Argle

Never voted on TheSauce before. I notice there's a box for "Reasoning". Will that be visible to everyone? Will your votes be visible? Not that I have anything to hide. I'm just wondering how this works.

Plenty of musicians are self taught. A critical ear and willingness to be hard on yourself can give plenty of improvement. Maybe the questions you're asking are too vague or broad. If I asked, "how did Garry Kasparov play such great chess", I don't think there is any satisfying answer to that question. He had a talent for it and put in relentless work and effort.

FX chains are chains of FX. Easy enough. So what's the point of them? Well, any time you want to insert multiple FX at the same time. Say you always start with a particular EQ and compressor. We can create an FX chain from that. Next time you need those plugins, bam. A nice time-saving feature. If you really love a particular FX chain, you can make it the default for new tracks. If you get sick of this chain, simply save an empty FX chain as the default to undo it. btw, an FX chain needn't be multiple effects. You can have a chain of a single effect. I'll do a future tutorial on a use for that.

Which looks better: this or this Personally, I think the one that's colored all purdy looks better. Easier to see your instrument categories at a glance if you color them. So, how do we color tracks in Reaper? Let's color a track using the default settings. Eh. It's something, but we can do better. We'll change some settings and see if we can get anything more interesting. Nice. That's much better. If you noticed before, there are 16 custom colors you can set to whatever you want. Let's set a few. Notice that I clicked on existing colors to fill the custom colors, but you can type values into the right side pane as well. Since I went over actions and keybinding, let's use that knowledge to assign the custom color window to a key. Great, that lets you hit a key rather than navigate a menu. One more example. So far we've seen that items inherit the color from their track, based on the settings in Preferences/Peaks-Waveforms. But we can set the item color independently. Hope this gives you an intro to livening up your projects with color. One more thing to keep in mind is track templates remember the color, so that's nice.

To the only place in my house I can attach them to, my doorway pullup bar. It's the kind that sticks out a bit so that's good, probably better for rings than the one that sits right in the frame. I definitely won't be doing iron crosses on them, but then again I won't be doing iron crosses anywhere.

So we just vote for the track we like the most. I wasn't sure if we should prioritize covers, slight alterations, or sound upgrades. Sounds like it doesn't matter?

I see some of the ways people are doing a conservative approach to the source while adding something original. I wasn't really sure what to do. It's weird but I've been in "OCR mode" so long I've kinda forgotten how to do a conservative remix.

So I've noticed in the last couple weeks, my pec area has changed. It always was soft and jiggly. Not large enough to be boobs but fatty deposits still. It's heavier now, less jiggly. Looks different too, doesn't stick out quite so much. That's pretty interesting. I guess exercising is having an effect on it. I recently got a pair of rings so now I can do some good exercises there that will work the pecs.

I'm still waiting for it. When it happens I'll let you know.

Let's open up the actions window. What can you do here? As it turns out, 3 main things. 1) Run individual actions 2) Assign keys or MIDI controllers to actions 3) Create custom actions We'll hold off on custom actions for now. Let's run an action to see what it's all about. Not very interesting, but note that every single menu command, button, and right-click context menu command in Reaper is available as a corresponding action. As well as loads of actions that aren't available anywhere else. What you can do here is assign keys that make sense to you to the important actions that you frequently use. Note that ANY of the factory default key assignments can be deleted or changed. This is a powerful feature that not all DAWs have. It lets you completely customize the keyboard. So what are some useful actions we can assign to keys? Well, hundreds of em really. But let's do a couple examples. One thing you might notice if you've been using Reaper is, why the hell does the mousewheel do horizontal zooming rather than vertical scrolling? That's the Windows standard. It's one of those baffling Reaper dev choices, but something we can fix. First we can find the mousewheel shortcut to see what action it's assigned to it. Yup, horizontal zooming. Alright, now let's assign it to vertical scrolling instead. Great, we fixed that silly design choice. How about another example. Previously I went over envelopes and automation. Let's say you've got a bunch of plugins and want to automate a specific parameter. Yikes, that's a lot of text to wade through. Individual plugins can have dozens or upwards of a hundred parameters. If only you could wiggle a parameter and create an envelope. Well, there's an action for that! Let's bind it to the tilde (~) key. Sweet! This is a much easier way to create an envelope. Hopefully this gives you a taste of the power of actions and key binding. Have fun!

Being in Chicago it's actually closer to me than either of the coasts. Still would be a very solid drive though. Hope you find some peeps!

That's worded ambiguously imo and could be confusing. The reverbs I use don't have low cuts built in, I use a separate EQ in the bus. Bottom line is, we're talking about cutting the low end of your reverb.

By default the plugin names in Reaper are kinda stupid. They're usually too long and have the developer name tacked onto the end. Fortunately though there are 2 ways to rename plugins. You can change it on a per-instance basis. In this case, "EQ" is a much better name than "ReaEQ (Cockos)". See how only the one instance is renamed, the next time you add the plugin it's named the default. Note that plugins can be renamed in the mixer the same way. You can change it for all instances as well. Notice that changing a Reaplug name will move it out of the Cockos folder into VSTs.

As you use certain plugins, you might find yourself always dialing up the same settings as a starting point. There's no reason to do it manually every time when we can set up the default preset. Let's say we have a favorite ReaEQ setup we always like, a highpass filter and one band. It's a snap to save it as the default. So the next time you need a ReaEQ, your favorite setting is ready to go.

I've done it before. Larry must be thoroughly annoyed with me, but he's never rejected the update.

Docking is an extremely powerful feature to customize Reaper with the important windows you use, in the locations you prefer them to be. Additionally it lets you access multiple windows from the same dock by switching back and forth. Quick disclaimer, these gifs came out choppier than the other ones. I have no idea why. I still think they're usable though. Let's dive right in. Here's a basic example of docking the mixer. Always look for the blue bar or square. I've seen it appear as gray on some tutorials, no idea why. Maybe those are Macs? Anyway, look for blue or grey boxes. Ok, so we see there are 4 basic docking positions relative to the arrange window - up, down, left, and right. Let's dock some more windows. Notice the potential for quickly accessing different windows in the same space. Now let's put some windows in different docks. I think you're allowed up to 16 different docks in Reaper. In addition to creating single docks that span the entire top/bottom/left/right, you can share the space among multiple docks. You'll notice in the preceding examples that the left dock overlaps the top and bottom docks. By double-clicking on the divider, you can change this to give the top and bottom docks preference. One last example. So far we've seen docks attached to the main window. But you can have floating docked windows as well! To accomplish this you need to Ctrl-click and drag the window tab into the center of the screen until you see a floating blue box. Note that if you just click and drag you'll wind up with a floating window, not a floating docked window. As the example shows, once you have a floating dock it's a snap to transfer windows between it and the main window docks. So there ya go. Docks are lots of fun to experiment with and offer tons of creative potential for getting your own custom workflow. Docks work the best with dual monitors. All of these examples are a bit cramped because it's a single monitor view.

You may start your projects at measure 1. This allows you to render the entire project with minimal effort. If I may suggest a different approach though, creating a render region has two benefits. 1) You don't have to start the project at measure 1. I typically start 3-5 minutes into the timeline. This allows you to go back and add more to the front end without having to shift the project. 2) You can store audio and MIDI items outside the bounds of the render region and not have them rendered. This is good for alternate or "maybe" parts. So, how do we do it? Let's take a look. Note that naming the region is optional and has no effect on anything. Also, you can drag the edges of the region to change it. If you only have the render region that's all you have to do. If there are more, the default is to render all the regions, which you probably don't want. So there's one more step you have to take.

If you look at the timeline/ruler, you'll see that it gives a measures:beats readout as well as a time readout. This may be a case of TMI for you. Fortunately, there are two settings you can change to simplify the readout to measures only. I personally like this better.

The King of Shadows theme from Neverwinter Nights 2 has been in my mind for a long time, but I honestly don't know if I could do anything that would hold a candle to the original.

Does this have to be a boss character related theme, or any generic boss music?

I'm not aware of any plugin I have that can do that. It sounds like an awesome feature though. For sticky situations like that I usually end up using a dynamic EQ with a couple bands spread across the problem range. But you've piqued my interest with this key tracking EQ. edit: oh man, turns out I do have an EQ that can do key tracking. That is sooooo awesome. Thanks for the sweet idea!

I feel like you created a great intro, a nice thick atmosphere, then kind of squandered the potential. I think it should build up to something more, with more changeups along the way.. The sine lead sounds a little overbearing. Might want to EQ some of those stuffy/nasally resonance freqs that sine leads always have.

I'm pretty sure that's the purpose of the Metroid Reorchestrated project.

Awesome source, I have every intention of doing this one myself. Maybe when I get caught up on tracks in another 2 years. I would put some more reverb on the choir to make it blend better. The exposed line in the beginning sounds mushy. Maybe you can adjust something to make the attack a little quicker. I hear the little distortion noise you're talking about. Very faint but there. Sometimes I find I have to render at 1x or online in Reaper rather than full-speed offline, or I get random artefacts. Usually not in most projects, but once in awhile. There may be a setting to avoid this, if there is I'm not aware of it.

If you use envelopes for awhile, something like this might happen to you. The default behavior of Reaper is to take your volume offset and apply it to the envelope, while resetting the track volume. Unfortunately if you have a track turned down really low, this results in a completely unusable envelope. A much more sensible method is to keep your track volume where it's at, and create an envelope set at 0 dB. Fortunately, this is very easy to change. This should be the default setting, IMO.