Reaper Standard recording 2 45 Minutes

REAPER is a powerful audio application used for music production, podcasts, sound design, and more. This course will teach you how to use REAPER, starting with installation and setup. You'll learn about tracks, tempo, recording live audio and MIDI, editing audio and MIDI, and using effects and automation. The course also covers customization, rendering, and more. REAPER is a flexible and frequently updated tool that works with all plugins. It offers a 60-day free trial and is affordable to purchase. The first lesson covers installing and setting up REAPER, including audio device configuration and preferences. REAPER is one of the most powerful, flexible, and customizable audio applications available. You can use REAPER for music creation and production, podcasts, voiceover, 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 tour 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 groups, 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. 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 professional 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 plug-ins, 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 much. 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. In this lesson, you are going to learn how to install and set up 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 when 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 thing 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. Those are effects that may have been previously installed to some default folders on my OS drive, and Reaper's 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 going to 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 Mac, 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 dropdown 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. ASIO 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 or FireWire audio interface and you're on Windows, you're going to want to choose the Wasabi option down here. It's the Windows audio system, and it's going to be perfectly fine to use to follow along for this course. Now, because I am using an audio interface, I'm going to choose ASIO, 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, and 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 ASIO 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 set that up in your ASIO 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 will 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. Then I'm going to click this button right here to store all peak caches, or re-peaks, in an alternate path. By default, when you insert audio files into Reaper, it creates a little re-peak file and puts that right next to the audio file, wherever it is on your hard drive. That re-peak 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 wave files, I now have a re-peak file that's going to sit right next to it. So instead, I like to set a folder here for all of my peak files, and I already have a folder set up right here called re-peaks. 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 re-peaks 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, 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 time-stamped 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 time-stamped 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 Z Backups, and that will create a time-stamped file in that folder. You can also select when to create this time-stamped backup or this auto-save. By default, it's selected to when not recording, but you can choose when stopped or anytime. If it's anytime, 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's gonna 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, $60 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 gonna 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's gonna 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 are recording when you didn't save a project, but you're gonna 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 gonna be a lot better. I'm gonna click save as default project settings, and that's it. Coming up next, you're gonna get a tour of the Reaper workspace. In this lesson, you're gonna get a tour of the Reaper workspace. Once you have Reaper 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 gonna get rid of the mixer control panel because it takes up a little too much space. So I'm gonna come up here to view and then uncheck mixer, and now we have a little bit more space to work with. Next, I wanna 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. They'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 wanna jump back to Reaper and just set my tempo down here in the transport bar to 95. I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna wanna 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 gonna 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 space bar to play. Once the play cursor reaches the end of the media item, it's automatically 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, video, 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 bass, and I'm going to pull that down below my drums just like this, and you can see I now have two tracks over here. Let's check out what this sounds like. Finally, I'm going to pull in the last two tracks, and 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 MIDI 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. Very cool. Like I said before, this is the Arrange area, and in the Arrange area, you can do a ton of things. You can move your MIDI 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 MIDI 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 MIDI 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 5, and I'll just extend these out a little bit longer. I'll hit W on the keyboard to bring the Edit cursor back to the beginning, and then Space Bar to play. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna see me do all kinds of things like this. I'm gonna 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 that 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 in to 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 gonna 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 in to whichever track is in the center. So if I want to zoom in to the bass, that becomes a little bit tricky because right now it's zooming in to the piano, which is not what I want. But let me show you how to fix that. I'm gonna hit Control-P and jump in to 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 in to a particular section, my mouse will inadvertently move and then I will not be zoomed in to 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 okay, and now when I hold down control and I scroll up, you can see it's going to zoom in to whichever track or media item is underneath my mouse cursor, which is exactly what I want. Another way to zoom in to an area that you want to take a better look at is to hold control and alt and then right click and drag. You can see I get this little magnifying glass tool, and there is a green highlight over the area that it's going to zoom in to. So if I want to zoom in to, let's say, just this drum section here, these three beats, I could just hold control 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 scroll 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 and 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 a time selection, there are a bunch of edit 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 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. I'm not going 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 these 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 those 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. We're 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. 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 audio book or voiceover. 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 playback 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 customized. 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 and the track control panel in more detail in the next lesson. So check that out, coming up next. In this lesson, you are going to learn about 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 Control-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 folder. 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 things. 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 click 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 dropdown here, and then you can choose if you want those 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's 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 tracks in multiple projects. I use this, for example, for some more complex virtual instruments, like Native Instruments Kontakt, 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 Kontakt for the MIDI and the audio, and it saves me a ton of time, because building that from scratch would take several minutes, and it loads in just 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 track. 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 for 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. 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 can 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 of 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 and 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. 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 Pan, 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 a 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. 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 values 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 may be 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 show up here. I'll make my tracks real tiny. Track layout, mixer panel, yeah, it's just barely on the screen there. So if I select B, it's actually just gonna be for that first track because that was the only one selected, but I'll 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'm going 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 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 want to 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 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. In this lesson, you will learn about 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.