Argle

Add drums and you have a winner. Somebody mentioned brush drums but I think old skool hiphop sound would be good as well.

Do I submit a bonus mix in the same way as normal? Or a different way? Not sure if I will get around to it, but I will be pissed if I don't.

By default the coloring of MIDI notes is pretty unspectacular. They are colored by velocity, but most of the time it's easy enough to just look at the velocity lane. Perhaps you would prefer the notes to reflect the color of the track. There's an option for this, as well as other coloring options. My preference is based on track color.

By default drawing MIDI notes in Reaper is pretty straightforward - double-click to create a note, click and drag to create a note of a certain length, double click on a note to delete it, alt-click to get the eraser tool. You can tweak some settings to make things a little quicker though. First thing we notice is the last note length is not remembered. It would be helpful to enable this option. There, that's better for putting down notes of a given length. Next thing you will notice is that the standard left-click action isn't mapped to anything very useful. Let's change the behavior so it adds a note. That way we only have to single-click instead of double-click. btw, you saw there were a few options for "insert note". We just want to "insert note", but "insert note leaving others selected" is another cool option worth considering. So there you go, just a couple ways you can tweak MIDI editor. Experiment with mouse modifiers in the MIDI editor, you might find a good way to do something.

Ok, the reason you can't change the pan position is that it doesn't work with the normal pan slider. You either have to 1) use a pan CC message in the MIDI editor or 2) the plugin ReaControlMIDI (very useful plugin). However, pretty much all MIDIs you import already have a pan message at bar 1. So you have to get rid of that if you want to use ReaControlMIDI or it will keep snapping back to the original value. Otherwise just change that value. If you use the event view mode in the MIDI editor you can see all of the CCs at the start of a track - name, volume, pan, program change. And you can delete them if you want. There's a rather larger problem though - you can't actually render anything using the Microsoft GS Wavetable synth. Just look at the meters if you play a MIDI track... nothing. Reaper views it as an external synth, and you would need some way to route the signal back into Reaper. Some soundcards have a "record what you hear" option. Otherwise you could always route the signal out of your PC, into a mixer, and back into your PC. Pretty ridiculous way to render general MIDI in my opinion. I don't think Reaper is a good program for it. It's not easy or intuitive for that purpose. So what can you do if you want GM sounds? You can look for a Microsoft GM soundfont. Then you can play it in a soundfont player and have a much easier time. Or you can buy a sound library that has GM specifications and better sounds. btw - the general MIDI sounds are all stored in the file gm.dls on your computer. A program like Extreme Sample Converter can actually convert it. I can do a conversion for you if you want - Kontakt, soundfont, many other formats. PM me if you want.

I haven't done a lot of MIDI tips so far but I definitely don't want to neglect it. There's a neat function that's very easy to miss. Check it out. Note that this fixes disconnected AND overlapping notes, regardless of the severity. This is something a quantize function can't do. It's available as an action (of course), so it's great fodder for a custom key assignment or toolbar icon (more on that later). If you're a MIDI user I'm sure you can find a use for this.

You may wonder if there is a way to easily change a fade curve in the same manner of modifying an envelope curve. Unfortunately there is not. Just kidding, there is. Unlike envelopes, this one by default is not set up, which I feel is a mistake on the part of the devs. Oh well. It's easy enough to change using mouse modifier. As you can see I chose the Alt modifier in keeping with the way envelope curves are changed.

I'm so glad you like it! I haven't been sure if I'm moving too quickly, or the subject material is too scattered. It's really just a thread for me to put down what I like about Reaper. Anyway, first select the track you want to demo the MIDI with, then preview it in the Media Explorer. That should do the trick.

That's a fair rule imo, keeps things interesting.

Isn't there some PRC rule, the winner of a contest can submit a mix for the next round but it doesn't count? Is that the case for this compo as well? Did I completely imagine this? I can't find it in writing anywhere now.

You may not even be aware of this, but you can grab the top of an item and drag it down! This works as a volume trim on an item level (pre-fx). However, there is a way to use a volume knob instead. To me this has two benefits. One, it's easier to see and more obvious. Two, you can actually increase the item gain as well as trimming it! This is a great way to turn up really quiet recordings before they hit the FX chain. This works on MIDI items too, it increases or decreases the velocity by a factor.

You may have noticed that the item label takes up a bit of vertical space in the track and makes the actual item waveform smaller. There's a way to change the placement of the item labels so you get a bigger item display.

Maybe someone else should take control of it, rather than it rotting in their absence.

I can't speak for any of the other DAWs, but the Reaper tutorials are great. Anything by Kenny Gioia is definitely worth watching.

I'm pretty neutral on the whole bonus vote thing. I can see the appeal of a straight contest, but I also see how a voting incentive could get more voters.

If you use the promo code RESIDENT30 at groove3.com/code you can get a free 30 day all-access pass. Not sure how long this will last, so get it while it's good. Loads of tutorials there.

That was fun. I hope people choose well known sources, tbh. Thats the potential appeal to me for this compo, redoing the classics in a way that wouldn't pass muster here.

Is this project completely dead? I don't see Theophany or Emunerator around much anymore. Then again I look at the track listing with many WIPs.

Layering is a common technique to get the best possible sound. Say you have 3 bass synth VSTs that all play the same part and work together as a unified bass line. What do you do? Copy the MIDI items to all 3 parts? Well that's an option, but if you need to change the bass line you have to change all 3 parts. Another option is to use Reaper's flexible sends to route the MIDI of one bass track to the other two. Notice the plug icon, that's how you can tell you're creating a send. Remember to disable audio sending, you only want to send MIDI. If you want to check to make sure your tracks are routed, click on the IO buttons. If you're mainly a MIDI person and don't create audio sends very often, you can change the send defaults to make your life easier. That's all there is to it! Give it a try, it's quite handy.

You may be wondering if you can easily change an envelope's curve to something other than linear. Why of course. Be default you can Alt-drag an envelope segment to set the curve.

Maybe you can get a different banner for your sig, so it doesn't confuse people because it looks so much like the PRC one. Even a change of color would do the trick.

Ok, we're getting into another heavy subject like actions. Mouse modifiers can have a powerful effect on your workflow. In a sentence, any time you left click, double click, or click and drag on something, there is probably a mouse modifier to change the behavior for that thing. Some contexts offer only a few limited actions. Other contexts you can literally use any action or custom action you want. Confused yet? You get to mouse modifiers in Preferences, so let's take a look. So, we see various contexts such as track control panel, media item, or envelope segment. Then for each context there is a list of allowed actions such as left click, left drag, or double click. Let's try an example to see what this is all about. Normally when you drag an envelope up and down it ignores the time selection. But what if you wanted to change that? Pretty sweet huh? By changing the mouse modifier you can now do envelope editing VERY fast. All you have to do is draw a time selection over the area you want to change. This is a much more pleasant way to work than trying to do the same thing one envelope point at a time. Note the context we changed - envelope segment/left drag. Alright, another example. There are more changes that can be made to envelope editing. As you know you can add an envelope point by Shift-clicking and delete the point by Alt-clicking. But what if you wanted to simply double-click to add OR remove points? By using mouse modifiers, we can do that. Awesome. Notice that we changed TWO contexts this time. One context is when you double-click on a blank envelope segment to create a point. The other is when you double-click on a point to delete it. The two of them work together to create a system that doesn't require keyboard modifiers. Ok, let's do something other than envelopes. Say you like to create regions a lot, but right-clicking to navigate a menu annoys you. We can add a mouse modifier for a context that by default has nothing: double-clicking on the ruler. Nice, that's pretty convenient. One last example. We may want an easy way to zoom into tracks or items of our choosing. There is a nice feature called marquee zoom. Let's set up two mouse modifiers, one to create a zoom box, and another to zoom back out. Excellent. So alt-drag zooms in and alt-click zooms out. These examples are just some personal preference of mine and don't even scratch the surface of mouse modifiers. There are an extreme number of ways you can configure them to your liking. Dive right in and experiment!

Very quick and simple tip here, but you should always use project folders for your projects. This has a few advantages. It's easy to find the media for a project. It lets you send someone your project with minimal effort. Also, it allows you to clean your project directory of unused files. If you keep all your projects in the same folder you can't do that because Reaper will view all other project media as unused media for the currently opened project. So, yep, first thing in a project should be to save it in its own folder.

omg. This is such a great tribute to a game I played so much in the early 00s

I hate to sound like a dick, but the problem might be you. I haven't seen other people on this forum that get repeatedly frustrated like you do. idk what to say. I don't really have anything useful to offer anyone about my experiences. It's all been a long string of micro-improvements based on trying to address weaknesses.