Why I Love Reaper with Adam Steel!

[Music] hi everybody hope you're doing marvelously well I'm sitting here with my friend mr. Adam still who has a channel called hop Studios I was drawn to Adam because primarily I loved his videos and also I could see that he was multi-talented one of the things that's really important to me as a guy that plays guitar bass drums keys really badly drums quite badly as well is I feel like this is the new normal for us is the ability to be you know a producer an engineer and mixer a multi-instrumentalist you know it and like Adam an educator so Adam it's great to have you here thank you very much it's an absolute pleasure as always this is your home environment here then yeah this is what I call Studio B this is actually my kind of office this is where I usually just sit and do my video editing for the YouTube channel and I've got a few guitars behind me so I'll do a bit of tracking at home I've got my lights set up we do a weekly podcast which I do from here but everything else I do from the studio which is a 45 minute drive from mouths I don't know why I'm pointing it's not as if you can see the direction but yeah usually that's where the bulk of my work gets gets done and then I'll do old tracking there check mixes on monitors and then I'll come home and quite often at the end of the day when the baby's in bed I'll do all my mix prep at home you know edits clean everything up make sure it's ready for when I've got a clear head to do a proper mix all that kind of stuff but I've converted this into a little kind of tracking station under my desk I've got a jcm800 and a 5150 with a load box one of the two notes captors and a cabin yes I mean you can't go wrong with those but yeah it's an absolute mess under my desk because I've just chucked everything in to record with because I've literally can't leave the house but it means I'm getting some amazing tones so okay you are pretty darn FA with Reaper to say the least you know it inside out and I'm to say so I'm told I I know this is how I found you I had watched some of your videos and then I asked Glen who's a mutual friend of ours who he would recommend and he goes oh there's just guy Adam Steele and I was like oh I don't know Adam Steele and then he sent me the link I was like oh but I know this channel and put two and two together that's fantastic it's it's funny how the whole Reaper thing came about I've been using Reaper for about ten years now it's yeah it turns out and it's just one of those things I've been doing audio production for 15 years or more and I'd been using Cubase and Pro Tools and a friend of mine recommended Reaper three at the time and it did all the stuff that I wanted this is way back 2010 I think and it did it didn't have all these issues that Cubase had at the time it wasn't limited like again like I couldn't afford a Pro Tools HD system at the time but Pro Tools le was limited to something like 32 tracks or something like that which sounds like loads but when that includes all your aux tracks all your instrument tracks so on so on so on that runs out really fast and so I got hold of every per and I think I've recorded my first album with it the the week after I'd first got hold of it and we produced an entire album for a band in about six days and I was just blown away with it so from there I just started digging and digging and digging and digging and it can do all these incredible things and as it's gone on it's got more and more and more features and so I think as times gone on I've picked up every feature because they were new so to me it was just a little thing extra little thing extra so it's it's built up and it's one of those things where I went back to Cubase a while back because someone recommended it and it wasn't bad but it didn't do the things that Reaper did you know and all that kind of stuff where I a few clients bring in Pro Tools sessions especially when I do a lot of work in film and TV and video which is the other side of what I I do and it feels really clunky in comparison and everything takes forever to load and oh okay and it's just one of those things where I just happen to use reprint I've been telling clients in the studio about it and then when I started up the YouTube channel I assumed more people used it then then actually kind of do especially at the top level certainly didn't consider myself at the time to be a top level user but but as I got more enthusiastic about making more videos for the channel because I had this studio and I may as well you know that's how the channel started I made this throwaway video one night it was kind of a webcam capture in my then bedroom which was here's how you do the basic stuff in Reaper and didn't really think too much of it because I was doing these properly produced videos every week and this was just kind of a filler and it got loads of views and then loads more and loads more and loads more and at last count I think it's had a quarter of a million views and I was like is this so so that went right okay let's go back let's let's start again and so I did the basics which most people who've seen me on YouTube have seen the newer Reaper 101 basics video where we did it properly in the studio and that's now I think that's just cleared 300,000 views at last count which is for me ridiculous what I've noticed about Reaper users is they are the most passionate da doubling users so no matter what the person you know the actual percentage of Reaper users is is they're all incredibly valuable as a hardened Reaper user like yourself can you can you give me some some feedback or what makes it unique for you what works in your workflow so the reason that I think Reaper is so incredibly intuitive is because it's so open it works the way you want it to work if you've got away in your head that you think it should work it doesn't take too long to get there I used to use Reaper completely differently to the way that I use it now and it works both waise I used to use it where I'd record stuff unto tracks and then I would send all the audio out to send to two groups which is the way you would usually think to do it right is you would have all your drums go to a drum group and that kind of thing and that was actually taken a long time and causing the issues later down the line in terms of stems and that kind of stuff and then I found folders and folders like say if I have all the drums I make another track and I grabbed all my drums and just budge them up in fact I'll show you that because that's something this this absolutely incredible it takes two seconds so all these drums if I just move them they are just tracks and they'll come out the master if I select all of those drums and just move them up you'll see a little blue line up here under the drums where it says drum groups that's what I've named it and let go and those all the sound now comes out of that drum group and I've not to do any routing or anything complicated and the benefit there is I can do things like I can tuck them away I can minimize them and then bring them back up again which I can do exactly the same in the mix view so if I've got say twelve or even twenty or even thirty drum channels if I'm doing some crazy prog rock thing if I'm then trying to find where the guitars are and they're a mile down the the mixing desk that's gonna take me forever to to flick between if I can just hide them in their folder then I can keep doing that and hide the all the different groups I hide this trumpet group solo group and suddenly I can see my entire mix in about nine tons there and if I need to dive in to change anything I can just press that folder button and just pop that back open and that's good for clarity of mind and for me clarity of mind is what makes for a quick production because I need the the workstation to get out of my way so that I can spend more brain time on the mix and not fighting the software so this is a band that I recorded years ago called Sun boy the band aren't together anymore but I'm still friends with most of the members but this was a track that I really quite enjoyed called call me up and I'm not gonna play the entire thing but I'll just play a couple a little bit that's actually something that I've always liked about repurchased as a quick point number one is that this project is from 2013 and I'm just gonna bring up yes so recorded in February 2013 it's from a much older version of Reaper and it just opens no issues at all every other DOW that I've ever used you try open in something that's seven or eight years old in a and new version and watch it panic and another thing before I even hit play is at the top right corner here is a little button for monitor effects so I'm using headphones because I'm stuck at home in my home studio and I've got so now works running and someone that works is correcting my headphones which is brilliant you can use that in any DW but because it's in a monitor effect up there it's not on the master out which means that when I'm done when I've mixed if I hit render that doesn't get applied to the song I mean you're supposed to bypass it if you're using it but how many times do we all forget so I mean I used to do stuff like that all the time we used to have like a corrective EQ on the master so that I could hear it clearly when my room wasn't treated very well and the number of times you forget to turn it off render that and send it to a client and they go what the heck is this it sounds awful and you go oh oops so it's one of those things that saves me tons of time and it's always there because it's separate from the project that is smile ever heard of that yeah well those little things it's separate from the project so any project I open up it all goes through so networks which is the same in my studio with corrective setup on the atom a sentence that amusing so that's very very useful and it's all mixed internally it was called 64-bit floating-point which i think is the same as every modern DW so the quality is absolutely on par with anything here's something that I found really cool so this is let's say this is the vocal and that's vocal one you can see the the wave form here and you can see how loud it is but you can't see anything else I mean yes it's blue but if I go to view Peaks display settings I can change this from Peaks to spectral Peaks and if I just let this build for a second this is going to do something that I've never seen in any other DW and I tend to have this enabled by default the reason it's not on on this project is when I actually recorded this project that wasn't a feature in Reaper it's it's been added and what's happening here is it's building up all these things and you can see little colors like the yellow here means that that particular piece is really mid heavy the red is is Lowe's some vocals especially where you look at yeah I can see little blue bits here in the blue bits what they're telling me there we go is that's where sibilance is so I can see different frequencies I can actually see what the singer's going to say and what they're going to sing before I even hit play so if I see a bit that's really strongly a sibling I can get rid of them very very very quickly and just jump between them I can see when a kick drum is on a channel or like the the bass if I just zoom in on the bass that's all a bright shade of purple and blue because that's all the low frequency information that saves me tons of time when I'm editing that's a very funky little feature if I play on that bass I've got this nice thumpy bass that you should be able to hear and then if I open the effects window I've got all my effects in a nice list here so I've got AmpliTube by everybody's favorite favorite I came multimedia going through wall of sound and mr. slates wonderful virtual mix rack but if I hit mixer at the bottom that starts out like this this bottom row here where we can see all the faders and the pans but if I just drag that and make that a little bigger suddenly that pops and becomes like Pro Tools this edit view mixed view where you can see all your plugins and all your inserts are you sends and I make that bigger and bigger and bigger and I can have more and more and more plugins so there is no limit to the number of plugins you can have on one particular track if you're being a Mentalist like sometimes I I like to have a little bit of compression a little bit of EQ a little bit this little bit of that you can have an endless list of plugins on a track and that's not a problem even before I hit play the other thing is there's no such thing in reaper as different kinds of tracks this is probably the biggest thing that sold it for me is there's no aux tracks there's no buses no groups no instrument tracks none of that stuff they're all just tracks which is completely freeing it'll take a second for you to go wait what what do you mean they're just tracks what that means is let's say the drums which were recorded with with a MIDI drum kit at the time they were actually played in but they were played on one of those roland eeeek it's the MIDI was recorded in and there's the MIDI and it's not a MIDI track or an instrument track it's just we chose the input to be MIDI and I can actually record audio onto that same track if I so desire and that'll just work it might sound mental but it's the kind of thing where I can have flight at the end of my project I've got a group of effects where I've got play reverbs delays all that kind of stuff this the kind of stuff you'd usually use on a mix you know but I've not had to make oxes or do any awful routing I literally just made new tracks put the plugins on there for the reverb and that kind of lustrous plates from liquid Sonics and I just sent from ascend from on from one of the tracks some sound to the plate reverb done it works much like an analogue desk wood if you think about it that way where if you've got a big 90 something channel analog desk you might have reverbs that come back on channel 80 something I don't know so you just send to that channel and that just works a nice and easy is what it's all about it's it's rapid production another thing that's dead simple but why haven't the other guys start of it is if I've got one project that I'm working on and let's say I've got a different track and I want to just flick back quickly I can go to file a new project tab and at the top I've got project tabs like chrome tabs so I can open a completely different like this is a mix of Chelsea by dragged under that I did last week this only using repo stock plugins which I did fur for fun but yes provable you don't need third-party plugins they are quite capable I do use a lot of third-party plugins but as a point I made this but I could play a bit of this click on the other tab at the top hit play and as long as I've got the CPU available to me to run more than one project then I can click between them and I can copy and paste tracks from one project to another so if I've got oh I liked that bass tone on this out on this song I can have both projects open and just go copy-paste and go and I saved me so much time are little things like if I go to the render window if I've got an engineer that says yeah that that song was great I need the stems with a lot of deer W someone says stems and your heart stops and God don't don't ya that's gonna take me days with Reaper I bring up the render window and go saw stems and I literally just ctrl and click or on Mac option and click the tracks that are you want and then at the end I make sure of my time selection is right and I can name them up here with these wild cards so it names them automatically for me and I hit go and there they are they're done so hold on hold on that's great but would you mean it it names them automatically it knows what they are how do you mean right so that's a big thing yeah so where it says wild cards let's say let's say this song's called Dave just to be silly but if I call this Dave and then dollar sign track number and then dollar sign track then what's gonna happen is it gives you a little preview where it says 24 files here cuz I've selected 24 tracks if I click that that gives me what they're all gonna be called and they're all gonna be called like dave 17 vocals 121 harmonica i can add whatever i want to that file name i could then add more unto the end of that caller yeah mix one or whatever it is and they're all automatically done the file names match up to exactly what I wanted and fantastic when you're sending tracks to people to mix because I'll tell me about it yeah these days yeah that's that's a really good function we have to do that when when we're uploading stuff to our academy for people to mix we want to go in there and rename everything because we don't want it to be confusing when they're downloading multi-tracks and it's like I've got 47 tracks called guitar which one's the right one oh yeah that's just swell yeah like that saved me days and then even things like I'm deceived behind it on the timeline there's a big gray bar that's a region so if I've got say more than one song in a project I can add multiple regions and then when I'm exporting I can say instead of exporting the stems export me those regions and I can name them so I could call them did names of the different songs and then I can tell it to render or bounce all of them for me and I go off I make a coffee I come back they're all done which especially if you're working on a big project and I've used this on like film ADR and TV production where you might have loads of little things like a stinger for this a clip for this but you need it all to be in one project otherwise you're gonna go dizzy because it's a big thing but then I work on it all I exploit them all send them all to the client and the client says that's great but this 190 things that you've sent me I need them to be a little quieter and I need an EQ tweak and you go oh well that's my day gone not with regions I literally then go and change my EQ to and volume down maybe put version 2 at the end of the file name export all the regions click OK there you go five minutes later send them that's amazing it saved me days and days because I don't just use this as a music producer I use this for film sound I use it for ADR I use it for all sorts of stuff that it can be quite basic but it's time-consuming yeah organization is huge and you talk about film and TV I've done a lot of stuff for film TV as well and I have learned when I'm talking to video guys do you have to make it absolutely what I do for instance is when I bounce something for film and TV I'll do you know a instrumental mix of one with vocals one with backgrounds but no lead vocal you know all the things you would normally do but I'll do it in 48 K 44 1/8 eight 196 stereo interleave split mono and I'll give them everything because I've made that mistake where I've sent them something and I become the full guy I'm the one that the reason why the project didn't get finished and when you're doing audio for film and TV make sure you covered all your bases you give them everything really well labeled because you do not want to be the guy that's the problem because if they get behind in the Edit suddenly it's like well you know we had to wait for the right audio to be sent so organization and making sure that they get everything they need and more is the best way to protect your career as an audio guy in film TV so that's marvelous absolutely it's all about saving time compared to some of the big boys like you know Pro Tools and that kind of thing where they are you know industry standards and they're great I'm not gonna say they're not but that one of the reasons that I used Reaper to begin with is that all these little features and functions were saving me hours and the hours turned into days and the days turn into God knows how much especially because when I started using it yes I was running a tiny little indie studio but more than anything I was the post-production and video editor for a small indie media company and being a trained sound guy I didn't want that to take all my time when I really needed to work on the the video side of things I should have been able to do the things that you know I do for a living which is the audio I should have been able to do that as go-go-go-go done next and things like Pro Tools were holding me back in that regard as like we shouldn't be this way so this is version 6 of Reaper this came out very recently and this is the default version 6 theme everything's in different places to where it was in version 5 if I go to options themes I can go to default version 5 and I can change the entire view that's how version 5 looked so if you preferred where everything was then it's not changed the way that it works in the background all the functionality of version 6 is there but it looks like how you you can download custom skins where you can make it look like something out of Star Trek you can make it genuinely someone's made the L cars next generation theme you can make it look like Pro Tools if you so desire there are things like you can add little icons at the end of each track so like the base I could add a little base icon like logic does that really kind of spell out what what every track is I personally think that's a waste of screen space but for other people that might be something that makes them feel more at home you know and there's all sorts of stuff you can do I'll put it back to the default there's a thing called actions and actions is incredible so the action lists this massive long list is everything that Reaper can do and it's twenty thirty thousand things it can do and you can assign any of them to a keyboard shortcut so if it's something you use a lot then you can put things there in that you might have used in other da W's and really speed up one thing I keep meaning to do this is a new laptop for me so I've not customized this at all yet this is completely stock so what I'm gonna do now is actually customize right before your very eyes ladies and gentlemen usually if I right-click on transport there's a thing I use a lot which is remove contents of selection moving later items and that's in Videoland that's what they call a ripple edit that will say there's like 10 seconds of silence in between two things and I just want to get rid of that and move everything afterwards so it just stink as if that ten seconds was never there that's something that I do a lot in film work where there's just a gap and we don't need that gap but right now I'm having to right-click on a menu and find that in a deep dark menu so in actions there's a filter if I start typing in remove selection where is it it should be here there is so remove contents and time selection moving later items I can add a shock and I usually have it on alton zed which if i remember rightly was the cube a shortcut for the same thing and just hit okay something else is mapped there which i never used so i'll just override that and that's it now anything else if i just select it and hit alt zit bang gone that saves me days so my question is is are there people that have created templates already that mirror other do double use yes there's loads of that was a massive community there's a package manager for it as well which has been created which you can install which is very lightweight don't think I actually have it installed because like I said this is a brand new install but there's a package manager and so any themes any updates any customizations you just look through the list for it you double click and it downloads it installs it does all that for you and so that but then becomes an option if it's one of the customization themes or anything there in those lists there's a massive forum for Reapers well where everybody who's a massive tinkerer like we were talking about before with there being a really kind of not to use the wrong word but an avid community they they're all absolutely passionate about what they do and so there's a massive resource of people willing to help you out if you've got a specific request or you can't find a certain thing it probably already exists and someone's done it and can point you to it because that's what the communities like by the way what what interface do you use at the studio I use in the rme Hammerfall one of the their radar interfaces and then I just plug a lot of preamp banks in I've got the Audion ASP eight hundreds and I've started using an or was it our Toria have the audio fuse eight pre I'm using that right now and it's incredible so that's usually my main can pre amp Bank for non non vintage stuff because I've got those bare vintage BBC preamps but they have to go into something and so yeah I'm using this archery audio fuse and it's been really really helpful especially at home when I'm trying to do all this amp recording and when I'm not using that I've got an audience sano which is right next to me I love the Audient guys but that means it only has two inputs and for what I was doing that he did more than two so I didn't have an ID 44 to hand so the Aria got broken out and came out the rack in the studio and came home with me for the time being and that's gonna go back in the studio pride of place my Audient 44 is what we're using at the moment but you can see in the camera and I'm afraid I pick it up because my microphone is plugged into it fantastic there the Sonos not plugged in because I was doing a stream over the weekend where I was mixing on an iPad and I was using the sanno as the interface for the iPad nice and then sending the output out to a couple of DI boxes to the stream so yeah it's absolutely wonderful for stuff like that and it's usually my at home interface for the podcast and for mixing because the headphone outputs are really really good and all that kind of stuff but because I'm trapped at home I took something with more channels so what is one of the main benefits that initially drew you to Reaper beyond the other wonderful things we've been talking about this is one of those things that this this was nearly ten years ago but one of the things that initially drew me in once I was convinced by how powerful it was honestly was the price and it's one of those things where it sounds silly but back 10 years ago you could get things like Pro Tools le you're empowered which were hundreds of pounds or dollars but you had to use their set interfaces there was Cubase was relatively it was in the hundreds of dollars but then also you had to pay for your interface we then buy at that time you've spent quite a lot of money Reaper was $60 six zero and it's one of those things that I know people who cracked software and that kind of thing but with Reaper I never did it gave you a 30-day trial but then at the end of the 30-day trial it did just keep working but then by that point I was so into using it that I just cost paid that $60.00 I mean why wouldn't you I think one of the big problems that potentially from my perspective Reaper might have faced over the past several years is that it's got all these features that have built up but the price hasn't gone up accordingly and so I think it's seen by a lot of people as cheap when in fact it's just inexpensive and yeah it's one of those things that I think the the luxury principle where something must be good because it's expensive doesn't always track and this for me is one of those times where it's so much more powerful than its price tag suggests yeah I tell this story quite often about working in a music store as a teenager and then having this beautiful handmade guitar on the wall and it was a I don't know eight hundred pounds or something like that and it was covered in dust and so one because it been up there for several years so one day I took it down on my own volition and just cleaned all that polished it up and this is pre kind of internet internet you know it was in its infancy so I called the manufacturer and told them the model and they're like oh that that guitars now twelve hundred pounds so it got up half as much again so I cleaned it up made it pretty put the brand new price on the wall and I am NOT shnizzle in two days it'd been up there for three years and didn't sell it became more expensive and got a bit bit of a shine on it and it's sold in a couple of days it's just it is it is interesting that we do perceive something as you know if a rolls-royce is you know a hundred five hundred thousand it's got to be better than a Mercedes at 100 or whatever but we know that not to be true there's just different perceptions what I love about the Reaper community and the people I know that use it like you and Glen and so many others is it fits into my kind of ethos of like us getting together as a community and helping each other so anything that's proactive like that is huge for me because look we're in the middle of this little panda Mickey thing and this lockdown in case nobody had noticed and and it's like people are coming together and helping each other and you know I think it's wonderful so I love what you're doing speaking of which you have a course we have done a course together tell me all about the course so the course uses the videos that I've done on YouTube before is it as a basics tutorial as a springboard and goes absolutely all the way so it goes from here's how you turn it on here's how you get a sound right the way through to here's how you do some clever stuff like like we talked about changing themes sidechain compression all the really clever stuff like manipulating MIDI on-the-fly all sorts of out their stuff but done step by step by step I I think last count there were 78 sections it's something like nine and a half hours of video and we keep measure to it because it's one of those things like new features are coming out and we can make new sections to go oh by the way this is a thing now it's so comprehensive but it's broken down into manageable bite-sized chunks as well so that it's not just over facing you can get one little bit two little bits if there's one thing in particular that you need to reference and you're like I've heard about this what does it do you can go and locate that section and it's just so comprehensive it took a month to do all the writing and most of the primary filming and it drove me slightly insane but hopefully it's been worth it for everybody because whoa it's got a real piece of my soul in there oh it's absolutely amazing well very very exciting of course there will be links to go and check that out Adam this has been rather wonderful and it's just such a shame that even though we're both from the UK you are about we are several thousand miles away from each other so I'll give you a virtual handshake yes so thank you ever so much I really really appreciate it every please check out the link below to the to the course you can tell one of the things that I'm really really impressed about Adam and about everything that's going on here and what he's doing is it fits in incredibly into our philosophy about community and I really really appreciate having this insight from Adam as to really what is great about repr I was blown away from that little 20 minute video I did with Glenn I cannot exaggerate that it was exactly the length they took to film is what we put it up in there and then the response was overwhelming one of the biggest if not the biggest philosophy of behind produce like a pro is to get people started making music is to go against those old ideas that you know you have to have this that and the other trust me I love vintage gear I love great gear but I don't want to stop people from making music because they believe they have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars like we were talked about earlier I am running everything through an ID 44 here most of the time my recording is done on inexpensive gear that is not just a necessity it is pretty much all I need now I'm outside of tracking on like drums and full band I just need a microphone and one mic pre and an interface and so everything that Adams doing here and we're talking about here really supports that philosophy so thank you once again Mike user if you have reaper questions please leave them below leave some reaper questions because I will get Adam to answer them as the video on loads of questions come in I'll try my best to answer everything it's gonna be like playing whack-a-mole fantastic thank you everybody have a marvelous time recording a mixing I'll see you all again very very soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 50,114

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio

Id: fRvaw-zMmQ0

Length: 35min 53sec (2153 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020