Category: Reaper

Audio Mixing Effects – Subtractive Synthesis and Phase Shifts

digm520admin / / Audio, Reaper
February 11, 2019

Reaper – Making Music

Audio Terms

Roland Blog – Guide To Subtractive Synthesis

This blog post has a very quick, basic description of a lot of subtractive audio creation methods. This covers waveforms: sine, sawtooth, square, and triangle; amplifiers with volume envelopes; and filters.

Making Music – Difference Between Phase, Flanger, and Chorus Effects

As the title describes, this covers the 3 effects: phase shifters, flangers, and chorus effects. They all deal with making duplicates of sounds but slightly offsetting them to create different effects.

Izotope – Understanding Chorus, Flangers, and Phasers in Audio Production

This is just more descriptive takes on the duplicating/phase shifting type effects. They also include examples where these effects are used in actual songs, as well as a lot of images to visualize how they work.

Reaper: Envelopes and Automation

digm520admin / / Reaper, Tutorial
February 8, 2019

Learning Reaper

Automation and Envelopes

Reaper – Envelopes and Automation

Continuing my learning with Reaper, I went through this tutorial to learn a bit about the envelopes and automation. These two things together basically allow you to vary the parameters of parts of the track at any time in anyway you want.

Each track has a “share” looking button that allows you to access the envelopes for that track. Here you can see all of the parameters available have options to create envelopes to automate, as well as any of the FX tied to this track. Making them visible shows them (either on a separate track or on the same track, which can be swapped). Arming them dictates which ones will be written over if you decide to write new automation.

There are also several automation modes:

  • Trim/Read: Plays automation with some editing capabilities
  • Read: just plays automation
  • Touch: records actions while doing something, then stops applying whatever you’re doing immediately on release
  • Latch: lets you record during play, but then continues to apply your last action when you let go
  • Write: records whatever you’re doing specifically, including nothing if you stop performing actions

You can also apply separate envelopes to the Takes, as opposed to the track. This lets you apply separate and different envelopes to an item that aren’t specifically tied to the track. This gives you multiple levels of control to affect the track.

You can also apply envelopes/automation to several tracks at once through master/slave connections. Use “Grouping”, and assign a track (i.e. the Master Track) as the master, and then choose the group which you want to apply to as the slaves. You will also want to select the parameters you wish to automate. Just creating an envelope for the master will NOT instantly apply to all the slaves. You need to set the master to a write mode, and it will record all the automation to the individual tracks. So you could technically use it to apply an envelope to multiple tracks, then delete the original master track and keep those additions.

Learning Reaper – First MIDI Song

digm520admin / / Audio, Reaper, Tutorial
February 2, 2019

Learning Reaper

First MIDI Song

Reaper – First MIDI Song Tutorial

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