Reaper is one of the most powerful flexible and customizable audio applications available use Reaper for Music Creation and production podcasts voice over sound design audio books live performance mixing for video mastering and much much more like any new software learning Reaper can be intimidating but not with this course hi my name is Dave Bode and in this course you are going to learn how to use Reaper I'm going to walk you through the very Basics like installation and setup and give you a t
our of the interface so that you know where things are and what they are called which can sometimes be a challenge with new software after that you are going to learn about tracks Tempo grid and snap settings recording live audio recording midi and virtual instruments editing midi and editing audio you are also going to learn how to edit using stretching so that you can clean up the rhythms of Live recorded audio after that you will learn how to use effects Automation and envelopes folders and g
roups markers and regions actions and customization and rendering throughout most of this course you will be able to follow along with me using project files and assets linked below now even though this course covers the basics at times I'm going to be moving really quickly because my goal is to pack as much content in as small a package as possible kind of like envato elements with envato elements you get access to Millions yeah millions of creative digital assets for one low price I'm talking
about stock footage Motion Graphics templates music photos vector graphics fonts sound effects after effects templates and so much more a single subscription gives you access to everything you need to create great projects see for yourself at elements.envato.com now before we move on to the next lesson I have to answer a quick question that I'm sure many of you might have why Reaper that's a good question because Reaper is not the only game in town and I'm sure you know someone who is a professi
onal musician or a studio engineer that uses something like Ableton logic FL Studio or maybe Pro Tools those are all fine but if you follow along with me in this course you will find out that Reaper is the most flexible customizable the most frequently updated and the most powerful audio tool out there it works with all the plugins there are no restrictions or limitations and it's so small that you could have had it downloaded by the end of this sentence and the cost is as Reaper says not so muc
h you can use Reaper for 60 days completely free in evaluation mode and even after 60 days it doesn't stop working but if you are using Reaper after that you should buy it because you'll be supporting a team that cares about its users and making the best audio software out there alright now that I've convinced you let's jump into the first lesson where you are going to learn how to install and set up Reaper for the first time [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn how to install and set u
p Reaper for the first time with some essential preferences to get started you can head on over to reaper.fm and click the download Reaper link on the top of the page and then you're going to select your operating system of choice I'm using Windows so I'm going to download the windows 64-bit version now don't worry if the version that you're seeing here is older Reaper is updated all the time and there's no way I could make a course like this and use the same version that you are going to see wh
en you download Reaper but don't worry because pretty much everything is going to be exactly the same everything that I'm going to be covering in this course hasn't really changed in the last couple of years so I'm going to click to install Reaper and walk you through this very easy install I'm going to click yes to the EULA and then the only thing that I'm going to do different than what you are going to do is I'm going to choose to do a portable install a portable install is a really handy thi
ng if you want to experiment with Reaper or try some different settings and not alter your main install and because I already have a main install on my OS drive I'm going to do a portable install but you can just click next on that screen right there and then I'm going to click install all right now that that's complete I'm going to click close And yes I want to run Reaper for the first time now the first time Reaper runs it's going to scan my system for VST and vst3 audio effects these are effe
cts that may have been previously installed to some default folders on my OS drive and Reaper is going to search for those and make those available in the effects list now if you don't have VST effects don't worry I'm going to be talking about effects in more detail in an upcoming lesson next Reaper's gonna ask me if I want to select my audio device driver and I'm going to click yes Reaper opens up the preferences and takes me right to the device setting for my audio device now if you're on a Ma
c this is going to be a slightly different experience because on a Mac you set up your audio device in your audio and midi settings in the system preferences but it should be pretty easy to follow along if you have any questions just check out the reaper manual it's very very good the first thing that I want to do is click this audio system drop down and show you that there are a bunch of options here don't let this confuse you though there are only two that are really relevant if you are using
an external audio device a USB audio device or a FireWire audio device you want to choose asio SEO stands for audio stream input output and it's a high performance driver protocol that is definitely going to be what you want to use because it gives you a lower latency experience if you are not using a USB b or firewire audio interface and you're on Windows you're going to want to choose the Wasabi option down here that's the Windows audio system and it's going to be perfectly fine to use to foll
ow along for this course now because I am using an audio interface I'm going to choose SEO and then I'm going to jump down here to the driver section and select my specific audio interface because I have used and am using multiple audio interfaces with my system so I'm going to select the Motu M series I'm currently using a Motu M4 it's a very good unit next I'm going to configure my inputs and my outputs Now by default there may not be anything that you need to change here Reaper automatically
selects the first and second input if you have two inputs available in the first and second output I happen to have more inputs available so I'm going to choose number four here because I have four analog inputs and inputs five through eight are actually digital loopback inputs and they're not going to be really relevant for this course so I'm going to keep it to the first four inputs on the output side I'm also going to select my last output so that I have all four outputs available for Reaper
and I'm good to go in this bottom section there are some more technical audio settings that you may or may not need to tweak for me I'm not going to mess with these because if I click this SEO configuration button my device driver is already set to 48 kilohertz or 48 000 Hertz as a sample rate and it is set to a buffer size of 128. now that works for me if you are unsure of what to use you can set up your audio device to use 44 100 Hertz as a sample rate and 512 as a buffer size as long as you s
et that up in your SEO configuration in other words whatever software came with your device you don't really need to click this button to request a sample rate or a block size so I'm going to leave all of these options unchecked since we have preferences open there are a few more things that I want to go over that will make your life a lot easier as you move forward in Reaper if you scroll up this list and then click on paths I would recommend setting up some default paths first set up a default
path to save new projects I'm going to click browse and I'm going to go to my portable drive and I already have a folder called Reaper saves this way every time you hit save in Reaper it's going to save in this location now you can change that but I think it's really handy to have one location where you kind of default save all of your projects I'm not going to set a default render path because if I leave this empty it's going to render my project in the current project directory which I know w
ill be in a subfolder in this Reaper saves folder right here however I am going to set a default recording path and I already have a folder set up called Reaper media this is in case for whatever reason if I start recording and I don't have a project saved I know where that audio file is going to be if I need it later which is unlikely but it's nice to set up now and then I'm going to click this button right here to store all Peak caches or repeats in an alternate path by default when you insert
audio files into Reaper it creates a little repeat file and puts that right next to the audio file wherever it is on your hard drive that repeat file represents the waveform that you see inside of Reaper and that kind of drives me nuts because it makes my files kind of bloated if I pull in 10 files now I have 20 files in that folder because for every one of those wav files I now have a repeat file that's going to sit right next to it so instead I like to set a folder here for all of my Peak fil
es and I already have a folder set up right here called repeats you can name it whatever you want and that way anytime I am importing audio files it's going to put all of those Peak files in that repeats folder the next area that I want to show you is in the project section right here in Project settings one thing that I would recommend is that you check this button right here to have Reaper prompt to save on a new project with this option enabled anytime you create a new project Reaper is just
going to come up with a save dialog box and I would recommend that you just save whatever you were doing even if you're just opening up Reaper to mess around or experiment if you have a record of that and that way if you come up with some amazing idea you have it saved down at the bottom of this page there are several options having to do with project saving you can keep multiple versions of your project you can keep a Time stamped backup you can keep your undo histories and you can explore what
all of those things do in the reaper manual however the one thing that I would recommend that you do is enable auto save or a timestamped backup and you have options for that as well you can select the frequency at which a Time stamped backup is created by default this is 15 minutes I would recommend dropping this to like five minutes because you can get a lot of stuff done in 15 minutes but in order for this to work you need to select either save to timestamped file in Project directory which
will create a Time stamped backup next to your save file wherever that is and slash or you can also enable save to time stamped file in additional directory so you could for example put this on another drive and then you kind of have a safety system in place where you have an alternate location where you are creating an auto save of your project I have a folder on my Z Drive called zbackups and that will create a Time stamped file in that folder you can also select when to create this time stamp
ed backup or this autosave by default it's selected to when not recording but you can choose when stopped or anytime if it's any time you may have an issue when you are recording and it may cause an interruption there so either when not recording or when stopped is probably your best option and that's pretty much it for preferences next Reaper is going to come up with a little nag screen saying hey Reaper's not free it's a paid product if you use it for more than 60 days you are required to buy
a license and like I mentioned in the previous lesson Reaper is a great value sixty dollars for a personal license and that should cover I would think most of you unless you are making buku bucks and then you need a pro license for reaper now there's one more setting in Reaper I know this has been a lot of settings in this lesson but there's one more setting that I think is really handy to show you right now and that is in Project settings so if you click this little button right here we're goin
g to jump into project settings for just a second and then we'll hop over to the media Tab and I would recommend that you type in something like audio files into this top box here this way every time you create a project you save your project and you start recording in Reaper Reaper is going to create a subfolder wherever you have your project saved and all of those audio files are going to go into that folder it makes file management way easier now you still have another location in case you ar
e recording when you didn't save a project but you're going to save your projects aren't you that's what I thought so I would recommend typing something like audio files or recorded Media or something like this and that way your file organization is going to be a lot better I'm going to click save as default project settings and that's it coming up next you're going to get a tour of the reaper workspace [Music] in this lesson you are going to get a tour of the reaper workspace once you have Reap
er set up and installed you should see something like this the reaper interface is broken up into different areas and panels This is the arrange area to the left of the arrange area you have the track control panel which is currently empty and you have the mixer control panel down here I'm going to get rid of the mixer control panel because it takes up a little too much space so I'm going to come up here to view and then uncheck mixer and now we have a little bit more space to work with next I w
ant to get some audio inside of Reaper to better explain what we can do in the arrange area over here and the track control panel so to do that I'm going to pull in some demo files that I have provided to you and they should be linked in the description of this video there'll be a zip file if you unzip that you will find a folder in there called demo track 95 BPM now because these files were recorded at 95 BPM before I drag them in I want to jump back to Reaper and just set my Tempo down here in
the transport bar to 95. I'm going to explain why I'm doing that now in an upcoming lesson but for now just follow along and now we can click and drag in the drum file right here and you can see as I do it's snapping to this grid I'm going to pull it all the way over to the left and it's snapping because I have snapping enabled over here in the main toolbar and you can uncheck that and get more fine control but for the most part if you are working in a music context you're going to want to have
this grid here set up to the tempo of your project to make sure that all of your Beats and your measures in the sections of your song are aligned properly otherwise things are going to get real squirrely really quick so now that I have my drums inserted into Reaper you can see that Reaper created a track it's track number one and it automatically labeled it drums based on the file name and I can press spacebar to play [Music] once the play cursor reaches the end of the media item it's automatic
ally going to stop but at any time you can just press the space bar to play and stop so like I said before this is called the arrange area and this is where you can arrange your media items in Reaper this is not called an audio clip it's called a media item and media items can be audio they can be midi they can be video and they can even be Graphics like a JPEG or a PNG and you also don't need any special kind of tracks a track in Reaper is a track it doesn't matter if it has audio on it midi vi
deo graphics in fact you can have one track contain multiple things with multiple different channels of audio so you can have mono stereo multi-channel midi on the same track it doesn't matter which is a really cool feature of Reaper so let's get another audio file in here let's pull in the base and I'm going to pull that down below my drums just like this you can see I now have two tracks over here let's check out what this sounds like [Music] finally I'm going to pull in the last two tracks an
d this time I'm going to do it together I'm going to select the guitar and the piano and then pull those down below the bass and then Reaper is going to pop up this little message saying hey you're inserting multiple media items do you want to put those on separate tracks or sequentially on a single track I'm going to choose separate tracks because that's what I want and now I have my guitar and my piano [Music] very cool like I said before this is the range area and in the arrange area you can
do a ton of things you can move your media items around so maybe you don't want the guitar to start at the beginning or the piano to start at the beginning we can just pull those over you can move one at a time you can right click and drag to make a rectangular selection and you can move two items at the same time if I put the mouse on the edge of the media item and drag to the right you can extend the length and this will automatically Loop because looping is enabled if you right click on a med
ia item and go to settings you can see Loop item source is enabled and that is enabled by default although you can change that in the preferences if you don't like that but because all of these have been recorded to be exactly four measures long at 95 BPM I can extend these and they will Loop seamlessly so I'll just pull this out to be let's say 12 measures long and let's have the piano come in right here and then the guitar come in at measure five and I'll just extend these out a little bit lon
ger I'll hit W on the keyboard to bring the edit cursor back to the beginning and then spacebar to play [Music] [Music] thank you very good it's not incredibly interesting but it's good to use for a little demo like this so the arrange area is where you can move things around you can edit you can make things shorter or longer by adjusting their length you can fade items in you can fade items out you can see when I put the cursor to the edge of a media item on the top so the top right Edge or the
top left Edge the mouse turns into this little fade tool here or if I bring it down it becomes a trim tool like that and I'm going to go over all of those edit type functions in another lesson so don't be too overwhelmed with all of those things that I didn't really explain well I'm going to explain all of those more in an upcoming lesson one thing that I do want to cover now is how to navigate around in the arrange area right here because you're going to see me do all kinds of things like this
I'm going to be zooming in and out and moving all around so let me go over just a few things if you want to zoom in to a particular section there are multiple ways to do it one of the things that you have to learn about Reaper is there's 50 different ways to do everything which is great because you can make Reaper work how you want to work but how I usually do it is set the edit cursor to the point that I want to zoom into and then I use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and it's going to zoom
into wherever I have that edit cursor set on the screen which is very handy so if I want to check out this section right here I'm just going to click and set the edit cursor there and then scroll in to zoom into that section so let's say you want to make your Bass track taller what I usually do is hold down control and then scroll with the middle Mouse button Now by default what Reaper is going to do is zoom into whichever track is in the center so if I want to zoom into the base that becomes a
little bit tricky because right now it's zooming into the piano which is not what I want but let me show you how to fix that I'm going to hit Ctrl p and jump into the preferences and I'm going to type in this little search box here vertical Zoom this search feature in the preferences is absolutely amazing I don't know why every application doesn't have this because it's fantastic and this is the option that I want to change right here vertical Zoom Center you can see by default it's set to track
at Center of view but I promise you you will find that just as annoying as I do so I'm going to change it and I recommend that you change it as well to track under mouse cursor now you could if you want to change the horizontal Zoom Center as well currently that's set to the edit cursor or play cursor but you could also change that to the mouse cursor however in my experience I find that way too fiddly because as I am zooming into a particular section my mouse will inadvertently move and then I
will not be zoomed into the exact section that I want to so I usually just leave this to the edit cursor and that works for me I'm going to click OK and now when I hold down control and I scroll up you can see it's going to zoom into whichever track or media item is underneath my mouse cursor which is exactly what I want another way to zoom into an area that you want to take a better look at is to hold Ctrl and ALT and then right click and drag you can see I get this little magnifying glass too
l and there is a green highlight over the area that it's going to zoom into so if I want to zoom into let's say just this drum section here these three beats I can just hold Ctrl and ALT and zoom right in it's very handy if you want to zoom out horizontally all the way there is a keyboard shortcut for that it is control page down and if you want to minimize the height of all of your tracks you can use the tilde key which is just to the left of the one key on the keyboard you can also use these s
croll bars on the side and just below this vertical scroll bar there's a little plus and minus button I guess you can click those to increase the height or zoom in vertically and the same thing here you can zoom in horizontally by clicking and dragging or pressing these little Plus in minus buttons here just to the right of this scroll bar I don't usually use these scroll bars because I think they're just a little bit too fiddly there's a few other things that I want to show you one of those is
making a Time selection so if you click and drag in the arrange view here as long as you're not over a media item because if you click and drag a media item that's going to move the media item but if you go up here to the ruler area which is what this area is right up here you can click and drag to make a Time selection and then down here in the transport bar you can see how big of a section that is so that was two measures that I made a selection of and that's because my current ruler is set to
measures beats and sub beats and then there's another time unit underneath which is minutes seconds and milliseconds now if I wanted to change that all I need to do is right click in the ruler area and then I can come down here and change this to minutes and seconds and now you can see that my selection has changed to minutes seconds and milliseconds but for music it's probably best to keep this to measures and beats that makes the most sense and with the time selection there are a bunch of edi
t things that you can do you can copy and paste in your time selection you can Loop in the time selection down here you can toggle repeats which is just off the screen that that little pop-up is just off the screen you can see right there you can toggle repeats which is r on the keyboard and that way if there was a section that you just wanted to Loop to practice you can really quickly just create a section like this press r on the keyboard to enable repeats and then press play [Music] I'm not g
oing to go over all the things that you can do with the time selection but I'm going to cover more of those in an upcoming lesson on editing and you're going to pick up more of those things as I go throughout this course one thing that I do want to touch upon which I did a little bit already is the amazing right click menus in Reaper you'll notice that if you right click in the arrange area you get a different menu than when you right click on an item or a track or the mute button or some of the
se items in the toolbar up here like the snap and grid settings or the metronome the right-click menus in Reaper are pretty fantastic so if there's ever a thing that you want to change odds are if you right click on it you will get the option that you are looking for down here like I mentioned before this is the transport bar and you have all of your typical transport buttons like go to the beginning of your project go to the end of your project record play toggle repeats stop and pause all of t
hose have keyboard shortcuts which you can change if you want to over on this side you've already seen that you can set a Tempo and you have a time signature setting right here I'm going to go over those in more detail coming up real soon as well and you have a playback rate knob right here so if for whatever reason you want it to slow down or increase the playback of your project you can do that as well [Music] changing the playback may not seem super relevant right now but there are plenty of
times that I use that for example when I'm editing an audiobook or voice over a lot of times I can edit at 1.5 or 2x speed to save me a lot of time because I can process the dialogue a lot quicker if it's running really really fast and there's also an option here that I want to show you that's just off the screen let me just bring this over just a little bit and that is to preserve the pitch in audio items when changing the master play rate and that's really handy because if you do change the pl
ayback rate you can keep the pitch exactly the same in the top left section of the screen you should see the main toolbar and this is where you will find common buttons like new project open project save project project settings undo metronome and more this is called the main toolbar because there are actually multiple toolbars that you can switch to in fact There are 16 different toolbars that you can use in addition to the main toolbar and all of those including the main toolbar can be customi
zed so if you didn't want some of these buttons in here like maybe you already know the keyboard shortcut for new project and save and you want to get rid of those buttons and replace them with something more useful you can do that which is awesome and then finally this is the track control panel which I mentioned before and I'm going to be covering tracks in the track control panel in more detail in the next lesson so check that out coming up next [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn a
bout tracks in Reaper to get started I'm going to create a new project which you can do by clicking the new project button right here or going up to the menu and choosing file new project or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl n and because I set up those preferences in a previous lesson to prompt to save on new project and set a default save location for my projects Reaper is going to open up right to my Reaper saves folder and I can name my project I'm going to call it tracks and while this is open
I want to go over some of the save settings down here one thing that I like to do with all of my projects whether it's in Reaper Photoshop After Effects Premiere blender whatever is I like to create a folder that contains my project files and all of my assets and all of the other files associated with the project and you can do that really easily with this button right here so now instead of manually creating a folder and then putting my project in that folder Reaper is going to do that for me
and then in my project if I decide to record any audio all of that audio is going to go inside my tracks folder in a subfolder called audio files which is why I set that up in the project settings in a previous lesson these other two options are very useful as well so this option right here will copy all media into project directory and this is great if you have assets all over your drive or all over several drives and you want to consolidate all of those you want to pull them into one project f
older that's very useful for doing that you can also convert your media if you have them in different formats and for whatever reason you want those all to be a WAV file for example you can do that right here as well you can also move all media into project directory which is similar to copying except with this move option enabled it's going to remove the files from wherever they are and then place them in your project directory this is great for some things and maybe not so great for other thin
gs for example if I'm doing a sound design project I have a sound design folder with thousands of sound effects in it and if I inadvertently check this and then saved my project whatever sound effects I was using in my Reaper project will now be removed from all of my sound design folders and put in my project folder which means the next time I went to look for those sound effects they wouldn't be where I was expecting them so use caution when you're using this option down here I'm going to clic
k save and let's jump in and talk about how to create tracks in Reaper like you saw in some previous lessons this is super easy if you right click over here in the track control panel you have four different main options for creating tracks you can insert a new track or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl t you can insert multiple tracks so let's say for example we wanted to create three vocal tracks you can type in whatever number or select from a drop down here and then you can choose if you want t
hose after the last touched track or at the end of the project I'm going to click OK and now you can see I have vocal one two and three super useful you can also insert a virtual instrument on a new track and when you select this option Reaper is going to open up the effects browser and it automatically selects the instruments and then you will have a list of all of the available virtual instruments on your system now you're probably not going to have many of these but you're definitely going to
have these top three which come with Reaper so if you select something like resynth and then click add you're going to see it's going to create that track and it's automatically going to arm that track for recording which means you can play on your keyboard and you can get to recording that virtual instrument right away I'm going to delete that track and let's check out this option here insert track from template this is a fantastic option if you find that you are inserting the same types of tr
acks in multiple projects I use this for example for some more complex virtual instruments like Native Instruments contact where I have 16 different Samplers running in one effects instance and so I have in my main install of Reaper a track template that will build for me 16 midi tracks 16 audio return channels and it has all of the routing to and from contact for the midi in the audio and it saves me a ton of time because building that from scratch would take several minutes and it loads in jus
t a second and to create a track template it's super simple you just select whatever tracks you want to make a track template and then you right click and choose save tracks as template super simple finally you can show the master track in your track control panel now your master track is where all of the audio in Reaper gets routed to so all of your tracks that have audio and virtual instruments on them whatever sends that you have and receives that all gets routed eventually to the master trac
k and having that in your track control panel can be very handy so that you can monitor the levels and you can adjust your processing here if you want to there's a couple other ways that you can view the master track so you can also float this and dock it to the side or look at it in the mixer control panel but you might find that it's useful to have here in the track control panel as well I'm going to delete those tracks and I'm going to bring in the demo track 95 BPM tracks that you saw me use
in a previous lesson and I'm going to go over some of these track controls over here really quickly if you've ever used any other audio software a lot of these controls will be very familiar on the left you have a track number this is the button to arm and disarm your track 4 recording you can double click in this area here to change the name of your track this knob here sets the volume for this particular track you can click and drag to set the volume to wherever you want if you want to reset
this you can just double click that knob and it'll go back to zero decibels just to the right you have a route button and this will bring up all of the routing controls so that you can send audio to another Channel you can receive audio there's a bunch of cool stuff that you can do with this which you're going to learn about in an upcoming lesson then you have the effects button if there are no effects on your track the first time you click this it'll bring up the effects browser and then you ca
n insert an effect maybe something like re-eq to put a basic EQ on your track and once you have an effect on your track you'll see that this turns green to let you know that there are effects on this track the next button is the trim button or it's labeled trim and this will allow you to adjust the automation mode and make visible and arm various envelopes for your track this can be a little overwhelming to look at because there are a lot of switches but I'm going to cover this in a little bit o
f detail in an upcoming lesson and then finally you have the pan control right here and this adjusts how much of your audio gets routed to the right Channel or the Left Channel by default all of your tracks will be right in the center meaning even if they're a mono track it's going to send an equal amount of amplitude to the right in the Left Channel but you can click to adjust that here and just like the volume if you double click this knob it will reset to the center over on the right side you
have a mute button which does exactly what you think it would do if you mute the drums you can't hear the drums and below that you have a solo button and with the solo button pressed the drums are the only thing that you can hear [Music] and you can control the mute on a single track or you can control the mute and in fact most of these other settings on multiple tracks by selecting multiple tracks and then making an adjustment so you can control the volume for all of your selected tracks the p
an the mute or solo that's kind of a temporary way to create a track group so that you can make adjustments on several tracks at the same time in the bottom corner there is a phase button and if you click this it will invert the phase of your audio and this can be very useful if you are mixing drums for example a lot of times there will be a top snare drum mic and the bottom snare drum mic and sometimes it can sound better to flip the phase on the bottom snare drum mic so that you get the proper
low frequency balance between those two microphones otherwise you can get some phase cancellation which doesn't sound that great [Music] right here is a meter which right now doesn't look like much because audio is not playing but if I play you can see the meters light up here in all of the tracks and the master track up here which brings me to my next topic and that is customizing what the track control panel looks like so you'll notice that this is a knob and you may prefer to have something
like a fader instead of a knob well that's super easy to change if you go to the menu and select options and then come down to themes and theme adjuster and you go over to the track control panel you'll see that there's a lot of settings that you can change and you can experiment with this on your own but I just want to point out a few things right now first is that you can make simple adjustments to the size of various elements so the volume size right now is set to Knob if you move it up just
a little bit it turns to a fader and you can make that bigger and you'll see that all of the other elements kind of wrap around to adjust which is very handy I'm going to set that back to a knob one of the things that I like to do is get meter values on the meters which will show up if you enable recording but when you're just playing back they are set to be hidden you can see that right down here meter values if track not armed is set to hide so if you uncheck this then we should see meter valu
es here but we actually don't for some reason they don't show up when the meter size is set to 20 unless we increase it and then put it back I don't know that maybe a bug that I'm going to have to send to the reaper team and that'll probably be fixed in the near future but there's a bunch of other settings that you can change here you can change the size of the meter you can put it on the left if you want and a whole lot more you can also see that there are multiple layouts for the track control
panel and you can adjust that right over here so if you right click on one of the tracks way down here you have options for track layout and you can select the track panel and then it's just off the screen here but I have a b and a c I don't know if I can get that to to show up here I'll make my tracks real tiny track layout mixer paneling yeah it's just barely on the screen there so if I select B it's actually just going to be for that first track because that was the only one selected but I'l
l select all my tracks and change them to the B layout there and you can see that that has a different look to it and some more elements are visible it also changes the volume to a fader and then there's also a c layout here which arranges things a little bit differently so you can have different layouts you can customize each layout and you can use them in different situations if you want which is very cool you can also change the colors of your tracks which is something that I find very useful
to do that with all my tracks selected I'm going to change the color on all of them I'll just right click on one of them and come down to track color and then I have options to set all of them to one custom color to set them all to random colors I can set them all to one random color or change them all back to the default color which is this lovely gray right here I'm going to choose random colors and then if you want to tweak those even further you could set an individual track to a particular
color or you could jump over here to that theme adjuster again and hop over to the custom colors tab right here and on this tab you can see that there are a few different palettes that you can choose from if you want to just update the random colors you can click this recolor project using this palette button and that will update the colors and cycle through several variations you can select all of your tracks and set them to one color if you want I want to undo that or you can pick a different
color palette something like Vice which is super bright down here and then cycle through some of these options I think that looks pretty cool right there another option that you have for changing the look of Reaper is to install a different theme and I want to show you that really quick so I have downloaded a theme called white tie Imperial and I can install this to Reaper really easy I'm just going to drag it right into Reaper and then it's going to install and apply that theme and this comple
tely changes the look of Reaper to this very kind of skeuomorphic design here with these cool looking hardware buttons that glow I think this is really cool and there are there are tons of themes for Reaper hundreds and hundreds of themes that completely change the look of the buttons and the colors some change it a little bit some like this one change it an awful lot if you want to go back to the default theme you just go to option themes then I'll just select default I actually like the stock
version I think this looks pretty slick especially with the tracks colored I don't much like the gray track aesthetic but I think this looks pretty great all right that's pretty much it for tracks and track controls I touched on a bunch of different things and you're going to see a lot of the things that I talked about covered in more detail coming up in the next several lessons but coming up next you're going to learn about Tempo grid and snap settings [Music] in this lesson you will learn abou
t Tempo grid and snap settings the first thing that I want to show you is what happens to Media items in Reaper when you adjust the tempo right now my project is set to 95 beats per minute in my media items take up four full measures you can see that right up here in the ruler here's measure number one measure number two three and four and at the end of measure four is measure 5 and you can see that there's nothing here these media items are four measures long now check out what happens when I c
hange the tempo from 95 to 110. in the arrange area here things kind of shrank horizontally and my items are now shorter than they were before and you can see that right above each media item where it says rate 1.158 this means that they are playing back faster but they need to play back faster so that they still take up the same amount of musical space which you can see that they do if you look at this ruler and the grid here there's still four measures long but because 110 has more beats in it
per minute they need to be shorter check out what this sounds like foreign [Music] so what Reaper has done is it's done some time stretching to make these shorter and it's kept the pitch exactly the same and it still takes up the same amount of musical space again four measures now if I adjust the tempo slower Reaper will stretch the items the other way I'm going to come down here and set the tempo to 80 and now you can see that the rate has been set to 0.842 and check out how this sounds toget
her [Music] now they're slower than they were before but they're still taking up the same amount of musical time this is the default behavior for rebirth and it's very useful when you are recording and editing music however however this is not always what you want there are many times when you are going to want to adjust the tempo in Reaper but you don't want Reaper to adjust the rate of your items in order to do this what you want to do is to change something in the project settings but before
I do that I'm going to set this back to 95 BPM and then I'm going to jump up here into the project settings which you can find right here in the toolbar in the project settings tab there's an option to adjust the time base for items envelopes and markers currently it is set to beats position length and rate but if you don't want Reaper to adjust the rate of your items you can change this to time I'm going to click OK and now when I change the tempo what you're going to see is that the grid is go
ing to change so the arrange area is going to change but the length of my items won't change now you may be wondering why this is useful well sometimes what I need to do is edit some pre-produced music and what I want to do is to align the grid to my music and I don't want the rate of my music to change and so when I'm doing that I change the time base over to time so that the rate of my audio item doesn't change other times I will be editing a voiceover a podcast or an audiobook in Reaper and f
or those projects I also set the time base to time so that I don't inadvertently change the tempo and alter the rate of my dialog tracks let's look at another example in this example I have a simple project with one track this track has a virtual instrument on it from Spitfire audio it's a simple drum kit and in the arrange area I have a midi item that has a simple drum beat that repeats thank you [Music] and it just repeats like that for a minute or so in Project settings you can see that it is
set to beats for the time base and if I change the tempo from 70 to 80 check out what happens instead of adjusting the rate of the midi item the midi notes actually align to shift to the new Tempo so you won't see a rate indicator above the midi item in other words instead of time stretching the audio because this isn't audio with midi it's just triggering the notes at a different time so that they still align to the tempo foreign [Music] you can also have more than one tempo in your project by
inserting a Tempo marker I'm going to come over here to measure 5 and insert a Tempo marker you can add a Tempo marker by right-clicking in the ruler area and choose insert Tempo time signature marker you can also find that over here in the insert menu insert Tempo time signature change marker or use the keyboard shortcut shift C there are several options here starting with the tempo I'm going to change this to 120 you also have the option to set a time signature so my project by default was se
t to 4 4 time but I could set it to a new time signature right here if I wanted to I could also change the BPM basis so instead of having one beat be a quarter note I could have it be an eighth note or one of these other options I'm going to uncheck this for now you also have the option to set a different metronome pattern if you want and you can gradually transition Tempo to the next marker but I'm just going to leave all of these at their default and I'm only going to change the tempo to 120 a
nd click ok now a couple of things changed in the arrange View and the ruler area here now I have two Tempo markers this is the tempo marker that I just inserted but anytime you add a Tempo marker Reapers automatically going to add another Tempo marker with whatever your Tempo was originally at the beginning of your project you can also see this blue line showed up here in the master track and if you hover over this you'll see that this is the tempo map envelope so the envelope is this line repr
esenting what the tempo is at any given time in your project you can see that right here it's 120 and right here it's 80. let's check out what this sounds like if I play it back from measure four foreign [Music] so you can see right at measure five we have that increase and it jumps immediately to 120 beats per minute now I'm going to double click on this first marker here and I'm going to show you this option right here and that is gradually transition Tempo to next marker so right now it's mai
ntaining 80 BPM right until measure five and then it instantly goes to 120. but by checking this and then clicking ok now it's going to slowly increase the tempo over these four measures until it gets to measure five check it out [Music] there are more things you can do with Tempo and type signature but for now let's talk about grid settings I'm going to jump back to my previous project and take a look at the grid the grid is made of these vertical lines in the arrange area and you can enable an
d disable the grid with this button right here in the toolbar so you can turn it off and you can turn it on right here the grid helps you to align your media items and arrange your project and it can be adjusted to fit your needs currently the grid is set to quarter notes and you can change that by coming up here to the grid button and right clicking on it which opens up the snap grid settings the top section of the snap grid settings deals with the grid and the main thing that you want to adjus
t here is the grid line spacing like I said before it's set to quarter notes but often I'll change this from quarter notes to something like eighth notes or even 16th notes and you can see when I do that there are a bunch of more grid lines that show up here in the arrange area and that's very helpful if I'm trying to align things with a little bit more precision and I have these grid lines to help guide me to see exactly where those 8th and 16th notes are and you have several other options to c
hoose from you can do one two and four measures and you can even set this to frame which sets it to your video frame rate which you can set in your project settings these options here with the T at the end stand for triplet so this would be quarter note triplet eighth note triplet 16th note triplet and 32nd note triplet there's also an option down here where you can swing your grid and you can adjust the swing of your grid but honestly this is something that I have never used and that's because
in jazz music swung eighth notes are the same thing as a quarter eighth triplet so usually if I have a project that has anything to do with swing and I want my grid to be showing me a swung Rhythm I will just set this to eighth note triplets and that works just fine for me but you can do whatever works best for you a snap enable button is right next to the grid button snapping allows you to easily align your items markers and envelopes and the cursor to whatever you have the snap setting well se
t to right now if I try and move my media items what you'll see is that they jump from beat to beat because snapping is enabled and it's going to snap this media item from beat to beat there's no way to put it in between these two beats unless I disable snapping which you can do by clicking this button here or use the keyboard shortcut alt s or option s on the Mac and if you disable snapping now you can move this much more freely and with a lot more precision but like I said before it's a lot ea
sier to arrange and move your media items around especially in a musical context if snapping is enabled so I'm going to turn that back on and you can see that things will snap really nicely the edit and play cursor also snaps to the grid and it will also snap to other things in your project which you can set in these snap settings right here by right clicking on the snap button this whole section deals with SNAP settings I'm not going to go over all of these I'm just going to show you a few thin
gs one of those is what you can snap to so there's two lines here that you'll want to check out this one here will snap media items selection and cursor to selections markers or cursors and down here you can snap media items selection and cursor to the grid and you can uncheck those and make it work however you want so let's say you didn't want to snap media items to the grid but you still wanted to snap media items to selection marker and cursor well check this out with that unchecked now I can
move this along and it won't snap to the grid however it will snap to my edit cursor so if I come over here you'll watch and it's snapped right there if I make a Time selection it will also snap to my time selection which just so happens to be snapping to the grid however I can uncheck selection from the grid and now I can make a free kind of time selection and my media item will snap to that time selection which is very handy now you can make this effect more dramatic by going into the snap se
tting and changing the snap distance so if I bump this way up to something like 30 and I do the same thing and I move this from right to left you'll notice that it will now jump right to that cursor in time selection from what looks like a larger distance away because that's what it's set to now it's going to snap from about 30 pixels away and now I have to pull this to the right 30 pixels before it's going to move so it just makes the snapping perhaps a little bit more effective or a little bit
more aggressive if you want to think of it that way snapping in the grid are super useful tools for making sure all of your items your markers and your envelopes are exactly where you want them to be in your project all right coming up next you're going to learn about recording foreign [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn about the basics of recording in Reaper I set up a new project here in Reaper and my plan for this lesson is to show you some of the recording options in Reaper in th
e context of a real world project and you'll be able to follow along for the most part with the files in the description so the first thing that I'm going to do is to come down here and pull in some drums into my project so I have something to record to now you'll have access to this file in the link in the description there'll be a bunch of project files in there there'll be a folder called just won't 124 BPM and inside of that folder there'll be a drum track right here and I'm going to pull th
is into my project and when I do Reaper is going to come up with this pop-up here with a couple of options because it has detected I think that 124 BPM is in the file name and it's smart enough to know that if there's something that says BPM in the file name it probably has something to do with Tempo and I have a couple of options here I can adjust the media based on this Tempo or I can ignore Tempo Suggestions by media now if I select this first option what Reaper is going to do is stretch my d
rum track so that it fits 120 BPM because that is what my project is at and that would make sense in a number of circumstances but not this circumstance so instead what I'm going to do is ignore the tempo suggested by media and click OK and then I'm going to set my project to be at 124 BPM now before I do that I'm going to jump into project settings and set the time base for my items envelopes and markers to time select OK come down here here change this to 124 and then I'm going to slide over t
his drum media item here right to measure two and let's check out what this sounds like foreign it's a pretty simple drum track and I'm going to use it as the base for recording some other instruments now before I move forward I need to change the track color because I do not like looking at these gray tracks I'll just select a random color there and I'll add another track to start recording so with my new track I'm going to name this base because I'm going to record bass guitar and if you have
a bass guitar you can follow along if not keep watching because you're going to learn a lot in this lesson once my track is renamed I'm going to arm my track for recording now when I earn my track for recording you are going to see some activity here in the meter and you're also going to hear some kind of weirdness in the audio and that is because record monitoring is on now I'm going to click record monitoring two more times to set record monitoring to off which you can see as I hover over that
little button right there when record monitoring is on it's taking the input from your audio interface it's going into Reaper it's processing it and then it's coming back out of Reaper and when you hear it it is always going to be slightly delayed this delay is usually called latency because it arrives later than when it went into your audio interface and right now I have about 7.5 milliseconds of latency in other words that's the time that it takes from whatever input is selected to go into my
audio interface to go through an analog to digital conversion be processed by Reaper and then go back out of my audio interface through a digital to analog conversion and then make it to my ears it's about seven and a half milliseconds and if you have no other way to monitor the inputs on your audio interface this is definitely going to be an option for you on my audio interface and I'm guessing on your audio interface there's probably an option to enable Hardware monitoring with Hardware monit
oring there is no delay it literally routes the input to the output so that you can hear it without this latency which is more optimal for recording now it's at this point in the lesson when I need to have a quick talk about feedback right now I'm going to be recording electric bass guitar and I have it plugged directly into my audio interface but anytime that I'm recording a microphone in the same room that I have my studio monitors I always turn my speakers off and this is because if I don't t
here's a pretty high probability that feedback will occur feedback happens when you have a microphone that is being Amplified by a speaker and they're both in close proximity to each other the output of the microphone is Amplified by the speaker which is then picked up by the microphone which is then Amplified by the speaker which is then picked up by the microphone and so on and so forth it creates what's called a feedback loop and it's self-oscillating which means once it starts there's no way
to stop it unless you turn down either the output of your audio interface or the input for whatever thing is feeding back feedback is problematic for two main reasons number one it can damage or destroy your speakers the second issue is that feedback can occur very very quickly in the level coming out of your speaker can be so loud that it can cause permanent hearing damage and you are not going to be able to turn it down either the gain of the mic or the output of the speaker in time to save y
our hearing human reaction time is just not that fast and so it's my opinion that it's just not worth it to have my speakers powered on anytime I'm recording with a microphone because let's face it humans make mistakes we get tired we get distracted and at some point you will plug a microphone in and your speakers will be on and they'll go into feedback if you don't practice this kind of power off habit that I'm advocating for here and if that happens there's a real chance that you could lose yo
ur hearing at least partially forever and that is just not a chance that I'm willing to take so anytime that I have a microphone plugged into my system I take the 10 seconds get out of my chair walk over and just power down my speakers alright with that out of the way let's record some bass so what I need to do is change the input from input number one here to input number two and this is where I have my bass guitar and I don't need to turn on record monitoring because my audio interface has Har
dware monitoring and that's going to work out just fine so I'm going to record bass here on track number two and my drums right now are coming in at measure two now the reason why I didn't pull these over to measure number one is because if I record anything before measure one or I play anything before measure one it's not going to be recorded so I usually like to start at measure two and that way I can have a little bit of audio maybe I'll do like a slide or something into the first beat someth
ing like that in this way I can capture that I also want to come up here and enable the metronome so that I can actually hear what's happening in the first measure otherwise I'll never come in at the right spot so with the metronome enabled when I play this back you can hear a little metronome in the background now usually what I like to do is change the metronome settings because by default they are a little bit quiet so I like to bump up the level quite a bit and I also like to switch the freq
uency by default Reaper uses a sine wave as the metronome and it has a low frequency for the first beat into high frequency for the secondary beat and I like to switch these around because every metronome that I have ever heard growing up goes beep boop boop boop boop boop boop and the higher pitch is always the first one so that just makes sense to me you can do whatever you want there's a bunch of options on this page which are pretty cool you can change the metronome sound so instead of a sin
e wave you can pick a sample maybe you want a cowbell or a wood block or something like that download a sample from envato elements and load that up here and then you can have your metronome sound like whatever you want you can also enable a count in before playback and to count in before recording now this is really handy if you are recording kind of in the middle of your project and you need to kind of start at one spot without a count in there's no way you'll be able to start recording right
at that spot so accounting can help you kind of get a feel for the tempo before it actually starts recording with that said let me double check that the metronome sounds correct very good I'm going to make sure the edit cursor is back to the beginning and I'm going to record some bass foreign [Music] that was good enough not perfect but it's good enough for this example when I stop the recording by pressing the space bar Reaper has a pop-up and it is asking me what I want to do with my new audio
files do I want to save all of them if I record it on multiple tracks there would be more than one file right here right now there's only one file but if I was recording on multiple tracks there would be multiple files here and you have options to save all renamed selected delete selected or delete all you can also disable this pop-up from coming up in the future by unchecking this button right here and once that is unchecked Reaper is just going to save everything so even if I record nothing i
t doesn't matter it's going to be saved but that's going to streamline things for this lesson I'm going to click save all and let's listen to what I recorded [Music] okay that's not bad it's pretty close it's kind of hard to tell exactly how accurate That Bass playing is because the grid is set to quarter notes and I was playing a lot of rhythms in between the quarter notes so I'm going to right click on the grid button here and change the line spacing to 16th notes and that'll give me a better
idea of how close these notes were a lot of them were pretty close but they weren't all perfect let me play back this beginning part here and let's see if there's an area that I can clean up a little bit more thank you it sounds like the first two measures are pretty close but they're just a little bit sloppy now I could edit the heck out of this and make it sound perfect but I'm just going to show you some options for punching in now punching in is a process where you can record sections of you
r part or track or whatever without needing to record the entire thing over again or without recording another track which you can also do what punching is going to do is put everything on the same track and there are a bunch of different options for how you can handle that in Reaper so let's say I wanted to record just the first two measures of this again well one thing that I could do is just roll back to the beginning and just record over it [Music] I enabled recording myself and then I stopp
ed it and you can see that what I have down here is a new take so this is the new audio that I just recorded you can see that right up here it says take two of two if I select this one up here it says take one of two and so if I want to hear this new take I just select it down here and then I can play it back foreign so that's called manual punching and with manual punching you can be playing back anything and as long as you have a track armed for recording at any point in time you can press rec
ord [Music] [Music] and then when you press Ctrl R again to disable that you can manually stop the recording and with this technique you can kind of punch in anywhere you want but it's kind of doing it on the fly now I'm going to undo that last recording and I'm going to undo that recording right there as well so instead of manual punching I'm going to show you Auto punch if you click on options you'll see that right now it's set to record mode normal the next option down is record mode time sel
ection Auto punch so with this option enabled if you make a Time selection so let's say I wanted to re-record just this section and I wanted it to stop right here Reaper is going to automatically start recording right here and stop recording right here which is a lot more precise especially if you are recording by yourself which I'm doing right now I'm going to press record and redo this intro section one more time please you can see now I have this take right here and it stopped recording right
here now before and after this new recording you can see that there are empty takes right down here and if you don't want to see that you can come up here to the options and then go down to take behavior and then uncheck display empty takes and now you'll only see anywhere that you've recorded another take and anywhere that you have not recorded it'll just kind of look normal so that's Auto Punch Time selection really really handy for very precise punches another option for punching is right he
re record mode Auto punch selected items I'm going to select that and I'm going to play a little bit more and find a couple of other sections that I want to re-record [Music] okay so this section right here this was a little bit sloppy I'm going to put the edit cursor right there and then press s on the keyboard just to split this and then let's see what we have after that foreign okay I'm going to punch in right here as well I think it was fine but this will be a good example and now I'm going
to select these two media items I'm going to bring the cursor back just a little bit maybe to measure eight and I'll play from here and press record and Reaper is going to punch me in for these selected media items [Music] okay [Music] there we go and that is super easy so that's a great way to punch in in multiple sections in one pass so you wouldn't have to go and individually record each one of those sections you can just split them select them and then select the option to record Auto punch
selected items super easy you can also get to those recording options if you right click on the recording button right here and you can see that the recording button itself changes to this different shape here this kind of looks like a camera this is record Auto punch items and it looks like this when it's record Auto Punch Time selection and when it's set to normal it just looks like a normal record button so now that you have takes what are you going to do with them well like I said before you
can select your take if you want to here the first take here the second take the third or the fourth or however many takes you have you just select the one that you want to hear in your song now that can be a little bit fiddly because at times depending on what you're doing it's very easy to inadvertently select a take that you didn't want like I just did it right there so if you don't want that to happen there are some options and I'm going to select all of my second takes here and then if you
right click on these items come up to take there are a ton of options here there are two that are probably most relevant one of those is to crop to active take and the other one is to lock to active take if you lock to active take you can still see the old take which is right here this is take number one but you can't select it so that's an option and that'll kind of lock in whichever takes you have selected I'm going to unlock those and I'll show you the other one which is crop to active take
this will make the other take kind of go away and now you'll only see the selected takes whichever they were now if you jump over into the options and you come down to new recording that overlaps existing media items there are different ways that you can handle what happens when you record over existing media items by default which it says right here Reaper is going to split the items and create new takes if you don't want that what you can do is you can select one of these other options you can
trim existing items behind new recordings this is called tape mode so I'll just show you what that looks like here I'll make a Time selection and then set this to Auto punch [Music] I don't think I played that right but it doesn't matter it's just to kind of show you here so instead of creating that new take and splitting the items what Reaper has done is inserted this New Media item and trimmed whatever was behind there which is fine now in the manual this is labeled as a destructive process b
ecause if you kind of move this you'll see that there's nothing behind here anymore but it is another way to kind of punch in that doesn't use the take system and you may prefer that there is another option on top of that which is create new media items and when you punch in now [Music] what Reaper is going to do is create a new media item and put it right on top of the other media item now there could be a very good use case for this but I haven't come across it I I don't know why this is somet
hing that you would want to do because now what you have is two media items that are overlapping which is not only difficult to see it's going to sound like a hot mess [Music] that to me does not sound good now you can make this a little bit more clear if you come up to the options and you select offset overlapping media items vertically and now you can actually see a little bit more clearly that there's another media item under here but I don't think that's probably the best recording option fo
r most of your projects probably one of these first two is a better fit so those are the basics of recording there's definitely more ways to record more methods and techniques and more options that you can explore but I think this is probably what you're going to be dealing with most of the time now coming up next you're going to learn about recording with midi and virtual instruments [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn how to record midi and use a virtual instrument I'm picking up jus
t about where I left off in the previous lesson between then and now I've recorded this guitar track right here which sounds like this [Music] and then it repeats that same basic pattern again like you heard in the previous lesson let's talk about midi and recording midi into Reaper midi is an acronym that stands for musical instrument digital interface and according to the Wikipedia article it is a technical standard that describes a communication protocol digital interface and electrical conne
ctors that connect a variety of electronic musical instruments computers and related audio devices for playing editing and recording music and that last part there is how I'm going to use midi in this lesson I'm going to use a midi keyboard that is sitting on my desk to input some note information into Reaper and that will trigger a virtual instrument to give me access to some additional sounds for my song here now to get started I need to jump into the preferences and enable my midi keyboard so
I'm going to hit Ctrl p on the keyboard and jump into preferences over here on the left I'm going to come down to MIDI devices which is underneath the audio section here and in the midi inputs section right here I'm going to find my midi keyboard it's right here I'm going to right click on it and choose enable input and that's it now my midi keyboard Works in Reaper now while I'm in preferences I'm going to show you something else here on the left side underneath plugins and then VST and I'm go
ing to show you how to add some additional paths to point Reaper to any locations where you might have additional effects or virtual instruments installed I'm going to click on edit path list and then you can choose this option right here add path and you can see down here I've added two paths on my S drive one for 32-bit plugins and one for 64-bit plugins once you have added your path where you have installed your effects in instruments you can come over here and then click on rescan and then r
escan VST paths for new or modified plugins and that's it I'm going to click OK and then come over here to the track control panel right click and choose insert virtual instrument on new track Reaper is going to open up the effects browser with the instruments selected right here on the left and now I have access to all of the virtual instruments on my system and if you're following along and you are new to Reaper and recording you probably don't have this many but you definitely will have these
three right here re-samplematic 5000 re-syn doctor I think that's how you say that and resynth those three are Reaper effects and they're okay re-samplematic is probably the most useful out of those three but instead of showing you how to use those which I don't think are super useful in the grand scheme of things I'm going to show you how to use a very simple and free virtual instrument called Mr 2. this is a pretty old virtual instrument and it only comes in 32-bit VST format but that's total
ly fine because you can get it for mac and PC it sounds really pretty good and it's free so I'm going to select this one and then click add over here on the left you can see my new track is set up and this is my instrument interface it's super basic there are five controls and I'm not even really gonna mess with any of them you can see my track is already armed for recording record monitoring is on which is necessary if you want to hear the instrument and if I plan my keyboard I can hear this el
ectric piano sound so to record this instrument I'm going to bring the edit cursor back to the beginning by pressing W on the keyboard I want to turn the metronome on and then I'm going to press Ctrl R and play some simple chords [Music] thank you [Music] okay that was pretty good I intentionally played a couple of what you might call spicy cords to show you how to edit midi in just a minute and you can see right here as I was recording all of the notes that I was playing were populating in this
midi item right here and before I show you how to jump in and edit this midi item let me go over the different record modes for a midi track if you right click on the record button you can see you have several options right down here it is set to record input audio or midi and then right below there there are some options specific to MIDI tracks the first one is midi overdub with midi overdub you can add new notes on any channel within existing items preserving what you already have so let me s
how you what this looks like [Music] you can see as I recorded and played those new notes down lower on the keyboard they were added right down here let's look at another option with midi replace from the time you start recording until you stop existing midi notes will be removed and any new material played on any channel will be recorded in their place check it out [Music] thank you I'm going to undo that and let's check out this option right here midi Touch replace with midi Touch replace exis
ting midi notes will be replaced by any new notes played over them on the same channel as the original material and other existing material will remain as it is in other words if I play new notes those notes will get replaced and any of the other notes that I don't play over top of won't get replaced check it out [Music] thank you [Music] so you can see as soon as I started playing new notes everything underneath whatever note that I played got replaced and then as soon as I let go of the keyboa
rd whatever note was already there remained intact so this chord right here I played and then as soon as I released that this chord was not affected I'm going to undo that and let's check out the last mode which is midi latch replace with midi latch replace existing midi material remains unchanged until you strike the first note all of the old material will then be replaced with notes played on the same channel as the original material until recording has stopped in other words this is pretty mu
ch the same as midi replace except it doesn't start recording whatever you're doing until you play the first note check it out foreign [Music] so as soon as I started playing it kicked over into that latch mode and then anything from that point on was replaced whether I was playing notes or not I'm going to undo that and I'm going to switch this back to MIDI overdub because this is normally how I leave all of my midi tracks set up the next thing that I want to do is clean up my midi recording I
need to adjust the rhythms and clean up some of those spicy notes and you're going to learn how to do that coming up next [Music] in this lesson you will learn how to do some basic midi editing to get started I'm going to come over here and disable my track for recording and I'm going to solo this track right here and then I'm going to double click on my midi item to open it up in the midi editor and this midi editor is really fantastic you can do a ton of things you can quantize transpose lock
your notes to a specific scale you can add notes to whatever you have recorded by just clicking and dragging you can trim your notes make them longer or shorter you can adjust the velocity by clicking and dragging near the top of your notes so if you wanted to make this chord quieter which is a little bit annoying to do like that and the other way that you can do that is to just click and drag down here in the velocity Lane which doesn't make as much annoying noise and you can see that my notes
are going lower with their velocity which is displayed once you start making a velocity adjustment there if you push the value all the way up to the top that is the loudest a midi note can be which is 127 and if you pull it all the way down it's one which is the quietest and so you can adjust how loud or soft your notes are just like that [Music] you can also delete notes so I'm going to delete those extra spicy notes that I put in there and make another adjustment to this velocity just like tha
t to bring it closer to the velocity of these other notes the coloring of the notes indicates their velocity so now that I have adjusted that first chord you can see that the first chord is all the same velocity which is why it's all the same color one of the things you're going to be doing quite frequently is using quantization to clean up the rhythms quantization is a process where Reaper will move your midi notes to the closest grid line now just like in the arrange view the midi editor has g
rid lines here which you can set right down at the bottom currently it's set to 16th notes and you can set the type of 16th notes right now it's set to straight but you can also do triplet dotted and swing with this drop down right here so quantizing is going to move my notes which are already pretty close to being right on the beat but it's going to get them even closer and it's going to take care of a couple of these other areas where the rhythms are a little bit not so great so I want to zoom
into the beginning here so that you can see what quantization is going to do a little bit better and press Q on the keyboard that's going to bring up the quantize events window right here and you can see as soon as this popped up all of the notes shifted just a little bit and that's because this is set to quantize all notes and right now it's only set to position but there are a few more options you can do position and note end position and note length note and only and note length only I'd lik
e to point out that there are a lot more quantization settings if you switch this over from use grid to manual when it's set to use Grid it's a little bit unclear what the difference is between position and note end and position and note length it looks like it's doing something but it's not easy to tell if you switch this over to manual mode now position and note length makes a little bit more sense because there is a drop down for length and you can set a specific note length for all of your n
otes you can make them all whole notes all quarter notes and you have a lot more flexibility with these settings right here I'm not going to go into all of these settings because I think for this particular example it's going to be good enough to switch this over to use grid and set this to position and note length and now all of the notes that I have played have been locked into the grid now depending on how well you played your midi notes this may or may not work perfectly let me undo that and
I'll show you over here if there were let's say a bunch of notes that were a little bit too early like this and you quantized everything they're going to be snapped too early so sometimes what I will do is look at the thing that I have played and then do some really quick manual adjustments sometimes I will select all the notes and just shift some over so that they're closer to being in the neighborhood of where they need to be and then quantize so for example what I would do here is pull all t
hese notes over to the right to get them a little bit closer and then quantize everything and now let's see what this sounds like [Music] I'm going to turn off the metronome because I don't really think I need that right now [Music] all right this is a lot better honestly it wasn't really that bad the way it was before but quantization is definitely going to come in handy so I wanted to show you how that works one thing I want to do is adjust the length of these first three chords here because t
hey're just a little short I could have played this with my sustain pedal but I didn't because I wanted to show you how to clean these up a little bit and sometimes editing with a sustain pedal can get a little bit tricky so you can manually adjust the length of your notes just like that [Music] okay or instead of doing that manually what you can do is use the event properties which I brought up by hitting Ctrl F2 you can also get to that by clicking The View menu over here and going down to eve
nt properties so you can do a bunch of stuff with the event properties one thing that you can do is to set all of your notes to the same length so what I would do here is Type in is Type in 0.3.75 which will set them all to three and three quarter beats long which is three beats and a dotted eighth note and then click apply and that's a super fast way to set a bunch of chords or notes to the same length which can be very handy in a number of circumstances let's say I wanted to do the same thing
here I'm just going to retype that in 0.3.75 done and so you could select all the chords that you know need to be that length like this bring up that event properties window again and adjust all of those to the same length now this chord right here didn't start at the correct spot but I'm just going to move it over to the left a little bit there you go and then other times it's faster just to do this manually so I would jump in here and just kind of zoom in and make a quick edit like that and li
ke that now this chord here sounds a little bit too quiet so what I would do is adjust the velocity so that chord kind of jumps out just a little bit more maybe that's too much I'll just bring it back down just a touch and so that's a really quick way that you can adjust the note length and the rhythms the start and the end of all of your notes in your recording now what about some of these spicier chords let's take a look at this right here okay that wasn't right so what I'd probably do is brin
g the velocity of this note down a little bit adjust the length and then figure out what's going on here but actually because this is a repeating pattern I really don't need to do that what I can do instead is just delete all these notes take this section right here and then just paste it right here let me delete this one straggler there and this should line up perfectly let me unsolo this [Music] okay perfect I'll just clean up this Rhythm right here just a little bit extend that out just a tou
ch [Music] and then extend this out just a skosh and then I need some cords to go with this longer section right here just some big hole notes and what I could do is just draw the notes in manually so I can draw an A down here an e [Music] grab all those and adjust the velocity back down or just copy one of the chords that I played earlier like this and just paste it over here move it to the right spot and then I can even take this chord hold Ctrl click and drag duplicate it over here and then j
ust raise it up to the next chord which is a C sharp minor now because this is an a major chord I need to find that third in the chord which is going to be an F and drop this down right here one half step [Music] and then the next chord is a b so I can just duplicate my a major chord and bring it up a whole step [Music] and then this chord is an F sharp minor so I'm going to control click again bring in this minor chord here and then just pull it down to F sharp minor and then just adjust the vo
icing a little bit maybe take this F sharp and bring it up here oh [Music] and maybe throw a seventh in here so instead of this note I'll make this an e [Music] or something like that now maybe you feel like after you have done all of your edits to your notes and you've quantized everything that it sounds a little bit what you might call robotronic or unnatural and you might want to give it a little bit more humanization well good news there is an option to do that as well if you press h on the
keyboard you can bring up the humanize notes window and you can adjust the timing so I'm going to select all notes here and then I'll just give this a little bit of wiggle here maybe 25 percent we'll just adjust the timing just a little tiny bit the timing bias will shift kind of where it's adjusting the timing when it's set to zero it's kind of going to adjust 22 percent positive or negative you can see some of the notes are ahead of the beat some of the notes are behind the beat if you shift i
t this way it's going to move everything towards the left a little bit you can also humanize the velocity so I'm going to click OK and then let's say I wanted to adjust the velocity of this one chord which is currently all at the same velocity I'm going to switch this back to selected notes pull the timing back to zero and then just adjust the velocity and you can see that down here it's adjusting the velocity of this chord to just make it sound a little bit more human [Music] foreign [Music] le
t's say that that was too much what you could do is re-quantize everything maybe just set the position but instead of using a strength of a hundred percent maybe just knock this back down to like 50. [Music] all right I think that sounds pretty good I didn't clean up all of my spicy notes in there but now you have an idea of how to do some basic midi edits which is going to be super useful all right coming up next you're going to learn how to do some basic audio edits so check that out coming up
next oh [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn some editing basics if you want to follow along with this lesson there is a link in the description to a bunch of project files and you can actually open up this project with all of this media included if you look for the folder that says just won't editing inside there there will be a project that says just want underscore editing and all of the audio files are in this little subfolder here and if you open up this project it should open up
all of the audio files if for whatever reason it doesn't find any of the audio files you can point Reaper to that audio files folder and you should be good to go now you probably don't have this Mr 2 effect installed at this point and Reaper may come up and say hey I can't find this effect no problem you can just dismiss that or if you want to follow along and actually hear what's happening on this Mr 2 effect check out the link in the description for Mr 2 go ahead and download that there'll be
a zip file unzip that inside of there there will be a couple of folders depending on your operating system for me on Windows I'm going to take the windows folder open that up and then take the Mr to dot dll file and then I'll pull that over into my effects folder jump into the reaper preferences like you saw in a previous lesson make sure that folder is added and then rescan it and you should be good to go you may have to reload the project file to get that to show up in work properly but that's
all there is to it so let's look at some basic edits like you saw in a previous lesson you can move your items in the arrange view by just clicking and dragging them you can even pull them to a new track if you want I'm going to undo that you can move multiple items by selecting them in a number of different ways and what you saw me do right there was create a rectangular Marquee by right clicking and dragging to select all these media items and then I can move those around wherever I want you
can also use shift and click to select media items and that's going to select everything between kind of two points so for example if I select this First Media item here and I shift click down here everything in between those two clicks will be selected and it works very similar in a vertical way as well if I click on the drums and then I click on the guitar here everything between those two points is selected if I kind of do it in a diagonal way so I select the guitar and then up here you can s
ee it selects both of these media items or if you want to select non-contiguous items you can just use control and again once you have your items selected you can click and drag and move those around you can trim your items very easily if you go to the end and I'll just zoom in here by holding Ctrl and ALT and then right click and dragging a little Zoom selection box here if you put your mouse at the end of the media item you can just click and drag to trim up the end if you go to the beginning
you can do the same thing to adjust the end point of your media item if you move your mouse to the upper corner of your media item you can apply a fade in if you right click on your fade in there are several fade shapes that you can choose from maybe you want this to be a nice dramatic fade kind of like that let's see how this sounds and to get rid of this fade because I don't really like that I'm just going to click and drag that and pull it all the way back to the left you can do the same thin
g over here on the right side and you can do a fade out just like that you can right click on the fade to change the shape to whatever you want you can also trim and fade multiple items at once so I can select these two items here and I can trim them both and I can also fade them both now trimming Works regardless of where the media items end so I can trim all of these but fading does not you can see that the fade only works for this item here but it does work for these two items and that's beca
use they end at the same point so if you want to fade out multiple items at the same time for whatever reason you just need to make sure that they are ending at the same spot I'm going to show you some more options with fading and crossfading into second but first I want to show you splitting I think you've seen this before in some previous lessons but if you want to split any of your media items you can select the media item and put the edit cursor right at the point where you want to it and th
en press s on the keyboard if you don't have any items selected and you set the edit cursor and you press s it's going to split everything in the project that's underneath the edit cursor let me show you that one more time so no media items are selected I press s and everything gets split so you want to watch out for that if you are trying to split something specific you want to make sure you have the media item selected then press s now that I have this item split here you can do all kinds of t
hings with this item over here to the right I can copy it and paste it I can cut it with Ctrl X on the keyboard if I control click and drag I can duplicate it and then I can drag this out wherever I need it by the way I don't think I mentioned before when you're moving items if you hold shift you can move items and ignore snapping shift is a keyboard modifier that a lot of times will ignore snapping for the thing that you are doing which is Handy to know you can hit Ctrl D on the keyboard to dup
licate your items duplicating looks a lot like copy and pasting except that duplicating pastes the item right at the end of the item that you duplicated so if I take this and duplicate it you can see where the New Media item gets placed copying and pasting Works a little bit differently if I copy it from here and then paste it it gets pasted wherever the edit cursor is so similar but slightly different now you may have noticed when I duplicated this item by control clicking and dragging it's doi
ng this thing that you saw in a previous lesson where it's kind of stacking these media items vertically and that's because I set this option in the options menu for offset overlapping media items vertically which I actually don't like to have most of the time and now you can see that this Crossfade is being created automatically that's because Auto Crossfade is enabled if I disable auto Crossfade and then do that same operation again where I control click and drag to duplicate you'll see that i
t won't Crossfade with the media item underneath now I still do have a fade here but that's because there was already a fade on the beginning of that media item and it's not crossfading with the media item underneath for the most part I leave Auto Crossfade on because that is my preference but but you may prefer to turn that off from time to time depending on what you are doing now speaking of crossfading when you split an item you'll see that there is a fade out and a fade in created right on t
hat split in fact there are a bunch of fade options that I want to go over with you really quick in the preferences so let's jump into preferences here and on the left you will find this page underneath project and media item defaults so at the top of this section there are a bunch of options that have to do with Fades this first option here is set by default it is create automatic fade in and Fade Out for new items and you can set the length and when this is checked when you split an item you w
ill get a fade in and a fade out because Reaper treats a split item as a new item so if I uncheck this and I click apply and we zoom in here and I split this media item you'll see now there's no fade generally I think this is a decent thing to have on because if there's no fade between these sometimes you can get some strange clicking artifacts depending on what kind of edit you are doing another option that you'll find right here is overlap and Crossfade items when splitting so I'm going to cli
ck on that and then click apply and then I will heal that split in this item by selecting these items and then I'll right click it was just off the screen there right at the very bottom heel splits in item now that split is gone but if I re-split it you'll see that now there's a cross fade that appears right here which can be very handy depending on the type of edits that you are doing now you want to watch out for doing cross Fades right on the beat if you are editing something like drums becau
se you can see that the Crossfade kind of Alters this waveform a little bit let me undo that and then redo that and it may affect the transient attack which means the spiky bit at the beginning of the drum hit and it may make that sound kind of dull or mushy sounding so you either may want to turn this off or adjust where that Crossfade is happening I'm going to turn snap off and undo that split right there and if I split it over here it's not really going to affect this drum hit at all there's
not necessarily a right or a wrong way to do this it kind of depends on what you are editing now you can also adjust the timing of this Crossfade by default both this option and the above option are set to 10 milliseconds generally I like this to be a little bit faster for something like drums maybe two or five milliseconds so if I click on five and then click apply and I undo this split and then re-split it oh actually I think I set it to 50 milliseconds when actually I wanted zero zero five so
let me change that and click apply and now when I split this you'll see a very small Crossfade you can make it even smaller just like that and that can help if you're making some really tight edits and you want to maintain a Crossfade to make sure that there's no clicking sounds that happen but you need to tighten those up significantly another option that you may find Handy is this option right here do not set fade in Fade Out for imported items generally I like to leave this checked because w
hen I'm importing items I don't necessarily want Reaper to put a fade on those because I prefer to do the fade manually in fact I don't necessarily want Reaper to create automatic fade in Fade Out for new items either so I'll click apply there as well you can also set the default fade in Fade Out shape right here if you don't like this particular curve you can choose another one and you can do the same for the Crossfade shape right here I'm going to go ahead and heal that split right there heali
ng by the way works only if you have not moved your media items so if I split this and then I turn off snapping and I move this media item ever so slightly and I try to heal it it's not going to work so if I did that and I wanted to get rid of that split probably the best option would be to just delete that media item and then just edit this over here to get that to be the correct length now speaking of length you can see as I increase the length of this particular media item right here it's loo
ping I think you saw this in a previous lesson and looping is on by default on all of the types of media items in Reaper so if I increase the length of this midi item down here you can see that it's going to Loop and looping is fine in some situations and definitely useful but I prefer not to have it on by default and you can set that right here in the preferences in the same section as those Fades and crossfades that we were just looking at right down here there are options for Loop source for
imported items Loop source for new midi items Loop source for recorded items Loop source for glued items and I think generally I prefer to uncheck all of those and that way things won't Loop now everything is still going to Loop in this project because they're not new items but if I create a new item and you can do that by control clicking and dragging you can see when you hold Ctrl the cursor changes to this little pencil tool here and that will actually create a new midi item and if you increa
se the length of this midi item you can see that it's no longer looping but if I wanted to set all of the items in my project to not loop I can just select all of them go to item settings and then uncheck Loop item source and now if I take my drums and increase their length they won't Loop and I can see right here there's a little triangle that indicates that's the end of this media item but you can see that it's not looping which is generally how I prefer to work in Reaper another way that you
can perform many of the edits that I just showed you is using a Time selection and that gives you a few additional advantages so let's say I wanted to do something like copy the drums from measure 21 to measure 23 and then paste them over here at measure 27. well what I could do is split the drums right here split the drums right here copy and then paste super easy but it's a couple of extra steps that you don't actually need to do if you know how to use time selections so instead what I could d
o is create a Time selection and you can do that by clicking and dragging up here in the ruler area or clicking and dragging in the arrange area as long as you are not over any item because if you click and drag over an item you're going to move the item but even if you are over an item if you hold Ctrl and then you right click and drag you can create a Time selection so I'll create a Time selection right here make sure my drums are selected and then I can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl shift C
to copy within time selection set the edit cursor here and paste now this has a couple of advantages because now I can paste the contents and if I clear my time selection by hitting escape on the keyboard I haven't split my item in splitting your item unnecessarily is generally not a great idea because if you have that Crossfade option selected that can slightly alter the attack of some of the drums or some of the other instruments and it's best to leave the audio intact whenever possible so usi
ng time selection is a very handy thing to know there's a lot more that you can do with time selections but I'm going to leave it there for now another thing that I will do very frequently is adjust the volume of my media items so I'm going to zoom into the bass guitar right here by holding Ctrl alt and then right clicking and dragging and let's say that I wanted to increase the volume of this bass guitar note right here there's probably a dozen different ways that I could do it but one way is I
could just split this item right here and then if I put my mouse on the top of this media item you can see that if I click and drag I can change the item volume so if I click and drag down I can decrease the item volume and you can see that represented in the waveform there and if you hold shift and you drag up you can increase the item volume which is also very handy although you can do it this way this is not my preferred way of doing it because it is a little bit finicky for one it's not alw
ays easy to get my mouse right on top of the media item to make this adjustment especially if the tracks are a little bit shorter it's very easy to kind of overshoot and then click on a bunch of stuff and maybe you know move something or make a Time selection that you didn't intend to and after you have already made an increase in volume so you can see that this item has been set to Plus 3.83 if I try and adjust the volume again and I move in any direction it's going to snap down to zero first b
efore I can decrease the volume in order to move it in a smooth way from positive 3.83 decibels I need to hold shift which I don't always remember to do so instead what I like to do is hop into preferences and then search for knob and that will take me to this page right here appearance media and there are a bunch of options for media item buttons one of those that I like to use is for the volume knob so if I click on this and then click apply and ok now you can see that there is a volume knob a
bove all of my media items it looks grayed out when there hasn't been a volume change by default and once you do make a volume change it changes to this lighter color here and now it's much easier for me to make a volume adjustment to my media items if you want to reset this back to its default you can just double click and reset it to zero now for those of you who have eagle eyes you may be noticing that this guitar media item right down here is set to positive 1.45 but the item volume is set t
o zero how is this possible well there's another way to set the volume for media items like I said there's like a dozen ways to do everything in Reaper or sometimes more and right after I recorded this guitar part I made a small adjustment to the item volume in the item properties and you can get to the item Properties by right clicking and then choose item Properties or use the keyboard shortcut F2 and there are a bunch of item properties right here that you can adjust but what I had done after
I had recorded it is made a small adjustment to the volume right here and just bumped it up a little bit there's also options for normalization which you can do right here and that will bring up some normalization tools but this is another way that you can adjust the volume of media items and then if I click OK you can see that it's been brought up to positive 2.83 but there's no volume change right here so that's just another way that you can do it as well both options work and you can do what
ever works for you there are a few more things that I want to show you with editing but you're going to learn those in the next lesson where you learn about stretching items and using stretch markers so check that out coming up next [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn how to stretch audio items and use stretch markers to adjust the timing of recorded audio items so I'm going to be working on my bass track here this is something that if you recall in a previous lesson I recorded live and
it's not a hundred percent perfect The rhythms are pretty close but there are a few sections that could be massaged a little bit to be right on the beat so I'm going to solo this track I'm going to double click the volume to bring that up a little bit to make it a little bit easier to hear and I'm going to jump to the end because first I want to show you how to stretch an audio item and that's super easy to do I'm going to split this item right here just before the last note and I'm going to pl
ay it so you can hear what it sounds like before it gets stretched and then after all right to stretch this I'm going to move my mouse to the end of the item hold alt or option on the Mac and then click and drag and when I do you can see that right above the item here a rate indicator pops up which wasn't there before and now it's showing me a value of less than one which indicates that it's longer than it was before if you move it to the left it'll give you a value that's greater than one which
means it's playing it back faster than its default which is one so let's say that I make this about twice as long which is 0.5 check out how it sounds now basically it sounds the same it's just really really long you can still hear that there's vibrato but the vibrato is 50 as fast as it was before because it's twice as long as it was before I want to jump into the project settings because I want to show you that you can change the default pitch shift mode in Reaper currently it's set to elasti
c 3.3.3 Pro that is the default and if you click the drop down here you can see that there are a number of other options but I don't think I've ever changed it from the default setting because first the default setting works for just about everything and second if I do need to change the pitch stretching algorithm that Reaper is using I can do it on a clip by clip basis by hitting F2 on the keyboard to bring up the item properties and you can see with this media item selected in the media item p
roperties window here right in this bottom section there's a drop down where I have all of those same options but now I can adjust them for in visual items if I want and like I said before normally I don't adjust it but for whatever reason if I felt that this pitch stretching algorithm wasn't working I can change it to something different or I can select the same as the project default but just change the mode and this is useful if you're maybe doing something like a vocal or a spoken word and y
ou're stretching and it doesn't quite sound right what you can do in that case is experiment with one of these different modes that will preserve the formant and the format is the part of the sound that creates the vowel sound and so by selecting one of these other modes it may sound a little bit better for you the only one of these algorithms that sounds I would say wildly different than all of the rest is Ria so if I select that one and then click apply check out how the bass sounds now it has
this really cool kind of Spacey reverberant texture to it it's probably not appropriate for General use but for sound design and creative use Ria sounds amazing I'm going to switch it back to the project default and click apply and I want to show you just a few more things here first is resetting the playback rate so you can do that just by typing in one here and then clicking apply you can also uncheck preserve pitch when changing rate if for whatever reason you wanted to stretch something out
and have the pitch shift while you did that you can uncheck it right here in the item properties and then stretch it out and now it will be lower in Pitch than it was before you can also see that right above the media item here where it says the rate 0.5 and then right next to there it says negative 11 that negative 11 is referring to the number of semitones that this item has been shifted relative to where it was before so if I get this right at 0.5 or close enough it'll be almost exactly one
octave down from where it was before because 12 semitones is one octave it's 12 half steps which equals an octave so I'm going to undo all of that by checking this box and setting the playback rate to one and now I'm going to show you how you can use this idea of stretching an audio item to adjust the timing of a recorded bit of audio so I'm going to look at this section of the base right here that I recorded live and what you'll see is that the notes are not aligning perfectly to the grid now y
ou don't really need to fuss too much if all of the notes are not like 100 on the grid but at some point in your editing Journey you're probably going to have to clean up the rhythms of something so let me show you a couple of techniques that you can use to do that one of them involves splitting the item and then just shifting the audio a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left to do that I like to turn off snapping by pressing alt s on the keyboard and in this particular case what I
would do is try to get the splits in between the notes as much as possible and because this is a staccato sounding bass part which sounds like this I have some space between these first few notes here so if I split it right here you're never going to hear that because the bass isn't really making a lot of noise here so what I can do is put a split right there and then take this part of the audio and just shift it to the left typically I like to do that by holding alt and then left click and dra
gging which is called a slip edit although Reaper doesn't call it a slip edit and you can just slip edit that to the right I can do the same thing to this note I'll split it right here and then just move it over to the left now sometimes splitting the item and doing a slip edit doesn't always work because there's no space between the notes so in these last four notes Here which sounds like this or however many notes that is I think it's six notes actually doesn't matter there's not a lot of spac
e between the notes so it's going to become a little bit trickier to try and split this without some weird things happening let me show you what I mean so I'm going to split this right here and in general when you're doing this technique what you want to do is have a split to the right of the thing that you are trying to adjust for example if you wanted to adjust this first note here what you would not want to do is just take this entire media item and do a slip at it to pull that one note to th
e left what you would want to do is split it right here so that everything to the right is unaffected and you can just adjust this one note right there so it's the same idea over here I don't necessarily want to adjust these notes I only want to work on this one note so I'm going to put a split right here and then shift this note over to the left now when I did that this may be a little bit hard to tell but this note should be taking up two sixteenth notes of time which the grid is currently set
to 16th notes so each one of these spaces here is 1 16 note and I believe that this note should start here and end here but because I played it a little bit loose that's not really what's happening now but I can fix that by stretching this note just a little bit now if I just stretch this note where it is it's going to stretch from the beginning of the media item which is way over here that's not going to really work for me so what I want to do is move this split point right here by holding dow
n shift and then clicking and dragging and I'm going to try and get this split Point as close as I can to the grid without being on top of the grid because I don't want it to be right at the very start of this note because that can sound kind of funny when there's a Crossfade that's happening right at the very start of a note so now what I can do is trim this note back just a hair and I think the second note is happening right here you can see the waveform is kind of changing so I'm just going t
o trim it back to about here and then stretch it to the right and that way this note is lasting for the correct amount of time I can do a similar thing right here what I can do is split this and then shift this over just a little bit I can't really tell what's happening here because this note kind of looks like a mess it's more like a noise yeah I don't really know exactly what's happening there but I'm just going to guess that this kind of looks right and I'll focus more on getting this third n
ote here kind of dialed in so I'm going to move this split point right here I'm going to split this again before these final two notes and then I'll just shift where this note is starting and I'll try and get this part of the wave here this is the start of the note I'm just going to slide that over so it aligns right to the grid there and again this particular note is not lasting quite long enough I start the next note right here but actually it needs to start over here so I think the best way t
o do that is to just kind of fix these notes over here so I'm going to slide that note over just a little bit and then trim this back a little bit trim this forward just a touch and then take this note and stretch it to the right and I'm going to zoom way in here and just Crossfade that just a little bit to make sure there's no clicks or pops all right let's see how this sounds to me that sounds more or less perfect you'd have to really compare that to the original to know that there was an edit
made but now the rhythms are a little bit cleaner they're happening right on the beat and it's going to lock in with the rest of the music I think a little bit better so splitting and slip editing splitting and stretching is a perfectly valid technique for adjusting the timing of your recorded audio items but I'm going to show you one more method that I think you'll find perhaps even more useful so I'm going to undo all of those edits real quick so let's look at using stretch markers to do some
thing very similar so stretch markers allow you to stretch your audio item but not all at the same rate and I think this will make more sense if I show you how they work so I'm going to turn snapping off and then what I want to do is place a stretch marker at the beginning of each one of these notes so I'm going to put my mouse at the beginning of this very first note here oh actually the first notes right here and I'm going to hold Ctrl and ALT on the keyboard and then click and you can see the
re's a little Diamond stretch marker that appeared actually that's kind of hard to see so I'm going to change the color of this clip make it nice and dark like that very good that's a stretch marker right there and I'm just going to move along and drop another stretch marker right after because just like before when you're making these adjustments with stretch markers and splitting I don't necessarily want to adjust everything in the clip so if I put a stretch marker here and then I move this st
retch marker you can see that it's going to preserve all the audio to the right of this stretch marker but I can make an adjustment right here and move this to the grid just like that so really quickly you can go in here and drop stretch markers at the beginning of all of your notes so just like that really really quickly and then if you turn snapping back on you can snap your stretch markers to the grid just like that or you can right click on your item go down to stretch markers stretch marker
s in selected items and choose snap to grid and just let Reaper snap everything for you and now it basically sounds identical to the method that I showed you just a minute ago but it takes a fraction of the time now the reason that I spent time showing you that other method is because for some sounds stretch markers can perhaps leave some artifacts behind that may not work maybe it's a violin or maybe it's a female vocal using stretch markers might work but it may be better to split it and stret
ch it in that more labor-intensive method that I showed you just a minute ago both techniques are totally viable there's not a right or a wrong way to do it there's just different techniques I would say most of the time use stretch markers because it's way faster but if you hear something that sounds kind of odd you may want to undo your stretch markers which you can do by right clicking on your item go down to stretch markers and just remove all of them just like that and then experiment with t
he other method to see if you can get the results that you're after all right coming up next you're going to learn about effects [Music] in this lesson you will learn how to use effects in Reaper there are a ton of ways that you can use effects inside of Reaper but in this lesson I'm going to focus on some Basics applying effects to tracks applying effects to individual media items applying effects to your master track and using monitor effects let's start with applying effects to an individual
track if you click on the effects button right here Reaper is going to open up the effects browser and it's going to show you all the effects that it has found on your system and finding the exact effect that you are looking for is really pretty easy there's a filter box right up here and you can search for the name of a specific effect or you can type in something like comp which will find almost every compressor that I have on my system it's not going to get all of them because some effects li
ke Rough Rider for example this is a compressor and I don't think this shows up if I sort for comp because it doesn't have comp in the name yeah I don't see it here but either way if you're searching for the name of a specific effect or you're searching for the type of effect I would say this is going to get you where you need to go but if it doesn't you can also sort the effects over here on the left you can sort by the effect type so you can click on VST or vst3 or JS or Cocos and that'll show
you just those effects there's a list of categories here and you can click on one of these categories to find some eqs now again just like the filter this doesn't always find all of those EQ effects because of how the developers of certain effects have labeled their effects for example there may be an effect that is neither labeled an EQ or in the internal code flagged as an EQ but this will find most of them and if you click on developers you can find the effect from a specific developer now a
s you see here I have a ton of audio effects on my system and you're probably not going to have the same effects that I have but let's look at some of the effects that come with Reaper that I think you're going to find very useful so if you click on kakos right here one effect that you're probably going to want to have on every single one of your tracks is an EQ Reaper comes with a basic but very good EQ called re-eq and you can apply this to your track by double clicking on the effect or clicki
ng the add button right down here and now I can start eq'ing my drums if I want to add another effect I can double click in a blank area underneath the effect right here that'll bring up the effects browser or I can click the add button or you can come to the menu underneath effects add effects or use the keyboard shortcut insert or a another very common effect that you'll find Handy to use on most of your tracks is a compressor so I'm going to apply this stock compressor from Reaper called reco
mp and I'll double click to insert that effect on this track and now I have two basic but very good effects now these two effects are so common I would recommend that you have them available on pretty much every track and that's very easy to do if you select your effects right here and then go into the menu you can save chain as default for new tracks a chain in Reaper is a selection of effects so if I click on this and now I insert a new track what you'll see is that the effects button is green
indicating that there are effects already on this track and those two effects are re EQ and recomp and both of them have been saved as the default for all tracks in their default state so having these two effects as a track default is a pretty good place to start because if you don't use them it's not going to affect the audio it's not going to use up any system resources and when you do need to use them it's going to save you time because you already have them loaded now speaking of Saving Tim
e one thing that you may find is that over time you keep reaching for the same effects and you keep setting them up in the same way and there's a great feature in Reaper called effects chains which allow you to save a group of effects and it saves their current state so let's say that I did some fancy drum EQ something that looks like this which is probably not going to sound good but at least it looks like something and then maybe I set the compressor to something like this and I think that thi
s is really great to have and I want to make this available for future projects what I can do is Select both of these effects come up to the menu click on effects and then save effects chain and then I can save this as something like drum effects which I've previously done I'll click save and if I delete those effects and I click on the effects button again and add those you'll see that they will add back to this track in exactly the same state that I left them in which is great for saving time
in future projects moving effects from track to track is also very easy in Reaper if you want to take all the effects from your drum track and put them on the Bass track all you need to do is just click on the effects button and drag it over to the Bass track and there you go the same two effects have been applied in exactly the same way to the Bass track or maybe you just want to copy one effect over from the Bass track to something like the guitar track maybe the compressor you can just click
and drag the recomp effect and drop it right here on the guitar track sometimes what you want to do is take an effect from one track and just move it to another track instead of copying it over and you can do that by holding alt so if you hold alt and then click and drag you can just move recomp from the base over to the guitar if you want to get rid of all the effects on each one of your tracks you can just alt click on the effects button and that'll clear out all of the effects so putting effe
cts on an individual track or most of your tracks is probably the most common way to use effects in Reaper but it's not the only way another way that is sometimes very useful is applying effects to individual media items if I wanted to take this item right here and apply an effect a couple of different ways to do that one way is you can come up to the view menu and then come down here to effects browser maybe you want to put something like a JS EQ so I'll select this three band EQ and I'll just
drag it right over to that item and now if you look at this item right here you can see there's a little green button and that indicates there is an effect on this media item now you can get this effects button to show up on all of your media items if you want in the preferences so I'm going to open up preferences here Ctrl p on the keyboard and then underneath appearance and then media in the same location where I showed you how to get this volume knob to appear above all the media items there
are a bunch of different options you have for media item buttons and one of them is called No Effects if you click on that and then click apply what you'll see is a little effects button that's grayed out show up above all of your media items and when you click on this it'll open up the effects browser and then you can just select an effect to apply to that media item just like the effects in the track control panel if you hold alt and click on the effects above your media item that will clear t
hose out that will get rid of those effects now it's not my preference to have that effects button above each one of my media items but maybe you'll find that useful for now I'm going to take that off and then click apply using effects on your master track is also something that is very useful and I would personally recommend it now up until this point you've been hearing the master track in each lesson because in Reaper all of the tracks and all of the audio get processed by the master track is
their final destination that's where everything gets mixed together and processed before you hear it and before it gets rendered and using effects on your master track is a really good idea to make sure that you are not outputting levels that are too high and causing clipping and Distortion which is not a great idea so to see the master track in the track control panel you can come up to the menu click on view and then select Master track and then on the master track just like all the other tra
cks there is an effects button if you click on the effects button it'll bring up the effects browser and the first effect that I would recommend putting on your master track is called re-limit re-limit is a really nice limiter and it'll make sure that no audio gets above a certain limit sometimes that's called a threshold in this case it's called a ceiling and I like to set this up by putting my brick wall ceiling to negative one my threshold to negative one and I like to check this true Peak op
tion down here this will make sure that there is no audio that gets out of Reaper that's higher than negative one now you would think that negative one is somehow robbing me of a little bit of loudness but that's not actually true and if you look at the loudness specifications for things like YouTube and Spotify and apple podcasts they will all have a speck in them that says loudness and then true Peak and there are no loudness recommendations that I know of that have a true Peak value that's hi
gher than negative one so by standing up re-limit like this it pretty much covers you for all your delivery platforms and no matter how loud you get the audio in Reaper so if I take all three of these tracks and just Jack the volume all the way up and then play it [Music] it's gonna be loud but it's not going to be distorted or at least it's not going to be really crunchy Distortion because anytime that you'd use Dynamics processing like a limiter or compressor it does add some Distortion but it
's so low that you really can't hear it I'm going to double click on the volume to reset that for those tracks and the other effect that I want to show you is called loudness and that's right down here it's called loudness meter I'm going to add that to my master track as well and I like to have this as the last effect in the effects list here because you don't want to have another effect after this that's altering the frequency or the amplitude of the audio because that would mean that your lou
dness meter is not giving you an accurate representation of what's going on with your project and with your master track effects so really quickly I'll show you how I usually set this up I set the peak option here to True Peak I turn off short-term loudness and I also turn off loudness range just to make this effect a little bit cleaner and now you'll see as I play this back [Music] it's giving me what I think is some useful information about the loudness of my project the final thing that I wan
t to show you with effects is called monitor effects I'm going to come up to the view menu here and then I'll select monitor effects it's going to bring up the effects browser one more time and this time I'm going to be using a third party Effect called morphit I'll double click to apply that using monitor effects is a way to apply some effects to the thing that you're hearing but not to the audio that gets rendered by Reaper and typically this is used for doing some corrective EQ to something l
ike headphones in other words it's only altering the audio that I am monitoring in nothing else now I wouldn't use this with my studio monitors but if I'm using headphones this is a really cool option to make sure that the thing that I'm listening to with my headphones is a lot more accurate in this particular Effect called morph it by Tone boosters is an effect that will apply a corrective EQ based on measurements that tone boosters have done on hundreds of different types of headphones I think
it's over 400 pair of headphones that they have measured so if I search for my headphones the Sennheiser HD 598s which are not fancy at all I can double click to apply this corrective EQ and now [Music] things sound a little bit more correct in my ears now I'm not going to be using this for the rest of the course because this is also altering the sound as going out to OBS and I don't want that but I wanted to show it to you because it's a really cool option if you are someone who's maybe only u
sing headphones inside of Reaper you can use a plug-in like this which is called morph it to correct for the frequency response of your headphones which will make mixing and editing a lot nicer now there's a lot more that you can do with effects in Reaper but that's it for this lesson coming up next you're going to learn about routing oh in this lesson you will learn about routing in Reaper when it comes to routing in Reaper you have a lot of options for routing audio from one track to another t
rack and that can help you to solve problems it can help you to process your tracks creatively and much more but in this lesson I'm going to show you two practical examples of using routing that I think you're going to find very helpful first I'm going to show you how to set up a Reverb return track now when it comes to reverb there's nothing inherently wrong with taking a single track like this and adding your favorite Reverb to it you can get it set up just how you like it and it'll work just
fine however when it comes to using Reverb on multiple tracks it's a little bit more efficient to use a Reverb return track and let me show you how that works over here in the track control panel I'm going to double click to create a new track I'm going to name this Reverb return I'm going to click on the effects here and get rid of the default effects and then double click in a blank area to add my Reverb effect and I'm going to use a very simple stock Reverb Effect called reverbate right here
I'm going to double click to add that to this track now the idea with a Reverb return or any type of effects return track is that I'm going to put an effect on this track and then I'm going to send audio from other tracks in other words I'm going to Route the audio from my other tracks to this track and the only thing that I want to hear on this track is Reverb and because I only want to hear Reverb I'm going to jump over here in the Reverb settings and pull down the dry mix so that I'm not gett
ing any of the unaffected audio back through this track in other words if I pulled the wet mix all the way down and left the dry mix at zero any audio that I send to this track is just going to get louder and that's not what I want I don't want to hear any of the audio that has been unprocessed I want to hear only the audio that has been processed so I'm going to pull the dry down and leave the wet all the way up I'm also going to increase the room size for this effect up to the mid 90s and that
'll make it very apparent what's happening with this Reverb next I need to send audio for any track that I want Reverb on to my Reverb return track an easy way to do that is to just click and drag on the route button and if you drag it down here you'll see a little cable icon that's a little tip ring sleeve icon and if you release it that will create a send from track 4 to track five and now I have Reverb on my keyboard sound right here so if I solo this [Music] oh you can hear it's making a pre
tty big difference now maybe you want Reverb on multiple tracks and you could drag each one down from the route button over to this track or you can click the route button right here and you can click on the receives drop down here and you can add receives from all tracks now before I do that I'm going to delete this receive from track number four here so that I don't duplicate it and then I will select that option there add receive from all tracks and now audio is being sent from each one of th
ese tracks to my Reverb return which means I'll hear Reverb on everything [Music] foreign [Music] now that sounds interesting but it also kind of sounds like a hot mess so let me show you how I would go about fixing that for one I would take the Reverb off the base Reverb on base is not very common and it can sound a little bit muddy I don't really want that I also want to adjust the level of the send from each one of these other tracks to kind of balance things out I probably don't want a ton o
f Reverb on my guitar maybe I'll pull it down a little bit here for the Mr 2 keyboard sound and then I'll pull it down a little bit from the drums as well let's see how that sounds [Music] thank you [Music] now that sounds a little bit better to me another thing that I could do is jump into the effects here and just pull the wet level down like six or seven decibels and that would give me a little bit more granularity in adjusting the sends or the receive volume for each one of these tracks righ
t here whoops let me open that up one more time so with less wet Reverb sound that means that I will have a little bit more resolution in the mix level for each one of these tracks [Music] and there you go it's pretty simple to do the second example that I want to show you with routing is how to set up a headphone mix and send that to another output on your system and just like before I'm going to start by creating a new track by double clicking in the track control panel I'm going to name this
track headphone mix and then I'm going to click on the routing button and what I want to do here is similar to setting up the effects return but in this case I want to Route audio from these tracks but I don't want to actually hear the audio that's going to my headphone mix so what I'm going to do is I'm going to uncheck this button right here Master send and that will disable track number six here from ascending audio back to my master track if I didn't do this anything that I sent to this trac
k would just become louder and that's not what I want to use this track for instead what I want to do is in this routing window here I want to add a new hardware output so on my particular audio interface the Motu M4 I have four inputs and four outputs outputs one and two are connected to my studio monitors but outputs three and four I could have connected to something else like a headphone amplifier so I'm going to select outputs three and four and then what I want to do is add receives from al
l of my tracks and check out what happens when I play this now [Music] now you can see that there is some activity here in the meters but if I solo this track you're not going to hear anything because I disabled this track from sending audio to the master track and that's exactly what I want instead it's sending audio out on Hardware outputs three and four now the advantage of setting up a headphone mix like this on a separate output is that you have independent control of what is going out to t
hat headphone output and you can control the levels in the pan independently of what's happening over here in the track control panel and what's going out to your main monitors so for example whoever's listening to this headphone mix may want a little less bass maybe a lot less guitar because let's imagine that they're a guitar player so maybe they want to hear some of it but not a lot they don't want a lot of Reverb and we can dial in the mix for exactly what they need now it's worth mentioning
that you may want to switch the sends over for each one of these sends from post fader post pan to pre-fader post effects by default when you create a send in Reaper it's going to be post fader and for most things that works just fine but for something like a monitor mix it probably makes more sense to have this be pre-fader post effects and that way if while you are listening back to the project and the person is practicing or recording if you are making adjustments to the volumes of your trac
ks like this it's not going to be affecting what they are hearing in the headphones because this is pre-fader pre-fader post effects is really nice because if you have effects on the tracks like compression and EQ odds are they're going to want to hear what that sounds like as well so that's probably your best bet but you also have an option here for pre-effects which is pre-fader pre-pan and pre-effects a lot of options here on top of that you also have options for muting for flipping the phase
for collapsing the stereo image down to Mono to adjusting the pan and much more there's certainly a lot more that you can do with routing inside of Reaper and the only limit is really your imagination all right coming up next you're going to learn about Automation and envelopes [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn about Automation and envelopes Automation and envelopes allow you to change parameters over time and it's an essential part of mixing and processing audio once you understand
how it works it really opens up the door to a ton of creativity and flexibility now I'm going to start with the idea of automating the volume of a track because that's a super common thing to do but to make it easier for you to see I'm going to change this volume knob to a Fader by coming up here to options themes theme adjuster and here on the track control panel page which you can get to by cycling through the pages here I'm going to increase the size of the volume and decrease the size of th
e name to make that fader nice and large there now there are two primary ways that you can use Automation in Reaper one is to record your actions in real time and when you do an envelope will be created and then when you play your project back whatever parameter you have adjusted follows the shape of that envelope the other way is to just create envelopes manually and I'm going to show you both in this lesson first let's look at how to record some automation so on my drum track here I'm going to
right click on this trim button and I'm going to go all the way down here and set the automation mode to right now the important thing to know about the right mode is that it's always writing whether you are playing back your project or not so even though my project is not playing if I make an adjustment to the volume you will see that the envelope for the volume has been created and whatever value I set the volume fader to is stored in the envelope right here and if I play back my project it's
going to record the values in real time [Music] thank you again the important thing to remember is that right mode is always writing and if I want to hear the automation that I just recorded I want to change the mode because if I play it from here [Music] it's going to rewrite all of that automation so I'm going to undo that and change the mode to read trim [Music] now you notice that there are two modes that can read one is read and the other is read trim if I set this to read what you'll see
is that the fader matches the envelope exactly [Music] but if I set this to trim and read the fader doesn't move at all foreign the advantage of the trim read mode is that this fader now acts as a trim volume control which is kind of like an additional volume that sits above this volume envelope right here so what I can do with this mode is I can make an adjustment to the volume relative to this volume envelope in other words the track is still going to follow this envelope and it's going to adj
ust the volume but if I wanted to turn everything in this track up or down just a little bit or even by a lot I could do that with this fader if I set this to read mode I can't make any adjustments to this fader that's the difference by default all of the tracks in Reaper are set to trim and read there are a few more recording modes that I want to go over the first is latch and before I do that I'm just going to select all of my points and delete them so in latch mode it starts recording changes
once you've made an adjustment to a parameter and then it will keep recording the current position until you stop playback check it out foreign so in latch mode it doesn't start recording until you make an adjustment and then once you do it holds that adjustment until you stop playback and you'll also notice that there is an extra point that is created right here I think this happens in all of the record modes essentially what it's doing is when you record the automation it creates one more poi
nt that kind of stores the previous value which in this case was Zero decibels all right I'm going to select all those points and delete them and let's look at touch mode touch mode is similar to latch mode except that it stops recording changes when you stop adjusting the parameter [Music] so as soon as you stop touching the control that you are automating it stops recording those changes and they snap back to wherever it was before you started recording automation which is why it creates this
additional point right here now the nice thing about touch mode and latch mode is that you don't necessarily need to set those back to read mode if you play this again it's not going to rewrite the automation over what I recorded the only mode that does that is right mode and at any point in time I can start recording new automation for the volume [Music] I'm going to set this back to trim and read and I'm going to clear this envelope right here this is telling me all of my envelope points will
be deleted are you sure you want to do this I'm going to click yes now automation works with any parameter I showed you volume but it works with any parameter including effects so I'm going to insert req here I'm going to set this back to latch mode and check this out [Music] basically any parameter that you adjust when you have latch touch or write enabled will record automation I'm going to undo that and get rid of this effect because now I want to show you how to create those envelopes manual
ly if you click on the trim button you get a little pop-up here which gives you access to all of the envelopes that are currently available for this track and right now I have volume pan with volume pre-effects pan pre-effects with pre-effects trim volume which you can create an envelope for but if you notice you can't arm it for recording so you can automate the trim volume but you can't arm it for recording and make those adjustments in real time which is not a big deal I also have mute and I
have envelopes that go to the send of my Reverb return but let's say I want to make an adjustment to the volume I can just enable that here or there's a keyboard shortcut for that which is v v for volume very handy to remember and now I can create an envelope manually once this is visible I can use my mouse and if I hold shift and click I can create points here and it will create a new Point wherever I have my mouse positioned and it will hold the value of the last point that I created for the r
est of the project and if you have snapping enabled all of these points are snapped to the grid I'm going to select those and delete them if you hold control and you click and drag this will allow you to freehand draw an envelope and this ignores snapping so if you zoom in here you can see that there are all these points created in between the grid lines because this ignores snapping now just something to note when you create a freehand envelope is that it creates an additional Point here to the
right just like the automation record modes do which goes back to the default value now first you may think this is annoying but honestly I love this feature because when I'm editing vocals and I want to duck the vocal for a breath sound what I can do is find the breath in the waveform and then just hold Ctrl and click and drag and just duck it down in volume just like that it's super easy to do and super quick in fact this is the fastest way that I know about for editing out breath noises beca
use every time that I see one I just hold Ctrl and I can just duck it down just like that it is super fast and then the volume jumps right back up to the default so for editing vocals for editing dialogue and vo this is a super fast way to clean that up now let's say you create a shape like this and you want to move this to the right but you don't want to move it up and down at all what I would do is turn off snapping and then zoom in here so that I can precisely move this and then with those fo
ur points selected if I click and drag this to try and move it right you'll see that it's actually quite difficult to move in just the horizontal axis but if you click on one of these points and then you hold Ctrl and shift while you are still holding down the left click button that will lock the movement to the first axis that you move so if you move this horizontally you can see that it won't move vertically and similarly if I click this and hold it and then press shift and control this will l
ock to the vertical axis which is very handy to know let's say you have a couple of points and you want to make a very fine adjustment on them well if you click them and you hold Ctrl and ALT you can make a really fine adjustment where if you are not holding that it makes a much bigger adjustment another thing you may find useful is creating an envelope segment let's say you have two points just like this if you hold shift in alt and then drag in between these two points it will create a volume
segment which is this kind of square shape right here you can do something similar in a Time selection so if I hold down control and then I right click and drag to make a Time selection if I hold if I hold shift and control that will create an envelope segment within the time selection which saves you a little bit of time because you don't have to create those first two points manually all you need to do is control right click and drag and then hold shift and control and you can duck the audio j
ust like that now you may have noticed that the shape between these points is linear in other words it's a straight line between these points but that's something that you can change if you hold alt and you click and drag on the envelope between two points you can make this nice and curvy or you can select a group of points you can right click on them and then you can set the shape for selected points and you have all these options you can set it to square slow start and end fast start fast end
and bezier and you can get those exactly as curvy or as Square as you want and everything in between there's a bunch more options here for you to explore if you select points and you right click on them you can invert them you can reset them to zero and a lot more I'll leave that for you to explore I also want to show you a couple of things over here on the left side there's a knob right here if you click and drag this it will adjust the scaling vertically of all of your points if you don't have
any selected if you select some of your points here it will adjust only those points which is a handy way to make an adjustment really quickly right over here there's a bypass button so let's say you are experimenting with some Automation and you want to go back and forth and hear what it sounds like you can just bypass it right here and now this track will ignore this automation and you can just re-enable it to bring it back there's a drop down right here which gives you a few useful options t
hat I wanted to show you you can hide your envelope you can move your envelope to the media Lane which moves it right on top of your media item here generally I don't like to do that because it's very easy to accidentally grab your media item when you meant to grab one of these envelope points you can lock your media item to get around that but it's not something that I've found super helpful to do there's also an option to clear the envelope if you click yes it will remove the envelope complete
ly and delete the points if you click no it'll just delete the points and kind of reset it back to its default State here there's a lot more that you can do with Automation and envelopes you can copy and paste points on the same track you can copy envelopes from one track to another track or just copy the points from one track to another track you can create things like automation items and much much more make sure to check out the reaper manual if you want to dive into the weeds and find out ev
erything there is to know about Automation and envelopes for now you're ready to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn about folders and grouping [Music] in this lesson you will learn about folders and grouping using track folders in Reaper is a great option when you want to process multiple tracks together let me show you how it works I'm going to create a new track and bring it all the way up to the top in the track control panel and I'm going to name this and then if I click
on this button right here this will cycle between making this track a track a folder or the last folder in a track so if I click this one time every track in my project below this track folder will now be inside this track folder and once I have that set up the audio from all of these tracks will now be routed through my track folder which means I can process all of these tracks together so if I open up my effects here and I bring up the EQ I can now EQ all of these tracks together [Music] thank
you which is really handy for processing similar tracks like overheads snare drum tracks 10 different drum tracks background vocals guitar tracks and much much more this is also a great way to control the volume of multiple tracks at the same time so if I adjust the volume here in the track folder [Music] it's going to functionally adjust the volume of all of these other tracks I say functionally because it's not actually controlling any of these other tracks now the one thing to know about a t
rack folder is what happens when you have sends and receives going in and out of tracks in the track folder and let me show you what I mean I'm going to take my Reverb return here and pull that out of my track folder and I can do that two ways I can just pull it down like this and that'll make my Mr 2 Keys track the last track in the folder or I can click this folder button on the Mr 2 track two times and that'll also make this the last track in the folder and now watch what happens when I adjus
t the volume of my track folder [Music] thank you if I pull the volume all the way down in my track folder I can still hear the audio coming through the Reverb return because the routing didn't change and this drum track for example is still sending audio to my Reverb return so that's something that you got to watch out for if you're using an effects return track like this Reverb right here and you have other tracks put in a track folder when you adjust the volume of the track folder it's not go
ing to adjust the sends going to the Reverb return so probably the best way to handle this is to make sure that this Reverb return track is inside the track folder but there are other ways to control the volume of multiple tracks from one single track I'm going to pull all of these out of the track folder and I'm going to rename this track to lead track then I'm going to right click on this track come down to track grouping and then select track grouping parameters and with track grouping there
is a ton that you can control I'm going to show you some really simple things here to start I'm going to select my lead track and then I'm going to just assign all of these lead functions here by just clicking on this lead button right here and then I'll take all the other tracks and then click on follow which assigns all of these options right here to follow and what that means is when I adjust my lead track it's going to control the volume on all of the other tracks and it does that in a relat
ive way in other words when I double click the volume of the lead track and set it back to zero decibels it's not going to change all of the volumes in all of the follow tracks to zero decibels they're going to go back to wherever they were when I set them to follow which means that I can adjust the volume of any one of these tracks and still control them relative to my lead track I can also click on mute in Solo and that will mute and solo everything that's following and pan will also follow as
well Now using grouping like this is really good for toggling mute on and off in Solo and making a few adjustments here and there the one place where this becomes a little bit messy is when it comes to automation so let's say you wanted to record some automation with your tracks grouped like this I'll set my lead track to touch and what you'll see is everything that's following is now armed for automation as well and if I record some volume automation [Music] thank you it's essentially just cop
ying the automation from this track to all of the other tracks which means that if I go back and manually adjust the envelope for my lead track it won't update in any of the other tracks check it out [Music] so if I wanted to update the volume automation of what I just wrote I'd have to do it live and it's it's just kind of a mess so let me show you another way to group these tracks that works a little bit better for automation I'm going to select all of these tracks and then press Ctrl G on the
keyboard to bring up those track grouping parameters and with everything selected I'm going to click none which is going to clear out all of the grouping and I should also set all of these back to trim read this time I'm going to select my lead track here and instead of selecting all of these things what I'm going to do is enable VCA lead and I'm also going to enable solo mute and pan lead and then I'm going to select all the other tracks that I want to control set those to VCA follow solo mute
and pan follow and with the track set up like this mute works exactly the same way solo works the same way and pan works the same way you can see the pan updating on all the other tracks but the volume works much better when it comes to automation you'll notice as I move the volume instead of controlling the position of the fader on all the other tracks well nothing is happening but if I play back my project in adjust the volume [Music] foreign [Music] you'll notice that it is turning down the
volume of all of the tracks and if I bring the volume envelope up and freehand draw some Automation in [Music] all of these other tracks are following the volume envelope from the lead track without having automation written on them which is great because if you already have automation or envelopes on any of your other tracks it's still going to work just as it did before but on top of that it's going to follow the automation for the volume on the lead track so it's kind of like a volume on top
of a volume which seems crazy but it just gives you another level of control I'm going to select all my tracks and I'm just going to reset the grouping on all of those and before I wrap this lesson up I just want to point out that you can have up to 64 different groups in Reaper and you can rename them so that you can keep track of which tracks are grouped together alright coming up next you're going to learn about project markers and regions [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn about ma
rkers and regions using markers in Reaper is a great way to well Mark different sections of your project and you can insert markers by pressing M on the keyboard just like that now if you have snapping enabled and you are using the grid your markers will snap to the grid but if you turn off snapping you can slide these markers wherever you want you can also rename your markers if you double click on them you call this intro verse 1 and so on markers can be a great way to navigate around your pro
ject especially as it gets longer and there are some keyboard shortcuts which make that a little bit easier so the first nine numbers on the QWERTY keyboard will instantly move the edit cursor to the first nine markers check it out if you want to go back to the intro you just press the one key verse 1 two and three and that makes it super fast to get around your project so like I said before you can set the edit cursor and then press M to insert a marker or you can insert markers on the Fly [Mus
ic] just like that and you can see I can use the keyboard to jump in between those markers as well now if you have a bunch of markers and you want to go in and modify and rename them double clicking on each one can be a little tedious so I also want to show you the marker manager which you can find by coming up here to the menu select View and then it's right down here region slash marker manager if you uncheck regions and check markers you'll see all your markers in your project so you could re
name these sections here just like this by double clicking on the name and then using tab to jump down to the next name you can also change the color of your marker or set to a random color or you can select all of them and set to one random color or random colors or reset them to default now if you somehow get these markers out of order what you could do is just right click here and then read number in Timeline order which reassigns the numbers in the order that they are in the timeline if you
want to get rid of any markers you can alt click on individual markers to get rid of them or you can make a Time selection right click and then choose remove all markers from time selection so that's markers which are very useful another tool that you can use to help you manage and arrange your project are regions regions are kind of like markers but instead of identifying a single point in time like a marker a region identifies a Time range in your project so I have snapping turned back on and
what I'm going to do is set a few markers which will allow me to create a Time selection a little bit easier because currently the grid is set to 16th notes and that can be just a little bit fiddly to make a accurate time selection so sometimes what I like to do is just drop a couple of markers and then make a Time selection in between those two markers and then once I have a Time selection if I press shift r on the keyboard that creates a region so this is my first region right here and then le
t's see I'm going to put another marker right here select in between these two shift r and then I'll make one more right here shift r one more time and now I have three regions set up now regions are really useful for arranging and rendering your projects let's say that you wanted to increase the length of the verse section of your song what you could do is just duplicate this region by holding Ctrl and then left clicking and dragging and check that out now you have a verse that's twice as long
essentially what it did is everything within the bounds of this region just got duplicated and moved over if you wanted to take this verse and move it to the other side of the chorus you can do it just like that and everything in this region moves along with that region maybe you want to put another chorus right here and have it be a double chorus just like that you have rearranged your song entirely which is awesome now just like with the markers you can also edit and modify your regions in the
region marker manager right here and this can be a lot faster for naming multiple regions just like if you were naming multiple markers you can also change the color right over here and that can help you identify different sections of your project as I mentioned a minute ago you can also use regions to help you render your project and I want to show you that really quickly by switching over to a real world project that I was working on just the other day what you're looking at here is a nine ho
ur long audiobook by John Maxwell a buddy of mine Andrew recorded and edited this and then he sent it over to me to master it and get it ready to be published on Audible and as you can see here every single chapter in this book has its own region so we have the opening the dedication introduction and then it gets into the meat of the book with these 16 laws right here and like I said before I can use these regions to help me render my project because I don't want to render this entire project as
one audio file instead I want to render each chapter individually which is super easy to do what I can do is bring up the region manager and then click over to the render Matrix which opens up and it's docked down here but I'm just going to pull that out I'm just going to float that right over here and you can see that I have selected the master mix for each one of these regions and then if I go to render my project by hitting Ctrl alt R you can see that my project is going to render 21 files w
hich is every single one of those chapters because I have the source set to region render Matrix via the master mixer so essentially it's going to render each one of these regions via the master mix which means that it applies all of my processing and right down here you can see it's going to render 21 files and the great thing about doing it this way is I can get Reaper to name all of the files however I want so right here in the file name section you can see that I have this little dollar sign
and then it says region number and then underscore dollar sign region and if you look at the file names it's going to name all of those with the region number which is right here and then the name of the region and that saves me a ton of work now I'm going to talk more about render settings in an upcoming lesson but for now it's time to move on to the next lesson where you're going to learn about actions and customization [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn about actions and customiza
tions like I've said several times throughout this course Reaper is very customizable and in this lesson I'm going to show you a few of those customizations that you should know about first let's look at actions come on up to the menu click on actions and show actions list Reaper already makes extensive use of keyboard shortcuts but on top of that there are hundreds of actions which you can find in this actions list that represent things that you can do in Reaper that you can't find in any of it
s menus now when you look at any single action they're not that impressive but the real power behind actions comes when you realize that you can string multiple actions together in a sequence to create custom commands that can be executed with a single keystroke or midi input and if you want to change any of the default shortcuts this is where you go to do that so if you want to find the action you're looking for probably the easiest way to do that is to type something in the filter box right he
re so if you type normalize you can see there are already two shortcuts assigned to normalize actions but there are several other normalized actions that may be more useful for example the default shortcut for normalize is set to control shift n and that action normalizes items to zero decibel Peak which is not something that I find useful at all so what I usually do is change that shortcut to something else so I'm going to select that shortcut right down here and delete it and then I'm going to
select this action right here normalize items Peaks RMS lufs and then click add and type that shortcut in again I find this a much more useful action to execute when I'm trying to normalize because when I select a media item or several media items I get this little pop-up and I have all these different options that I can use to normalize those items which is super handy for dialogue for podcasts and much more another thing that I like to do is change the default behavior for play and stop in re
aper now right now when you press the space bar it's going to play and then when you press it again it's going to stop but when it stops the play cursor jumps back to where it was when you started playing just like this [Music] now that's totally fine if you're working on music but when I'm editing things like audio books podcasts or voiceover that drives me nuts because sometimes I'll play and I'll be listening and editing in real time as it's playing and maybe two or three minutes will go by a
nd then I press the space bar again and the play cursor jumps back three minutes ago and then I go and try and find the word that I just heard to try and find the place that I wanted it to stop so there's an easy way to get around that and that's just to change the default behavior for play and stop and let me show you how to do that really quickly so to find that shortcut I'm going to click on this find shortcut button right here and then press spacebar and this is the thing that I want to chan
ge which is transport play and stop I'm going to remove this shortcut right here and then I'm going to add a different shortcut which is shift space and then I'm going to create a new custom action a really simple one by clicking on new action new custom action right down here play and transport has already been added I think because it was just selected and that's totally fine because I need this action anyway but for any additional actions I can search for them over here and I do need one and
it's called move edit cursor to play cursor I'm going to drag that in and put it above this transport play and stop I'm going to name this stop on cursor and then click OK and then at the very top of my actions list I can see my custom action I'm going to add a shortcut which is spacebar and then click ok and so now if I play my project [Music] it does exactly what I want now like I said before this way of play and stopping using the space bar is probably not ideal for music production but for a
lot of the other ways that I use Reaper it's much better but now I have both methods of playing and stopping mapped to the keyboard if I press shift in space and shift in space again the play cursor is going to jump back to where it was before now if that becomes too confusing which it definitely can what you can do is just export two different key maps which you can do right down here so what I'm going to do is click on key map and then export shortcut key map and I'm going to call this video
playstop because this sort of play and stop is much more similar to how video editors work and I'm going to click save and then I'm going to swap these shortcuts around so I'm going to click add right here to my custom stop on cursor and I'm going to switch this to shift space and then click OK and because shift space is already assigned to that other action Reaper is going to say hey this key is already mapped to this action do you want to override it yes I do I'm going to select space and then
delete it and then I'm going to search for play stop and I'm going to add the shortcut and then hit the space bar and now I've basically put it back to the default way that play and stop works except that I have this additional shortcut of shift space and then I'm going to export this shortcut key map and I'll call this normal play and stop so right now play and stop work as they did by default which is fine but if I want to switch to that other key map I can just import this one right here and
now those are swapped around [Music] and you don't have to worry about this being super overwhelming because if at any point in time you want to restore to the factory defaults you can do that right here key map restore all shortcut bindings to factory defaults now I want to show you one more customization really quick and that is to Mouse modifiers now one thing that I like to do when I'm editing particularly when I'm doing sound design or voiceover or podcast but this definitely comes in hand
y when I'm doing music as well is have a mouse modifier that allows me to adjust the curve of this fade and this will work for fade ins and fade outs and crossfades as well right now I can adjust it by right clicking and selecting one of these shapes but that doesn't give me a ton of control instead what I want to do is add a mouse modifier or a keyboard mouse modifier to allow me to adjust the shape of this curve and let me show you how to do that so what I'm going to do is just grab the fade a
nd move it and then jump into the preferences and then if you come down here under editing behavior and mouse modifiers the last thing that you did in Reaper is selected in this context menu which is amazing because if you click this drop down you'll see that there are a bunch of options here and if you had to find the exact thing that you're looking for can be a little overwhelming but because I adjusted the fade and then opened up the preferences media item fade slash Auto Crossfade has been s
elected so what I can do is either override one of these default Mouse modifiers like something like alt or I can add one of these additional modifiers down here something like alt windows so if I double click right here what I want to do is Select something like just adjust curve and then click ok and now if I hold alt in Windows what I can do is change the shape of this curve and make it the exact shape that I want and I find this really handy for fading out things like drum hits and whooshes
and explosions and sound effects another mouse modifier that I like to change is not currently set up sometimes what I like to do is adjust the end of a media item but leave the start of the fade in place so maybe I want the fade to start right here but I just want it to go longer and that'll work a little easier if I turn off snapping so let's say I wanted the fade out to last this long well without that modifier I'd have to do like multiple things here so let me show you how to set that as wel
l I'm just going to wiggle the end of this item here and then go back into the preferences and now media item Edge has been selected and I can select something like control Windows double click and then select move Edge without changing fade in end time and then click OK and now if I hit control Windows check this out Ah that's exactly what I wanted it to do now I can adjust my fade curve and I find this very very useful for fine tuning how items Fade Out and that right there just scratches the
surface there are a lot of other customizations that you can do with actions with modifiers and much much more all right coming up next you're going to learn about rendering [Music] in this lesson you will learn about rendering in Reaper after you've made all of your edits and you get your project sounding fantastic it's going to be time to render out your project so that other people can hear it and let me show you how to do that if you come up here to file render which also has the keyboard sh
ortcut Ctrl alt r and the first time that you look at this render window this can feel maybe a little overwhelming but I'm just going to draw your attention to a few of the areas that will be very helpful when it comes time to rendering the first is this Source option right here you can click this drop down and you can see there are a bunch of different options for rendering things like the stems the mastermix plus stems and much more for most of your projects you want this set to the default wh
ich is going to be the master mix next you want to make sure that your project is going to render at the appropriate start and end times because sometimes you'll have a project like this where you may not necessarily want it to start rendering from the very beginning because I started recording most of this audio at measure two so if this were to render from the beginning it would have this kind of empty Gap which is probably not ideal so if you click on this drop down here you can see that ther
e are several options entire project will render your entire project even if you have a little piece of audio way over here it'll render all this silence and then that little piece of audio so that's something that you have to watch out for if you're going to be kind of moving things around in your project but if you want to make sure it renders only the parts that you want it to render what you might want to do is create a Time selection and I think the easiest way to do that is to use markers
so what I would probably do is come in here and drop a marker it doesn't have to be on the grid but this is close enough and I'm going to use that as my start position and then come over here and then drop another one for my end position and that makes it really easy to make a Time selection and then I can just choose time selection from this drop down here and whatever I do will update right here in the render window if I want to modify this just a little bit you'll see that update right here n
ow another way that you can do a very similar thing and utilize markers is to select this first marker and type equals start in all caps and then click OK and then for this one right here you're going to type equals end in all caps and then click ok and now if you select custom time range that's going to be between wherever these two markers are so you'll see if I move this and then I update this that's going to change and this is probably the easiest way to set a start in an end position but if
you wanted to render a smaller portion you can just create a Time selection and then select that right here and there are even more options like selected markers all project markers selected regions and more next let's look at this output section right here and I think this is pretty self-explanatory but there are some things that I want to highlight first we have to set an output directory if you click on browse it's going to have a couple of default locations probably where you saved your fil
e but you can browse for a directory usually what I will do is set this to the project save location which I think is right here and then choose browse for directory which makes finding that folder a lot faster usually what I do is select the save location and then I'll create a new folder and call this renders or exports or something like that select that folder and then click OK or if you know the exact location where you want these files to render you can just type that in right here or copy
and paste it from file explorer next is the name of your file which is pretty self-explanatory name your file whatever you want or you can use wildcards which are over here and if you click on wild cards you will see that there is a ton of different wild cards that you can insert for the file name which will automatically name the file according to these properties so for example if you want your file named with the project you just select that wild card if you want it to be something like your
project underscore the date you can do that as well so date time you can select date or date time or like any of these things and check that out you can see the file name right down here just won't underscore rendering underscore the date right there in the output section right here there are many many options don't let this overwhelm you because there are really only a few options that you need to focus on the first is sample rate by default this should be set to whatever your project was set t
o right now it's 44 100 Hertz which is the default sample rate for music most of the time I render out at 48 kilohertz because I work on a combination of music and video projects and podcasts and audiobooks in 48 kilohertz pretty much works for everything however if you are rendering to somewhere specific like Audible for example which you saw in a previous lesson you want to make sure that you are matching their delivery specifications exactly their delivery platform which is called ACX specifi
es that the files be forty four thousand one hundred they recommend mono and the format is MP3 which I'm going to show you how to adjust in just a second so the next section you want to look at is channels by default this will be selected to stereo but if it's something like an audio book you may want to switch this over to mono and by the way if you are going to be delivering something in mono please make sure that you listen to your project in mono which you can do by clicking on this button r
ight here this will collapse the stereo image down to mono and if it's something simple like a podcast with just one microphone it's pretty much going to sound exactly the same but if you have any stereo audio in your project you're going to want to hear what that sounds like in mono in case there is any kind of phase cancellation when the left and the right channels get combined together that's definitely something you're going to want to hear and make sure that it sounds okay but for most proj
ects this is going to be set to stereo and that's what you want if you are not super experienced at mixing and mastering and you want to make sure that you are outputting your files that meet loudness specifications for things like YouTube and Spotify and Audible for example an easy way to do that although this isn't the best way to do it but an easy way to do that is to click on this normalize button right here and then you can input the exact specifications for the delivery platform for Audibl
e for example they want all of their files between negative 23 and negative 18 RMS I which is RMS integrated so to give myself a little bit of a buffer I might do something like negative 18.5 or even negative 19 is probably a little bit safer than putting it at negative 18 because it could be slightly louder than that because even though this loudness normalization is pretty good it's not 100 perfect there's an option down here to only normalize files that are too loud what this means is that it
will only turn down your project if it's over this loudness specification and it won't turn it up and if you're going to be using this post-process normalization you definitely want to use this brick wall limit set this to True Peak and then set this true Peak value to whatever the loudness recommendation or specification is for your delivery platform so for audible it's actually negative three typically for things like YouTube Spotify and Netflix this will be something like negative one true P
eak and then finally you can add a fade in and fade out to your project if you need to if you are exporting something like MP3 you can click on this metadata option down here and then you can add all kinds of metadata for the ID3 which is supported by MP3 and waves and aiff if this were like a podcast you can add your cover art and all of the other important metadata so that when this goes out to your delivery platform it shows up and it displays all of the relevant metadata in the podcast playe
r and if you're wondering what metadata you need to use a couple of Google searches will help you to sort that right out next you have some options for output you can see you have a primary output format and a secondary output format which by default is not selected what this means is that when you render you can output two different file formats so if you wanted to render a wave and then as a secondary you want to do something like an MP3 you can do that right here and there are a bunch of opti
ons for each one of these output formats if this was the type of project that you want to send out to some folks to get some feedback odds are you're not going to want to select wave because that's going to be a much bigger file than it needs to be and you can select something like MP3 and then set the bitrate somewhere between maybe 160 to 256 or even all the way up to 320 kilobits per second and that'll adjust how big your file is and also adjust the relative quality the one thing that Reaper
can't do is render out an AAC audio file but if you need to do that what you should do is render out a wave and then do a Google search to find yourself an AAC encoder couple more options down here that you might want to check out one of those is silently increment file names to avoid overwriting this can be a really handy option if you are rendering different versions and you want to make sure that you don't accidentally overwrite a previous version because if you don't change the file name Rea
per will render over top of it now it does come up with a warning but if you're not paying attention that's pretty easy to do so for example if I render this out you'll see that it's going to render it out it's going to give me all kinds of loudness information right here which is very useful and once it's done you can close that but if I go to render this again without changing the file name Reaper is going to come up with this little warning and say that file already exists do you want to over
write it do you want to increment and you can select this to always silently increment file names to avoid overwriting if you find that useful sometimes I actually intentionally overwrite an audio file because if I'm doing a video project and I'm mixing the audio in Reaper I don't want to necessarily have to re-import an audio file and then line it back up so I'll just overwrite it which replaces my file in my project but you're going to want to make sure that you select the right option for you
and for your workflow once this is done rendering you'll see there are a few useful buttons here you can launch the file which will open it up you can open the folder you can open the media Explorer in Reaper which will go right to where that file is you can change the statistics that Reaper shows you when it renders so all of these are loudness statistics this is loudness units full scale integrated short term momentary loudness range true Peak clip and true Peak levels you can select some dif
ferent options down here if you want if you click the back button it goes back to the render window if you click close it will close that window and the render window and that's pretty much it now you know how to render your projects all right coming up next is the final lesson in this course where you're going to get a few more tips and tricks check that out coming up next foreign [Music] you made it congratulations this was a long course that covered a lot and if you followed along you will no
w be armed with the skills to tackle lots of projects in Reaper and I hope you are excited to keep on learning because there's a lot more to explore because I was mostly covering the basics in this course I didn't really get to focus on using specific effects like compression EQ and Reverb and others that's because those are pretty deep topics and covering those in detail would have made this course like five times longer but get subscribed to touch Plus for more advanced videos on audio process
ing Reaper and much more if you are a musician you might be feeling like Reaper is a little bit light on instruments and it definitely is the synths and sampler that come with Reaper are not super useful but there are a ton of free and premium VST Instruments out there if you want some top shelf sampled instruments for free check out Labs by Spitfire audio Labs is a series of free software instruments made by musicians for musicians and it covers everything from basic instruments to really wacky
stuff complete start by Native Instruments is another great option complete start is a free collection of instruments that has loads of sounds in different synths for you to use to create music with if you need some top shelf orchestral sounds check out orchestral tools they have some phenomenal sounding free orchestral instruments that come from their premium libraries orchestral tools is one of the top orchestral Library producers out there and their collection of free instruments is awesome
now if you want to go premium and get all of the sounds check out complete by Native Instruments there are two versions of complete standard and ultimate and they are not cheap however they offer an unparalleled collection of instruments synths and effects it's honestly astonishing but again there are tons of free options for sampled instruments and synths too and you can build your virtual instrument collection one at a time around the end of November and into December there are massive sales o
n Virtual instruments a couple of years ago I picked up a fabulous Steinway piano instrument for something like 15 when it comes to effects Reaper already comes with a lot of great effects but if you want to expand your horizons into the realm of third-party effects there are lots of free plugins out there check out Valhalla supermassive or tal Reverb 4. for great sounding reverbs that are super easy to use if you want a different compressor to use in Reaper I like fur comp fur comp does peak co
mpression extremely well with super low Distortion and can be used on pretty much anything the premium version fur comp 2 is my go-to compressor for just about everything for EQ check out Nova by Tokyo Dawn Labs Nova is on every list of best free EQ plugins for a reason it's powerful flexible and sounds excellent Nova's least sexy but best feature is that it maintains equal loudness as you EQ which is super useful it also can do Dynamic EQ and it has fantastic high and low pass filter options ag
ain the effects in Reaper are great but if you want to try out these effects and instruments check out the links in the description below and if you want access to millions of creative digital assets for one low price check out envato elements with envato elements you get access to stock footage Motion Graphics templates music sound effects photos vector graphics fonts After Effects templates and so much more a single subscription gives you access to everything you need to create great projects
see for yourself at elements.invato.com thanks again for watching this video let me know if you have questions or what you'd like to see covered next in the comments below my name is Dave Bode for envato and I'll see you next time thank you
Comments
This 51 year old musician is able to follow your tutorial without being overwhelmed. Thank you this is a BIG help
This isn't just good for newbies... It's a great refresher course for us guys that have been using for over a decade. Makes you appreciate the app you've been using all along and remind you of why you've switched!
I have been using Reaper for over 12 years. This is a nice course to pick up some ideas. The production values are very good and the organization is efficient and well done. Good job.
thanks so much for the invaluable information. I'm rewatching this again and again for many times.
soon as dave hit the "BUT, not with this course" i knew i was in good hands
Loving the short course already.
This is just amazing!!! Very professional and useful. Thank you so much for this course, and thank you so much, kind Sir, for making it free. 🤘
You are so appreciated! thank you for this video!
This is so helpful. You helped me so much today to transcribe a part that was too fast by introducing me to the playback rate adjustment keeping pitch the same 😅. Amazing resource for free. Thank you so much.
Fantastic Tutorial! Thanks for taking the time to speak clear and slow, yet efficient. Bravo sir!
Really appreciate that you create this course and share it for free!! I tried to learn how to use it myself, using the official manual and asking someone who is a sound engineer, for many months. Nothing really helped until I saw this video. Thanks a lot!!!
I record guitar songs and covers at home, and this is the most complete and helpful tutorial I found on youtube. Fantastic content. Thanks for you for sharing this knowledge!
Thank you, I'm sure this guide will come in handy many times in the future.
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!! Good grief, I feel like I need to send some $$$$ for the value! You've saved me countless headaches
What a great tutorial! thank you for putting this together!
Hi - just wanted to say that this is the most helpful YouTube tutorial on any subject that I've ever found - exactly what I needed at this point! I'd just discovered Reaper and found that (unlike Pro-Tools) I could actually do something useful with it even without any instructions so I dispensed with the evaluation period and paid up front. But to really get started, I needed something very different from the Reaper user manual. Your lessons were as good as it gets and better than I'd expected to find. Thank you.
I'm Learning so much from this Video. I will definitely be watching it a few times to hone my skills in Reaper.
Mighty informative vid thar, Mr. Bode! Thank-ya for the insight and guidance!
Best reaper tutorial I have come across packed with gems I never knew..thank you
Thank tou for this course. Its great!