Learning Reaper

February 2, 2019

First MIDI Song

This was my first experience using Reaper software, learning to create MIDI audio files. There were some bumps getting started but it worked pretty well after I got going.

The first issue was since I use a Windows laptop it was recommended I get the ASIO audio drivers for working in a digital audio workstation (DAW). I did get those installed ahead of time and it was easy to set them as my audio drivers for Reaper, but it caused some issues since I didn’t fully understand it (and still don’t completely).

Using the ASIO drivers in Reaper made it impossible for me to watch the tutorial videos, as those videos had issues when they went to use the audio driver then. From my understanding, the ASIO drivers specifically make it so one specific program has full control of the audio drivers to help it accomplish its goals, a major one of which is reducing latency. The big latency occurs between playing a virtual instrument and the audio output of it through the software. I eventually just had to use some other audio drivers to mess around with Reaper and listen to tutorials on the same device (and found out quickly how annoying even a small latency is when trying to keep a rhythm).

The Reaper interface also took me a while to get a hang of. Unfortunately my setup and docking did not end up working exactly like the tutorial, which I figured was some issue from just version differences, so that actually took a lot more time to get into a manageable spot than estimated. I was never able to get the Mixer docked “above” the MIDI keyboard section, but I was finally able to get the Mixer to show one mixer track at a time after hours of messing around (turned out I just needed to change a “right click in empty space” setting pertaining to holding the width of the mixers.

After getting through all the initial setup pains, everything actually went really well. Importing the different instrument tracks and messing with the settings and playing them is intuitive and well labeled. I really like how structured you can touch up the tracks after playing. That was especially helpful since I had the latency (messing up the rhythm), and I was using a computer keyboard to play (which makes playing the correct notes pretty difficult). Both of these things and WAY more can be edited after playing to make perfect whole, quarter, eight, whatever notes and play them at the exact right beats.

SUMMARY

ASIO drivers are weird and demand focus from a single software (can use workarounds but hard to setup)
Try to keep your digital instruments together folder wise, but if you need different ones, makes sure to add other locations in settings
Mixer – Uncheck “Show multiple rows of tracks if size permits” if you want your tracks to “stack”
Reaper is pretty easy to just mess around with (lots of drag and drop and just playing)
Make sure to keep instrument files in same place, or add them to locations Reaper searches