DAW Tips & Tricks - REAPER
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@postcardhelicopters Feb 2022
Have you learned a new tip or trick for your DAW during FAWM? Let us know! (Folks with different DAWs might want to start their own Tips & Tricks thread. Perhaps if you use the same naming convention as this thread, they might all cluster nicely together in the forum.)
For myself, I've been using REAPER for more than a decade and just discovered this trick: Mapping tap tempo to a different key.
Normally, tap tempo is activated with mouse clicks and that's never worked for me, but today I learned I can map that action to any key I want. I chose the lowest note on my MIDI keyboard, since I doubt I'll ever use that note and it's a lot more intuitive for me to tap out a tempo on a key than by clicking the mouse. This is how to set it up:
* Make sure you've clicked on your Octave Down button until it's at the lowest point possible
* Show Actions list (Key command "?")
* Enter "tap tempo" in Filter box
* Select "Transport: Tap tempo"
* In lower-left Shortcuts window, click the "Add..." button
* When the "Keyboard/MIDI/OSC Input" dialog box opens, the "Shortcut:" box will be highlighted by default
* Hit that lowest note. In my case this will be "MIDI Chan 1 Note 0" but that may be different for you.
* Select the "Close" button on the lower right.
And that's it!
Now, when you want to tap out the tempo of a piece of audio, you can just drop down to the lowest note on your keyboard and tap away until you get the value you want. -
@dragondreams Feb 2022
@postcardhelicopters - Wow! Thanks for that one. I'll be implementing that as soon as I fire the thing up in the morning!
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@mikeb Feb 2022
This is kind of an obvious tip.
Create 'templates' for your usual recording modes. I have one that has all the drums (EZ Drummer 2) mapped to separate tracks, instrument groups, vocal groups, reverb busses all set up. Saves a lot of time! -
@keithcuts Feb 2022
Awesome.
My reaper tip is to save your song file into dropbox. Reaper will save directly to dropbox. Then use that link as your song link here in farm. Then anytime you update your song or tweak it at all it is automatically updated aim Fawm for anybody who stumbles across your song or revisits. -
@halfwalk Feb 2022
I've been getting a ton of mileage out of IDDQD Sound's channel on YouTube. In particular, the Rapid Fire Reaper Tutorials section, where his thing is "all info, no fluff." I've been a Reaper user for over a decade now, and I'm blown away by how much stuff I never knew. A lot of it requires the free SWS extension, but there's some really great stuff in there... cycle actions, marker actions, contextual toolbars, cool stuff with templates, auto track renaming/coloring, etc.
Plus, he explains a lot of his toolbars, shortcuts, and mouse modifiers (I found the midi editor stuff really useful). There's a ton of stuff Reaper can do in the actions list that isn't even mapped to anything by default, so really the only way to find it is in the Actions window (shortcut is the "?" key)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjvmrOUg3J0qUO8LLIbJTYD7j0l9VUsJ3
One tip for me would be: you can right click an FX plugin in the browser and select "create shortcut" to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. But even if you just cancel out of that window, it creates an action in the Actions list, and you can then put that on a toolbar. So I have, for instance, a handy button on my toolbar that adds a tuner to whatever track is selected.
Also, I recently learned that you can pretty much use any sized image for your toolbars. So I was playing around with a contextual toolbar for my common effects. If I hit a shortcut, it pops up this toolbar (for example) over whatever track my mouse is hovering. Then when I click an effect, it adds it to the track that was hovered when the toolbar first opened, and closes the toolbar.
