Reaper 4

In this transcription, the speaker discusses how to change the appearance of Reaper, a digital audio workstation. They explain how to change the color of tracks, install different themes, and customize the look of buttons and colors. The speaker also demonstrates how to adjust the tempo in Reaper and how it affects media items. They discuss the default behavior of time-stretching audio items when the tempo is changed and how to change the time base in project settings to prevent rate adjustment. The speaker also explains how to insert tempo markers and transition between different tempos. They briefly touch on grid settings and demonstrate how to adjust the grid line spacing for more precision in aligning items in the project. colors and cycle through several variations. You can select all of your tracks and set them to one color if you want. I'm gonna 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 wanna 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 gonna drag it right into Reaper. And then it's going to install and apply that theme. And this completely 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 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 wanna go back to the default theme, you just go to Option, Themes, and 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 gonna 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 gonna learn about tempo, grid, and snap settings. In this lesson, you will learn about tempo, grid, and snap settings. The first thing that I wanna 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. And 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 five, and you can see that there's nothing here. These media items are four measures long. Now check out what happens when I change the tempo from 95 to 110. In the range 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 in the grid here. They're 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. ♪ 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. ♪ 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 Reaper, and it's very useful when you are recording and editing music. 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 going 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 audio book in Reaper, and for 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 dialogue 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. 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. 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 Tempo 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. My project, by default, was set 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, and 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 any time you add a tempo marker, Reaper's 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 representing 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 4. So you can see right at measure 5, 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 maintaining 80 BPM right until measure 5, 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 5. Check it out. There are more things you can do with tempo in Time 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 and 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. So I'm going to enable it, and I'm going to disable it. So I'm going to 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 adjust 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 sixteenth 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 eighth and sixteenth notes are. And you have several other options to choose 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, sixteenth note triplet, and thirty-second 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. The 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, set 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 easier to arrange and move your media items around, especially in a musical context, if snapping is enabled. 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 the 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 things. One of those is what you can snap to. 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. 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 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 setting 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 and 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 and 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. Alright, coming up next, you're going to learn about recording. 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 the 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 this 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's going to do is stretch my drum 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. Change this to 124. And then I'm going to slide over this drum media item here right to measure 2. And let's check out what this sounds like. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 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