Hey guys, in this video we’re going to start talking about how to use Reaper.
Reaper is a low budget digital audio workstation that’s packed full of professional features.
This program is $60 to purchase, but it also comes with a free trial.
In the first video of this series, we’ll go over how to get Reaper and configure it
on our system.
The first thing we need to do is get Reaper downloaded on our system.
I’ll link to their website in the video description.
You can start with the trial version of Reaper, but I do recommend purchasing a license when
you can since it is a great program and it’s good to support it since it’s constantly
being updated.
The license cost is $60 for the discounted license, and you can use this for business
as well as long as you’re making less than $20,000 a year.
Once you’ve got the download, just follow the steps in the installer to get the program
on your system.
When you’re ready to purchase a license, go to their website, fill out the payment
form, and use the license key they send to your email address.
Then you can use the license key to unlock the program.
When we start Reaper for the first time, we need to configure our hardware.
If you’re using an external audio interface or MIDI controller, this will need to be configured
through the Preferences menu.
We’ll also want to make a few changes here for how the program behaves.
First, go to the Options menu and select Preferences at the bottom.
This will open up a new window with a lot of the advanced settings for Reaper.
We’ll start at the top under General.
A lot of these settings don’t really need to be changed, but the only thing I want to
enable is ‘Save undo history with project files.
That way if we want to go back and undo changes after closing the program and reopening it
again, we’ll be able to do that.
The paths menu has a few settings we can change if we want to create a default path for saving
our files.
I’ll add a new folder with Reaper Projects where I’ll keep my default new projects.
We won’t be making any changes under the Keyboard/Multitouch section.
Next we’ll look at the project section.
The first one we can do is set a default project file template, if we’ll be using one.
That way all our tracks will be pre-configured when we start the program.
I’ll enable ‘Prompt to save on new project’ so that this is done from the start.
I’ll also enable ‘Open properties on new project’.
There are some settings there we’ll want to cover later, but this way we’ll make
any adjustments we need to before we start recording.
We won’t need to make any adjustments to the Track/Send Defaults or the Media Item
Defaults.
The next set of options allows us to configure our input and output hardware.
We’ll start with the Device menu, since the Audio menu just gives us controls over
when Reaper takes control of the audio device, and we don’t need to change any of that.
The first setting we need to change is the Audio System setting.
For these videos I usually have it setup as direct sound, but that’s just because it
allows me to record the screen capture for the tutorial with the audio.
When using this software to record on Windows, you’ll need to keep this set to ASIO, that
way it reduces latency for recording and when you’re working with MIDI.
Then select the Input and Output device.
I usually use a Focusrite Scarlett 18i6 audio interface for this, but you can also use a
much simpler audio interface like the Behringer UM2 since they support ASIO and they sell
for only $30.
Regardless, you’ll likely need some sort of USB audio interface to get the most out
of this software even if you’re not recording audio.
After that, we can make sure our sample format and samplerate are set appropriately for our
device, and all the input and output channels are available.
Now that our audio device is configured, we’ll cover the MIDI device.
This menu allows us to select and enable MIDI devices connected to our system.
For these videos, I’m using an Akai MPD218.
This is a 16 finger pad drum controller that’s good for creating beats, and I like using
this because it’s velocity sensitive.
Since this is a MIDI input device, we won’t be adding anything as a MIDI output.
We can skip a lot of the options in the Preferences menu and go down to the VST options.
This is where we can add folders where the VST plugins are stored.
Reaper should have searched your system for plugins when it was installed, but there’s
also an option to manually add folder paths for any plugins that weren’t found.
Thanks for checking out this video on configuring Reaper.
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