Reaper for Beginners

Reaper audio software is one of the most powerful, flexible, and customizable applications available. It can be used for music creation and production, podcasts, voice-over, sound design, audiobooks, live performance, mixing for video, mastering, and even more. It might sound intimidating, but don't worry, in this course I'll teach you all the basics to help you get started with Reaper audio editing. You'll learn:

1. How to install and set up Reaper
2. How the interface looks and works
3. How to record live audio and midi
4. How to edit midi and audio
5. How to edit using stretching

And much more!

In this lesson, I'll walk you through installing and setting up the Reaper audio software.

This will include setting up your audio devices, as above. There are a lot of options but I'll show you the ones you'll need to adjust and why. You can head to the Reaper audio download page using the button below.

Download Reaper

Once you're all set up, you'll need to know which tools are where. In this lesson, we'll do a little tour of the Reaper workspace to get you familiar with everything you'll need.

Reaper is broken up into different panels...

Some things, like the mixer control panel, you might not need - so I'll show you how to hide those, so you have more space on the screen for your other tools.

I'll pull in some demo files to help walk you through some of the things you'll need to know. I've provided those for you so that you can follow along, just hit the button below to download them.

Download Course Files

When you've got your demo file loaded in, I'll show you how Reaper treats 'tracks.' In Reaper, a track is anything, it doesn't have to be audio it could be video, a picture... you get the idea.

You could even have one track contain multiple things, with many different channels of audio.

We touched on tracks in the previous lesson but here, I'll go into a lot more detail. 

We'll take a look at useful things to include in a new track, like virtual instruments, inserting tracks from a template, and more.

In my main install of Reaper, I have a track template that will build 16 each of midi tracks and audio return channels, and it has all of the routing to and from contact from the midi to the audio and it saves me a ton of time. Building it from scratch takes a long time and with a template we can have that in seconds, so if there's a particular process you do a lot of, making a track template is definitely something you should try.

Tempo

I'll show you what happens to media items in Reaper when you adjust the tempo. If I changed the tempo from 95 BPM to 110, my items shrink to be shorter than before. This means they're playing back faster, which they need to do so they still take up the same amount of musical space - 4 measures long. Reaper has done some time stretching to make them shorter, keeping the pitch the same.

Grid and Snap

The grid is made of the vertical lines in the Arrange area, and I'll show you how to enable and disable those lines. Grid helps you to align your media items and arrange your project.

Snapping will let you easily align your  items, markers, and envelopes to whatever you have the settings set to. For example, you can drag and have the item move from beat to beat with snapping. If you wanted to go on the half beat, you'd disable snapping and be able to move your item more freely.

In this lesson I'll show you some of the recording options in Reaper in the context of a real-world project. You can follow along with the files you downloaded earlier.

We'll discuss latency - the delay - in your audio if you're using record monitoring. When it's on, here's what's happening in a nutshell:

The time it takes all this to happen - just milliseconds usually - is what the delay, or latency, will be. If you can use hardware monitoring, there's no delay, and that can be better for monitoring. 

If you're recording a microphone in the same room as you have your studio monitors, you'd need to turn off your speakers so that feedback doesn't occur.

Feedback happens when you have a microphone and speaker in close proximity to each other. The output of the microphone is amplified by the speaker, which is picked up by the microphone, which is amplified by the speaker, which is... you get the idea.

I've recorded a guitar track for this lesson to take you through MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface - and recording MIDI into Reaper. I'm going to use a MIDI keyboard 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.

Once the virtual keyboard is added, notes I play will populate into a MIDI item on the track.

There are some great options when it comes to recording MIDI, like overdubbing and replacing, so that if you want to make changes, you can do that without starting from scratch.

We've looked at recording MIDI so in this lesson I'll take you through editing MIDI in Reaper. I'll show you how to open up the MIDI editor, where you've got a ton of tools are your disposal. You can: quantize, transpose, lock notes to a specific scale, add notes to whatever you've recorded by clicking and dragging, trim notes, make them longer or shorted, adjust velocity... there are a ton of options.

Quantization is a process where Reaper will move your MIDI notes to the closest grid line and that's going to make the rhythm of the notes be exactly on the beat. 

Knowing editing basics is essential so I'll help you out with that in this Reaper tutorial. You'll find the project files you need to work along with me in the pack you downloaded earlier.

Here's an example of what I'll show you:

• how to select multiple items in a variety of ways
• how to zoom
• how to trim clips
• how to apply a fade in/out

Frequently, I'll adjust the volume control of my media items and it's something that's useful to be able to do quickly.

One great tip is to grab this line at the top here, and if you hold shift and drag that up, you can increase the volume. Grab it and drag it down, and you'll decrease it. It can be a little tricky to grab the line if you've got a lot going on on your timeline. One away around this is to add a little volume knob that appears above each media item, and I'll talk you through that too.

Splitting audio - make sure just the media item you want to split is selected and put the cursor where you want to split it, then press S- means you can do a bunch of different things with it, like copy and paste it, cut it, duplicate it, and so on.

You'll remember from a previous lesson that I recorded a base track live and I'm going to use that to demonstrate how to stretch audio in this video. We'll look at splitting notes and shifting them too, so that you don't accidentally adjust anything you didn't mean to.

There are tons of ways to use effects in Reaper's audio software, but in this lesson I'll look at some basics:

• applying effects to tracks
• applying effects to individual media items
• applying effects to your master track
• using monitor effects

There's a useful filter box in the effects panel where you can search for specific effects, or type in something like 'comp' which will find things like compressors (if that's in the name).

In Reaper, you have a lot of options for routing audio one track to another track, and that can help you to solve problems, it can help you to process your tracks creatively, and much more. In this lesson I'll show you two practical examples of using routing that I think you'll find really helpful.

Automation and envelopes allow you to change parameters over time and it's an essential part of mixing and processing audio. Understanding how it works opens up the door to creativity and flexibility in your projects.

There are two ways to use automation in Reaper.

1. Record your actions in real time, which creates an envelope, and when you play your project back, whatever parameter you've adjusted follows the shape of that envelope.
2. Create envelopes manually. 

Using track folders in Reaper is a great option when you want to process multiple tracks together. I'll show you how that works in this lesson.

You'll learn how to create a new track and bring it to the top of the control panel. Then, if you click on the plus button, it will change to be a folder, so every track in the project below the folder will now be inside of it instead.

Markers can be a great way to navigate around your project, especially as it gets longer. Keyboard shortcuts make that even easier. Here are some useful ones you'll learn in this lesson:

• The first 9 numbers on the keyboard will instantly move the edit cursor to the first 9 markers
• Set the edit cursor and press M to insert a marker
• When you have a time selection, press Shift + R to create a region.
• Duplicate a region by holding Ctrl and left clicking and dragging.

Reaper audio software is very customizable and in this lesson I'll show you a few of those customizations that you should know about.

Actions

From the menu: Actions > Show Actions List

There are hundreds of actions in this list that represent things you can do in Reaper that aren't in its menus. The real power behind actions comes when you realise you can string multiple actions together to make custom commands that can be executed with a keystroke.

Mouse Modifiers

To bring up preferences: Ctrl + P

Do the thing you'd like to create a modifier for, like adding a fade and then navigate to Preferences and Mouse Modifiers. The last thing you did will be selected in the context menu! This will save you a lot of time over looking for the thing you need.

After you've made all of your edits and your project sound fantastic, it's time to render out your project. I'll take you through how to do that in this lesson.

In the menu you'll need: File > Render

This window can look overwhelming, there are tons of options. I'll draw your attention to a few areas that will be useful for you to know when it comes to rendering, so that you can make the right choices for your project.

Congratulations, this was a long course and we covered a lot, but hopefully now you're armed with the skills to tackle lots of projects in Reaper. We mostly looked at the basics, but there's so much more that you can do in Reaper's audio software.

A couple of final tips I have for you is that if you want some top-shelf, sampled instruments for free then check out Labs by Spitfire Audio, and if you're looking for over 14 million creative assets at your fingertips - including music tracks and sound FX - then give Envato Elements a try.

Try Envato Elements

We have plenty more free tutorials to help you nail your audio production. Here are some to try next: