My First Reaper Project

by **DwaneHollands** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 6:08 pm

So I've been stuck at home with a really bad twisted ankle. Bored out of my brains. OK, though having an iphone with a good data plan means I can at least get my Turtlerock fix and do a lot of research into gear etc.

Any hoo.

So I read a little more about Reaper. Managed to get to my studio today. Downloaded reaper and started playing with it. Oooh, it found my plugins from Pro Tools (Garritan Personal Orchestra, Amplitube etc). Found my MBOX2 no problems. Cool. Got my cheap bass out and decided to see if I could get audio into a track and apply the Amplitube plugin to it. That would be the greatest achievement in the past 2 weeks for me. Fiddled for a little while and got it to work. First thing I noticed was how LOUD IT WAS vs Pro tools LE 8! It almost blew my head off at Unity gain! Yeouch. Same plugin I run in Pro tools. Same patch. Wow!

I know they said the 64 bit buss they use is meant to give you headroom, but I thought I wouldn't be able to pick it. Wow. Tried a few plugins and they were really nice. Quite transparent.

Anyway it found my garritan GPO4 ok and I thought I'd try and record some midi. (again I'd be happy to get one track down). Couldn't get the midi to trigger it. After a short dig around in preferences, the port just needed to be switched on. Bam, it's working! ha! practiced some scales, then decided to record some improvisation with the Steinway Piano FULL instrument to check it processing power. Aced it! No complaints running at 256 samples! (I couldn't print a single stereo track in PT LE 8 with 2048 samples and that single instrument!!!!)

Anyways I decided to add another instrument from Garritan. and on and on I went at 256 samples. I have 10 instruments running (2 or 3 of them have 2 instruments in each plugin instead of one). This is my first garritan project. Reaper never complained once. The offline bounching is just awesome! So far Reaper has been such a transparent tool that I have barely had to think about and it's my first day using it! it's such a pleasure to use. I barely know I'm using it. I'm just going about making music - oh that's right this things called reaper!

This piece is called "Much Is Forgiven"
http://www.hollands.com.au/R21Studios/A ... rgiven.mp3

Love to hear peoples comments on my piece!

by **Mickstape** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:07 am

Hey Dwane, Mate your piece is really good man, any chance of getting you to do a few collabs in the near future?

I'll send you a pm with a track that im working on atm, give you an idea of what i mean.

Stay at it dude cuz that shits banging!

by **heathen** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:43 am

Reaper is great, though I hav'nt used vit for 2 years, back then I could'nt get the midi working so gave up, gonna have to check out the latest version cause if it all works well now I'll be switching. It's such a small program, so quick to load and really does sound great, I really dig it.

by **heathen** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:47 am

Sounded cool Dwane, though was waiting for the big metal guits to drop in near the end, heh.

by **DwaneHollands** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 11:38 am

Hey Mick,

Thanks for the kind words. Sent you a PM.

Heath. ha ha. I hear you about the metal guitars. lol.

Yeah so far Reaper totally rocks over PT LE. I'm just loving it. There are a few things I'm really excited about. ReaMote and Plugin Firewalling.

As far as I'm aware a 32 bit plugin/application is limited to the amount of ram it can use. So if you're using a 32bit application and it has a 32bit plugin, the application uses it's maximum and then breaks down the pieces for plugins etc. With firewalling a plugin you can separate it from the application in Reaper and have it so it's a separate application. Meaning it can use up the maximum RAM a 32 bit application can address. So it's not begging for rations from the master application. That's my understanding of it. I believe you can set the limits on the RAM for that plugin when it's firewalled aswell.

More exciting than that is the ReaMote. Install the node (I realise this is like Logic. And I'm not sure how logic nodes work exactly) on other computers. Install the plugins and INSTRUMENTS on which computers you'd prefer them to be on. Perhaps a Dual Core you run the instruments on. Perhaps a G4 you run the Compressing and Eq plugins on. Then you switch on Reamote on the MASTER in Reaper. When you create FX chains (a chain of inserts) you can then choose from a drop down (local processing - or one of the server nodes). It's all transparent. I think they said with 100mb network connection you could run perhaps 7-8 servers before bandwidth became an issue.

But you're not limited to just INTEL processors. I believe (I have yet to test any of this) you can even run cross platform. They say, "even an old laptop can run a single reverb". So instead of throwing out all your hardware and trying to build/buy an even bigger system. You can create a little cluster. Buy another 'cheapish' computer to add to the cluster. Perhaps get some second hand cheapies from govt auctions. Nothing becomes obsolete.

Kinda how Google made it big. Cluster of Inexpensive Servers over Yahoo's expensive hardware.

by **jkhuri44** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 1:12 pm

editing in Reaper made me scratch my head a bit....

ie. getting crossfades hapening, and all that seemed to harder than necessary, to the point where there was no info available on the manual.

i really like the new interface, but im still scratching my head too much to be using it seriously.

by **DwaneHollands** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 1:23 pm

Jamil,

Must admit I have done any automation as yet. a little midi editing. Just deleting a few notes. Double clicking the track brings up the little midi editor which was snappy. Haven't tried to edit envelopes for modulation or volume as yet.

by **DwaneHollands** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 3:14 pm

Hey Jamil,

There's an Auto-Cross fade feature. Not sure how it works but stumbled across it a few minutes ago.

My First Reaper Project

My First Reaper Project

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