Hey guys, today we’re going to go over Reaper, which is a cheap, yet fully equipped, digital
audio workstation for Windows and Mac.
Reaper is fully capable of some advanced audio production, with support for audio and MIDI.
There’s also a lot of different effects available, and even some options for virtual
instruments to use with MIDI.
Though there are a lot of effects included, you can also add your own by telling Reaper
what folder they're in.
You can also do this with custom synths to dial in your tone, or use a MIDI instrument.
Reaper does have a free demo version available, however the license cost is $60 for a regular
license and $225 for a commercial license.
If you’re trying to pick a DAW, we would definitely recommend trying out a demo of
Reaper to see if it’s right for you.
When you first open a new project, there won’t be
any tracks and all you’ll have is your master.
The first thing we’ll do is set this up.
We’ll add 3 tracks to start with.
One for a kick drum, one for snare, and a stereo track for overheads.
To add a track, go to the top Track menu and select Insert New Track.
You can also right-click on the track area and select to add a new track.
Then click on the blank area as shown and name each of the tracks to keep them organized.
Now we’ll configure our tracks for recording.
First click next to IN FX for the track and select your input.
We’re using input 1 for the kick, 2 for the snare, and the 3/4 stereo input for the
overheads.
Then click the red circle beside the track name and arm each of the tracks for recording.
Finally, press the big red record button at the bottom next to play button.
Once you’re done, you’ll get a window that pops up.
Select Save All to keep the tracks, or delete them to start over again.
After you’ve recorded your tracks, you can make a time selection by dragging on the end
of each of them to trim noise from the tracks.
You can also select a track, move the time selection to a certain point, and press the
S key on your keyboard to split the track.
That allows you to quickly delete sections or slide them around individually.
You’ll want to make sure you turn off snapping at the top first, especially if you’re not
working with MIDI and your project tempo doesn’t match the recording.
Once all your tracks are recorded and trimmed, it’s time to start mixing.
At this point, we’re going to use a sample multitrack project for the rest of the tutorial.
The first thing we want to do is open the mixer at the bottom of the screen.
Click on View in the top menu and select Mixer.
This gives us the same controls that we have on the side, but it’s a little easier to
access down here.
At the top of each track on the mixer, you’ll see a power button next to the letters FX.
Click this and it will bring you to the effects menu for that track.
This is where you add, remove, and edit the effects for that track.
If you just click the power button, you’ll be turning on and off all the effects for
that track at once.
Once the effects menu is opened, you can individually bypass each effect by clicking on the checkmark.
From the menu, click add to add a new effect to the track.
Most of the effects we use are under VST or JS, and the virtual instruments for the MIDI
track are found under VSTi.
For example, on our kick drum track, we added ReaComp, which is a compressor.
It has all the expected options like attack, release, ratio, and it’s pretty straightforward
to use.
All you need to do is adjust the sliders to make changes.
We also added and equalizer which is a parametric equalizer.
By default, there are two central bands and a high and low shelf.
These can each be changed, for example if you wanted more bands or a high or low pass.
To make changes to the equalizer, you can use the sliders at the bottom or drag the
numbers across the chart at the top.
Next to the effects option on the mixer, we have signal routing.
This opens up a menu to control these options.
By default, each track should be sent to master.
You can also select a send, which outputs it to another track, and this can be done
along with the master.
There’s also the option to output a MIDI track to a MIDI device, or to output a track
to a separate hardware output, such as for monitoring.
When looking at the mixer, there are a few icons for the signal routing.
The green M indicates the track is being sent to master.
S indicates the track is connected to a send, such on our vocal track which is sent to reverb.
R indicates the track is receiving another track, such as the reverb track receiving
the vocals.
The routing window also has options for track volume and panning, but it’s easier to adjust
these from the mixer view.
Next we have the pan selector.
Just hold and drag this knob back and forth to adjust the panning of the track.
You’ll be able to hear the difference, and see it visually in the meter for that track,
since they’re all displayed in stereo.
To adjust the volume, all you need to do is pull up and down on the fader.
One of the awesome features about Reaper is its MIDI capabilities.
I found MIDI in Reaper to be very powerful, while still being simple and straightforward
to use.
For this example, I’m going to setup MTPowerDrumKit 2 as our MIDI instrument on a MIDI track.
We’ll go over how to create an entire drum track in Reaper, then you can route to different
audio tracks from there and edit all the drums individually.
Before we can work with drums in Reaper, we need to add a VST instrument.
Go to the Options menu at the top, select Preferences, then scroll to and select VST
under plugins.
Add the folder where your virtual instruments are stored and press re-scan to add it to
Reaper.
After we’ve added our VST instrument we need to create a new MIDI track.
Right click on the tracks section and select Insert Virtual Instrument on New Track.
From there we select our virtual instrument.
When it comes up asking if we want to add the following tracks, we will say yes.
This will allow us to route all the parts of the drum kit to different audio tracks.
When we first open our instrument, we need to do the signal routing.
This works similar for any plugin, but how you send the plugins to a different channel
within the instrument itself will vary.
In this plugin, we open the mixer view and change the output for each of the drums.
I’ve grouped some of the drums together, like different snare hits and the cymbals.
Now all the parts of the drum kit are assigned to those individual audio tracks that Reaper
created earlier for us.
At this point, I like to rename them to keep the project organized.
From here, there’s a few ways to create MIDI files.
The first is with the composer view from our plugin.
This can create really nice drum loops that we can use, but not all the plugins have this
feature.
The second is with the piano roll view.
To do this, select a section of the timeline, then go to the Insert menu at the top and
select New MIDI Item.
This creates a MIDI file on our track.
From there, double click the MIDI item to end the piano roll view.
From the piano roll, click on the keys on the side to see which drum you’re working
with.
Then just add the notes to create a beat by drawing them on the piano roll.
This is a very tedious way to program drums, but for what it is, Reaper does a good job.
At the bottom, the bars can be adjusted to control the velocity of each of the notes.
My preferred way to program drums in Reaper is with my Akai MPD218.
This is a USB MIDI drum pad.
All it does is send MIDI signals to your program, there’s no built in audio capabilities in
the controller itself.
From there, Reaper can create MIDI recordings and process it through whatever plugin you
have on that channel.
The only catch with a MIDI controller is that you need to make sure you stay in time with
the song, so using Reaper’s built in metronome for the project is really important to playing
accurately.
I find I get much better results with the Akai MPD218, since it also measures the velocity
of each note, leading to more natural randomness in the final product.
To setup a MIDI controller with Reaper, all you have to do is select it as an input on
the MIDI track, just like you would do with a microphone input.
Now that we have a MIDI recording going to separate audio tracks, we can apply effects
to these tracks just as we learned previously with an audio track.
There’s no need to record the actual MIDI to an audio file first, it will just automatically
process the sound going from that output of the virtual instrument.
Though we didn’t cover how to use any virtual synths or other instruments in this tutorial,
it does work the same way.
You still create a virtual instrument, but you don’t need to route to multiple tracks
after, and you edit the notes on the piano roll in the same way.
There are also MIDI controllers available that use a keyboard instead of drum pads and
these are definitely helpful, but I find programming synths with the on screen piano keyboard to
be easier than drums.
Once you’ve edited your project, go to File at the top menu and select Render.
We’ll leave the source as Master mix and the Bounds as Entire project, but you can
export only a time selection if you want.
In our case, we can select the directory we want to export in and the file name.
For this project, we’ll be keeping it at the default Wave file settings, but you can
adjust these if you wanted to.
Once everything’s the way you want it, click Render 1 file at the bottom of the window.
The export process for this is pretty quick, even with all the tracks and effects we’re
using.
Thanks for watching this video tutorial on Reaper.
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