Don't fear the REAPER

Posted by aeron on March 7, 2013, 1:16 a.m.

Those of you familiar with REAPER are probably aware it subscribes heavily to the notion "there's more than one way to skin a cat". This is sometimes a source of frustration for new users who are overwhelmed by all the menu items and endless customization. But I think once you realize you have the power to tailor the entire workspace to your needs it gets a lot harder to go back to other DAWs.

I never cease to discover new features and alternative workflows, which certainly makes this one of my favorite programs to explore and tweak. Recently I started taking advantage of REAPER's routing to send multiple MIDI channels on one track to various instruments on other tracks. Each channel corresponds to an instrument, so instead of having separate MIDI clips on each track (which have to be edited in separate windows), I can just create one MIDI clip and work with the entire harmonization/voicing in it's own window:

(Click to see example routing. Really quite simple, just change the MIDI channel to your liking)

REAPER's MIDI editor is rather underrated, in my opinion. It's filtering and display settings are second to none, like the rest of the program it's really easy to fit it to your needs. For example, you can use the dropdown in the top right corner to enable the channel filter and work on one channel at a time, or click the filter button for more fine-grain control. The color dropdown in the bottom right allows you to color by channel to more easily distinguish voices.

Anywhoo, this is just a blurg of a blog. If none of this concerns you, laugh it off jovially, go do that voodoo that you do, and proceed to move along citizen.

Comments

Rez 11 years, 8 months ago

Oh wow, that midi stuff is super nifty. So you have all your instruments in there? Man, I'd love to give reaper another shot some time.

pounce4evur 11 years, 8 months ago

Quote:
go do that voodoo that you do

oh no now I'm posting .gifs too D:

In all seriousness though, this looks pretty sweet. Especially the color coordination–if I showed you my notes, and all my various color coordinated highlighter marks and post its, you'd understand. I'll need to remember this. Thanks for sharing it.

aeron 11 years, 8 months ago

Yep, all I did was create an empty track and add sends to it. The send lets you filter a midi channel (as seen here). I could stuff up to 16 channels on a single clip, and route each one to it's own synth track.

I like how it allows all the harmonic content to be grouped so efficiently. I can now simplify most of my projects to just two MIDI tracks, one for the instruments and one for percussion, and the rest of my tracks are just free to be grouped for mixing. The composition is separate from the instrumentation.

Anyway, I'm gonna get a lot of use out of this pattern now :)

aeron 11 years, 8 months ago

Quote:
In all seriousness though, this looks pretty sweet. Especially the color coordination–if I showed you my notes, and all my various color coordinated highlighter marks and post its, you'd understand. I'll need to remember this. Thanks for sharing it.
You might also like how it looks when you set the color by pitch:

I need to try this on like some Chopin xD

Eva unit-01 11 years, 8 months ago

I don't understand most of what's going on here, but I'll just say that it needs more cowbell.

aeron 11 years, 8 months ago

eagly 11 years, 8 months ago

Astryl 11 years, 8 months ago

It's been years since I've tried REAPER. Perhaps it's time to try it again.

JuurianChi 11 years, 8 months ago

Reaper used to rustle my jimmies, but when FLstudio magically stopped exporting MP3s for me, I started looking into other solutions.

Protools - nope too much useless jargon

Sonar- worst software to hardware communication ever

Cubase - it's okay but the interface is balls

Ableton - the interface is monkey balls

Reaper - better than I thought, it's like FLS's hipster cousin

Edit:

BEST SONG EVER

Okay. maybe not the "best", but it's very good.

sirxemic 11 years, 8 months ago

Quote:
but when FLstudio magically stopped exporting MP3s for me, I started looking into other solutions.

What a silly reason. Many DAWs don't export to MP3.

Also, you forgot to mention Reason :3