using this so if i go note semitone shifted let me drag in a sample it'll actually map it out to my keyboard and to the piano roll so i can program notes in that way i'm not going to do it for this one because hopefully you get the idea but that is an option out there and if you want you can get external plugins that'll allow you to build up a full drum kit within one track so i'm gonna move on for now to a little bit of mixing and then a little bit of kind of building a track but i'm gonna recommend some other videos so for layering beyond just these three elements i'm going to point you to a cashmere video that shows you the basic anatomy of a standard edm drop he breaks it down incredibly thoroughly and i will link that at the end of this video so moving on to a little bit more mixing one thing i want to do now that i have a kick in here is to uh duck these two synth elements to the kick so ducking if you're unfamiliar is having an element get out of the way of another element the way that i like to do it there are a couple ways you can accomplish this one way side chain compression i'm not going to demonstrate that here because that requires a bit of routing and it's not my favorite way of getting that effect although it's the kind of original way that people would get that effect i'm going to use a plugin called lfo tool and i'm sure there are free equivalents out there i haven't looked so take what i say with a grain of salt but essentially this curve controls the volume over time so the easiest way to describe what's going on is just to show you visually what's going on so if i take this even further so if i play that with the kick [Music] you can hear how it gets out of the way of the kick every time the kick hits and it's just doing that on a consistent pattern and i can do a bit of routing if i want this to actually follow a more complicated kick pattern i especially go out of my way to do this with bass because you don't want bass frequencies of kicks and basses to fight and uh it's also a good way to allow the kick to punch through this is the most like extreme version i could take that even further if i wanted so now here's our little drop [Music] and from there i could go ahead and add more effects add more layers add more percussion especially which this is in desperate need of if i was to be developing this into a full track i'll demonstrate the reverb real quick because the built-in reaper reverb is actually pretty good and uh one thing to note is i just changed the order that the plugins are affecting the sound in because i want the reverb to be affected by this ducking so i moved it under that ducking effect and also if you double-click a parameter here it sends it back to its kind of neutral position so for reverb let me show this let me increase the room size there are multiple different kinds of reverb out there this one simulates placing your element in the middle of an actual room so you can control the size of that room uh and also you can control eq of that reverb so like obviously that's a bit much [Music] and i'll dial it back to a more reasonable level [Music] and go from there [Music] moving on to the actual mixer window typically i mix just through this window right here because it's easy to parse it's all right here it's all laid out nicely but occasionally you do want to go into your mixer especially for the master track or some people call it the two bus because it has two signals a left one and a right one that are then brought together for your stereo output so if you go to effects here typically what you're going to want to put on your master is a limiter if you're wondering why your songs are quieter than everyone else's it's because you haven't been using compression and limiting on them and i would try not to go too crazy with this and there have been many videos made on the mastering process so i am going to give you a grossly oversimplified version of here but there's this free plugin that i really like called loudmax where essentially all you do is pull down the threshold and it'll start to clamp down on your mix essentially what's going on is that there's a certain threshold that if your audio crosses it it distorts because it breaks it essentially is the easiest way to put that what this does is it punches any audio down that patches a certain threshold allowing you to make everything louder all at once so i've got this on my master so it's affecting everything at once and i'll demonstrate what that sounds like [Music] and you can see how it's pressing down on the mix especially at those peaks like when the kick hits and that allows it to bring everything up and makes everything appear louder i like using loudmax for this once again that's a free plug-in and of course there are other limiters out there plus there is an incredible amount of depth to mastering your music this is just one aspect of it that is normally not known about by people just getting into music production so i wanted to mention it here from here i could do a bit of arranging and this is the final thing that i want to demonstrate but i'll link at the end of this video a video i did about basically how to take a little loop like this and develop it into a full song and the exact blueprint i use and a lot of other producers use to accomplish this i'm just going to show you a couple of techniques real quick in reaper specifically so for say a breakdown you don't necessarily want these gigantic synths being pumped by this kick maybe you just want a laid back version of this so let me just grab this and copy it through a few times and we're going to jump into some automation so first of all i'm going to delete these kicks for these first couple loops and then i'm going to remove the ducking for this section without the kick and the way you accomplish that is with automation which essentially takes a parameter and makes it move by itself without you having to do anything so i go to trim for that and you have this giant list of stuff that you can modify and that is too much for anyone to parse so i'll show you a shortcut in a second but right now what i'm looking for is lfo tool bypass which is this right here and bypass means that the stuff just passes through that plug-in unaffected it's the on and off toggle for that plug-in so right now lfo tool bypass is turned on so i hit shift to add a node here hit shift to add another node here add another node and then i can move this up so now let me solo this which is isolating it no lfo tool and now lfo tool is affecting it another place that i would use this is moving the cutoff of the synth or something similar so let me demonstrate that let me go to helm and see if this even has a filter on it it does but it's not quite the effect i want so i'm going to go ahead and add an eq again grab this band here and change this to a low pass filter which allows the lows to pass through and i'm going to make sure to move this around a bit so let me show you what that sounds like first of all [Music] that's the effect i'm going for but i want to do it by itself so now that i've moved this parameter around i can go back to trim which is how you get to the automation window and i can click show last touched effects parameters only which significantly pares down your options and actually lets you find what you're looking for so in this case it's frequency low pass select this select this once again i'm holding shift click for that and then i can pull this down so now [Music] it's going to rise up over time [Music] and i can do the same with this base the other thing i'm also going to do is add a high pass so that's going to cut out a bunch of base and i'm going to automate this one as well so i'm going to start off with a bunch of base cut i'm going to slowly introduce the base and then right before this drop hits i'm going to cut out a bunch of base so your ears briefly get used to hearing the track with no bass so when the bass kicks in it's all the more impactful and i can show you how to do that really precisely so [Music] so we're building so at this point i want the base to kick back in immediately so i'm going to hit shift add another node bring this down and then i can snap it right there so this is the effect that you get [Music] and from here i could also go and add some kind of like riser effect which there are a few also living in my free sample pack like this one for instance so i can drop this in here and in this case uh it's got this boom at the beginning turn that down it's probably gonna be loud and in this case i don't want that so around here it starts to actually rise and if i select this and drag i can introduce a fade which is super nice so this should be roughly right [Music] and obviously there's a lot more i'd have to do to make that transition clean but hopefully you get the idea if you'd like to see a video on idiom layering i'll link cashmere's video i highly recommend you give that a watch if you'd like to make kind of standard edm tracks and if you'd like to learn how to develop a short loop like this into a full song you can click or tap the video lower on the screen hopefully you found this helpful and if you did i'd appreciate if you'd subscribe and hit that like button thank you so much for watching and i'll be back with a new video in a little bit

Channel: Gabe Miller Music

Views: 15,699

Rating: 4.9628649 out of 5

Keywords: gabemiller1, Gabe Miller, Gabe Miller Music, EDM, Electronic music, reaper tutorial for beginners, reaper tutorial 2020, reaper tutorial edm, reaper tutorial 2021, reaper tutorial electronic, how to make edm in reaper, how to produce electronic music in reaper, edm tutorial for beginners, edm production tutorial, edm production tutorial for complete beginners, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, reaper daw tips and tricks, reaper daw edm, reaper daw electronic music

Id: zHlOnvXaIsY

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GabeMiller1]

This is meant to be an introduction for people looking to make electronic music with Reaper. I've been using it as my main DAW for quite a while now and I want to get more electronic music producers on board to this fantastic, inexpensive DAW. Hopefully a few of y'all find it helpful!

[u/holy_stroller]

Thanks man! My Mac took a dive, so I lost LogicPro X til I replace. I've been using Reaper since then and it's been taking some time to get used to. Looking forward to watching.

[u/cgeod]

Wow, fantastic. I forward !

[u/witchape]

Thanks for posting this. I’ve been in REAPER for two years plus now. I came from Protools. Looking forward to learning some thing. I still use studio one for midi. Because I feel it is superior midi wise. However this might change my mind.