 Hi guys this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music and in this lesson let's look at learning how to set up and understand all the preferences of the DAW Reaper which is an amazing application to record, edit, arrange, mix, produce, master, any kind of music right and the first thing you'd want to do is install it you can go to Reaper.fm install your application then hit download please note that the software is free you can use it the full version is free however if you'd like to purchase it and support the company you can also do so by hitting purchase here so before we do anything if you haven't already please install the software from Reaper.fm and figure out which OS you have Linux, Windows or Mac, Mac is what I have so you would want to download it for whichever OS you're running okay in addition to that another thing to also download and keep ready will be the SWS extension which you can find by googling just type SWS extension and you can google this download that as well this will give you a lot of more features or more tools to use Reaper with and if you do not have a sound card I'd advise you to go to this website SEOforall.org and this will work only for Windows users of course and you can install some drivers to make your inbuilt sound card work and use your mic from your laptop or your desktop to some level however I would personally advise you to have a basic audio interface while using the software Reaper or any software for that matter so that it allows you to record things like vocals and listen back with high quality okay so once you've downloaded Reaper we're going to launch it and open it up here and while we're doing that I'd request all of you to if you haven't already please subscribe to our YouTube channel give us a thumbs up share the video and all of that nice stuff and yeah also turn on the bell icon for regular notifications the first thing Reaper will ask you is you have not selected an audio device so that's the first thing we need to do obviously because it's all about audio so you hit yes you can go over to your defaults now if you have nothing you can do default else I'm going to choose the one I have which is Zen Studio if you don't have a Zen Studio well you may have a focus right or an apogee or a pre son is whatever you may have you need to install the drivers let your computer see it and then only will Reaper see it so make sure you choose your driver your audio device after having installed all the relevant drivers after you've done that you can just leave this but just be aware that you will be coming to request sample rate and block size regularly during your recordings for example when you're recording the block size will be generally less and whenever you make a change in the preferences you need to hit apply Reaper preferences is what we are going to do today and just make sure we understand it thoroughly and not have any doubts set it up once and for all and then we can just focus on the creativity just let the software do its job okay so while we've set up audio devices you could also set up your MIDI devices I'm sure a lot of you would would be preferring to work with MIDI a lot so if you have your MIDI device installed on your computer for example the one I have currently connected is Studio Logic SL88 so currently by default it is disabled make sure you go ahead and enable both these options this is only if you have a MIDI controller installed so this could be a Studio Logic SL88 which I have it could be Roland or even if you have a basic Yamaha keyboard you can literally do something like just type Yamaha USB MIDI driver Mac you'll get a website you can go there and just download the driver and keep it ready right so install your MIDI drivers for your MIDI device and install your audio drivers for your audio interface which in my case is that okay now let's go all the way to the top tab by tab and let's get every setting understood and also I'll show you some of my customized settings which I think will be quite efficient for all of you people okay so first off general open project on startup I would prefer that you tick on prompt that means it'll prompt you give you a list of recent projects and then you can choose which one you'd want to work with as opposed to it opening the most recent one which I think is not so preferred okay as always hit apply so I guess here you can just do that paths default path to save new projects so you need to find a folder on your computer first of course make one in my case I've made a folder called repossessions and then hit open and then all of your new projects by default will be saved here and also to avoid cluttering up your project too much there's an option here store all peak caches dot re peaks in alternate paths these are all your waveforms which you'll see in your project which I don't think you need to see in your existing project folder it may clutter it up too much so I would say do this in a different path so I'm going to go to desktop there's a folder probably called re peaks which I've made already there we go and I'm just going to open that folder and hit tick here and hit apply tick store all peak caches in alternate paths alternate path so re peaks is just going to store all of your waveform information and just you don't bother about it this will really help if you're using also like an external drive like what I'm doing is I'm using an external drive called a glyph 1 tb and I'm actually recording all my projects there while all my waveform information is somewhere else because it doesn't really matter as much as this this really matters okay coming down next tab you have your keyboard multi touch option now you can choose your mouse wheel or your multi touch mouse or in this case an apple mouse you can choose how it will work so play around with these settings in my instance I prefer to reverse horizontal scroll that's the way I like to work so hit apply then moving forward you go to project so in project this is a very important thing when creating project use the following project file as a template so this will be very useful for instance you could go to browse you have all your templates so I have a thing here called as new project which is my template so I'm just going to link up to that okay so it has all of my plugins all of my settings etc okay so that's cool there's also an option to open properties on new project I would highly recommend that or you can leave it unticked depends on you for now we leave it ticked then this is an important place project saving you don't want to lose your data so I would personally recommend timestamp backup which is here and backup every two minutes anytime so every two minutes is going to do a backup and that backup I'm going to save it to an additional directory I don't want to save it to the project directory again to avoid cluttering so I will make an additional directory in my desktop here let me just type timestamp there we go the folder called timestamp so all my backup so if the power goes off or any such thing you're sorted right so hit apply very important so every two minutes anytime timestamp backup okay moving forward next tab tracks and defaults this is also very cool so the thing I would recommend well all of this you could use you could leave most of them as they are there's something here called default track heights in new projects you can make it large or small depending on your laptop size I guess then you could also choose any new track which you make you could record arm it right now this could be useful when you're doing midi so then if it's midi you could be like input one and also this is the default input for any new track so whenever you make a new track you want to monitor the input or maybe you don't want to monitor the input you could take it or untick are you going to be recording audio or midi or I do you want to do midi over dub which are midi recording features I would probably take this and what are you going to record are you going to record from this right now my sound card or my audio interface has inputs right so by default I want to record from input number 11 which is in fact the mic which I'm talking to you on so I'm going to take that you could take input one or input two wherever your mic is connected in your studio setup or as I said earlier if you're recording midi you just go input midi as you can see my SL88 shows up you could take all channels and just go with midi so this is important record arm I prefer to leave it unticked because I like to manually select that hit apply and I think we are good to go there these are all your track defaults then you have something called as media item defaults this is something you can disable you can disable this automatic fade I think well you can create automatic fade in fade out or you can disable it I just prefer to do it manually then default fade in fade out shape default cross fade shape you can leave this as it is or if you prefer other shapes you can change it accordingly right and this I think is quite important trim content behind media items when editing I like the setting just stick it and keep it available hit apply next audio we have already seen audio well this is fine all these settings you can get a bit more geeky here you can edit the names of all your channels your input channels you can actually call you can tick aliasing and you can actually call the true input of your sound card which is input 11 you can name it as something else let's say I can call it vocal you know and it shows up as vocal for now I just prefer the default settings which seem to work well for me can also reset goes back to default okay moving on devices I've showed you MIDI devices I've showed you buffering you can leave exactly how it is looks very complicated so yeah I think I would leave it as it is mute solo yeah this is just to prevent a few hearing it's just to protect your ears and stuff like that automatically mute any track when volume exceeds a specific db you could tweak that to suit you just to protect your hearing and so on playback this is another nice thing to tweak here and there okay so with playback the first thing I would like to do is to tick this one stop repeat playback at end of project I prefer to leave this unticked leave this unticked very important also you could reset MIDI CC pitch on playback start playback stop I just prefer to reset it once you finish the playback so take this and untick that and hit apply there we go moving on to seeking I think seeking is fine so under recording you can pretty much leave it as it is except for this one prompt to save delete rename I think just leave that unticked I don't want Reaper to keep prompting you after you record any instance of anything so untick that and hit apply I think that's pretty much what you'd want to do loop recording is fine rendering is fine appearance is fine at least for me media is something where I prefer media every item you record you can just have the volume control on each individual item so it's not only per track even items have their own volume so you could perhaps tick knob so it looks really neat there's a nice volume knob which you could play around with hit apply moving forward peaks and waveforms are fine fades and cross fades I think are perfectly fine for me track control panels yeah I think track control panels are also sorted for now then you have editing behavior so horizontal zoom center is what I would prefer to to work with these are some settings and also here move edit cursor to start of time selection on time selection change I would recommend that you take this very important take this and vertical zoom center is fine horizontal zoom center you could zoom to the current play cursor or edit cursor which is great or else what I like to do sometimes is zoom to my mouse cursor so wherever my mouse is if I zoom it'll actually zoom to that okay hit apply move below envelope behavior seems to be completely fine then automation seems fine mouse seems to be fine by default they've ignored mouse wheel on all faders if you like you know moving your mouse wheel on a fader you could untick this or maybe ignore mouse wheel on only track panel faders which I think is nice then you can use it for the mixer okay so that's something I prefer and then midi editor or mouse modifiers now this is a very very deep area like what you do here is absolutely customizable you have modifiers which are shift command shift plus command option shift plus option option is alt on pc so anything you do while holding these commands and doing stuff with the mouse which is left clicking left dragging and double clicking will do all sorts of things to all these sorts of things the media item the bottom half of the media item the edge of the media item man this is really really detailed so I have done some of my settings which I will attach in a file and give you and you guys could check it out and see if it works for you okay so that's about mouse modifiers just know that you can tweak a lot of things in this area coming to midi editor midi editor I have a few preferences for my workflow first of all you want to tick one midi editor per track I think that makes it very peaceful to work with then open items in built-in midi editor open all midi on the same track I think that works and also here one midi editor per track or you can even do per project depending on your requirement I think I prefer per track hit apply and now going to media super important thing to tick it should have probably been there by default copy imported media to project media directory that means whenever you drag and drop anything whether it's from a pendrive whether it's from a download from google or whether it's from whatsapp and then you drag that file into reaper it's going to put that into the project media directory so please tick that very very important hit apply come to midi I think all of these things are fine video well reaper also edits video which is crazy right so you have video stuff if you want to tweak plugins I think are completely fine compatibility is fine VST is just something you can just check you know you would have installed your own plugins VSTs are plugin file formats so if you've installed it correctly it's probably going to show up in one of these folders by default just make sure that these folders in fact store your virtual instrument plugins you can always re-scan it and just make sure that reaper can point to wherever you've actually installed your virtual instrument plugins okay and you can leave the rest as it is this is for coders and really really fancy people okay so I think this should get you up and running with the preferences hit okay you're good to go and yeah you can do a bunch of things here and a few more things I'd like to set up for my workflow before you actually start is hit this I which is project settings okay and this is a very important area so the project sample rate I would highly recommend that you go with 48000 with modern days standards choose the BPM of your current project which in this instance is 120 I could perhaps even make it 105 time base for items envelopes and markers that means do you want them to move with the beats or do you want them to always retain their original absolute position I would always recommend time here and beats here this is how I work with music especially if you don't do a lot of midi stuff I do a lot with you know acoustic instruments so I just prefer time here you may be different so then we go to media this is excellent path to save media files so all your audio files will now be recorded in a sub folder called as audio which is within the main folder which is going to be your project file okay audio or I can just say audio files or whatever that's up to you I guess softwares like Pro Tools and Reaper have it by default but Reaper you can just make it happen audio format for new recordings obviously wave 24 bit is highly recommended however if you're working with 16 bit that should also be fine video I don't really bother much advanced is fine notes if you have you can put notes and you can also save this as your default project setting so any project you make will be like that and you're good to go and you have everything sort of set up for you you have your metronome running right these are your metronome settings which can be accessed here right so all this can probably be done in another video by me I think this is a bit too much for now but yeah a few more things just to get you up and running go to options and new recording that overlaps existing items I personally prefer tape mode which is old school that means you record something and then if you don't like it you just record over that but please note the default is in takes so that means you record something and then the next recording which you do will not sort of overwrite the old recording the old recording will also remain so this is a setting which works for me I also like to untick this whole auto crossfade business I think it's a bit annoying so you can untick that what else yeah I think this is pretty much it with Reaper let me just show you one more thing you do when you when you save now this is an unsaved project so when you hit save let's just call it my first Reaper something like that just when you save it for the first time make sure to create sub directory for project then it's going to make a neat sub directory and then put the project file into that sub directory and into that folder which is called my first Reaper there will also be another folder called as audio files okay so just hit save and there we go we have a project file called my first Reaper and moving forward you can just make some tracks set up your view right now as you can see I'm on channel 11 and I don't want to turn on monitoring so I turn that off and as you can see the signal seems to be coming in I can record myself right now I'm just talking some random stuff and it's quite cool when I hit stop I just can work with this can also reduce the item volume some of the presets which I showed you guys and if I record over this it sort of just overrides it which is my preferred way but remember you can always play with it by editing and trimming and whatnot okay so I will definitely cover a few more things if you guys are interested please leave me a comment if you'd like to learn anything else in specific but I thought of doing this particular lesson primarily to show you how you can set up Reaper in the beginning so that you don't have to bother too much yes there are a few more things the other thing I recommended the beginning was to install your sws extensions this gives you a lot of other options like auto coloring some live performance tools if you are into that into that domain and it's great right so just set up Reaper to suit you before anything and as a nice bonus in this lesson I can I will be giving you a link in the comments to the configuration which I have used to set up Reaper to work for me what you'll need to do is import the configuration in settings and you would import the settings which I have given you which in this case is that this is my default so it'll go back to my own settings I'll also be giving you guys a lot of my shortcuts which which should help you for your workflow and yeah so it loads up quite well I can load up all my recent projects as you can see and it's pretty much set up for my work so for example if I go here print up a project so I have my piano set up for me I have some vocals running with some nice reverb and so on so it's sort of set up for me so yeah this is what I'm going to give you I'm going to give you my configuration if you'd like to just quickly just double click and get all my settings along with some cool shortcuts which Reaper is really really known for okay so I hope you guys have found this lesson useful so all the best have fun set up your Reaper really well and then go forward and be extremely creative if you haven't already guys please like the video give it a thumbs up thanks for watching for so long and I will see you guys in the next one if you have any suggestions please leave them in the comments and as always have fun make some great music and I will catch you in the next video cheers