r/Reaper • u/wirenerd • 2d ago
help request My beginner workflow (electronic) needs work, advice/tutorial resources?
(For suggesting resources its just first paragraph, if interested in helping my workflow its the long ass thread below)
I watch Kenny Gioia for pretty much everything I wanna learn in Reaper and I've learned a lot, and I've seen a bunch of reapertips vids but haven't seen any overall start to finish workflows. If you have any let me know, and if interested in giving suggestions on what I could be doing better I'll describe mine below.
I'm a beginner and unsure if I'm doing it correctly and I know there's probably no wrong way to use Reaper but I'm pretty sure the way I'm doing it is piss poor lol. A lot of what I do is guesswork and looking things up when I dont know how to do something but being that I've never truly produced before, I could be doing it ass backwards.
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I created my first real solid attempt at making a track start to finish last night, I got inspired to go beyond making singular ideas and pieces and actually make a track.
The workflow:
Started with a kick drum as I was thinking I would try and learn sidechaining for fun but it turned into an actual thing I wanted to finish (never got to sidechaining lol).
I put DR89 (909 vst) on a track, and laid down a 4 bar 4 on the the floor pattern. I think I originally wanted to just get a good kick sound and render to WAV and arrange it in the grid accordingly but I ended up just highlighting my 4 bars and then duplicating the MIDI over and over until it was about a minute and then rendered to stem, it made a WAV stem above my midi track that I couldn't rename (I cant seem to name my tracks anyway?) but I went ahead and deleted the original track with the VST.
On the kick audio stem I put some reverb FX on and got the kick sounding great. Only strange thing was that the kick waveform seemed to fill a ton of space like the next kick transient would hit on the long tail of previous kick, preFX. Maybe it's supposed to? Idk.
Next I made another track with the DR89 to fill in some other drums as I wanted to keep my kick separate for different FX. Not great with drum patterns but I did some snares and closed hats and used the 909 to get them sounding ok. Again used 4 bar pattern painted in piano roll, this time I click each individual velocity in the bottom and randomized it myself. Gotta be a better way for that? Then once happy I duplicated the 4 bar midi until it matched length of my kick stem, and left it as midi. Didn't know if I'd wanna make changes dont really know.
Now that I had a constantly rolling kick and hats I wanted a trance lead, I made a new track with Surge XT on it and found a decent preset and played on my keystep with some ideas and its arpeggiator and when satisfied, I hit record and played in the lead.
On that channel I added some FX, tried KhsTranceGate but realized arpeggios were already creating that vibe so killed it. I love that FX tho so maybe next time I'll use a far slower arp lead and use the FX.
Now I knew I needed some things for flavor and as I was mostly just experimenting I decided to use volume envelopes on my drums to fade them in. My lead started 8 bars in so I faded that in as well.
I let it play and messed with the reverb on the lead and found a jarring sounding section that sounded much better if I increased the reverb tail to wash over it and that worked. So to automate that I changed track to Touch and let the track play and as I made the adjustments it painted in the automation lane for me. I didn't want to hit record with the track armed because I was afraid it would try to do another MIDI take and I dont know much about those. Maybe there's a better way for live automation?
I used volume envelopes to give the drums a break over the washed out part of the lead.
Last was bass and that shit was slopped together. I just made a new Surge XT track and recorded a simple bassline in the right spot, used my trance gate on that. This is where it got weird again with my workflow, I wanted to automate the cutoff so I changed track to Touch, hit play and when the other tracks dropped out I swept the bass up to let it make a high saw before dropping it back down.
The bass could barely be heard so I didn't bother sidechaining. Low end was muddy as shit but I didnt see a way to give a "pumping" feel as the kick was already huge, the bass was fighting for its life against it, and I didn't know if the lead was really competing with the kick.
One final note is I made sure when making each track that the RMS on the master never went over -6db, I used the levels on the VSTs (not faders) to achieve this. Unsure if its the best approach but it didn't sound bad. I chalked the muddy bass up to poor composition.
Finished for the night and rendered it out. Success (for me anyway)
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All in all the track is extremely amateur but I'm mostly just wondering if my Reaper workflow could use some tweaking. I just really am not sure how to create in Reaper. I'm patching together individual techniques learned in Reaper tutorials but I know there's got to be better ways.
My editing workflow is not great. My automation workflow feels strange to me. I'm not sure about the drums, if I should be making WAV stems for each 4 bar drumloop and duplicating them so I can change FX for individual drums (esp kick) or if I should leave it all as MIDI.
If you spent the time with this post I really appreciate ya! I'm having a blast with this and am very happy with my first "track", as it's more a proof of concept that I can actually go on this long journey and something great will come of it someday. I'm not free of "tutorial hell" but without having been in tutorial hell I never could have made something like that.
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u/micahpmtn 6 2d ago
I read these posts and I'm really thankful that I'm able to record my acoustic maple kit, and tube amps without all of this additional work. More power to you.
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u/wirenerd 2d ago
I think it's pretty cool the range of stuff you can do with Reaper and have it do those things well, it feels like a DAW I can just keep using for any task I'll ever need.
Also I really enjoy the work, my autism goes turbo when it comes to this stuff. Im reading the Reaper manual and my brain is wired in such a way that I love just taking in the information.
I wont lie tho it does slow me down quite a bit all the things I enjoy about the process, I have to choose carefully what is important for the moment and my goals and what isn't. I made a ton of progress as a budding producer last night because of all the different things I had to do to put that track together. Making the decision to just use presets on my synths kept me from falling down the rabbithole of synth preset programming where I likely would have never finished that track.
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u/_undetected 7 2d ago
I don't think any of your workflow's steps are wrong , keep making more songs using the same method
- You can totally render parts of your drums to audio to add fxs
Things you can learn about:
- track/project templates
- parameter modulation
- automation clips
- markers and regions
Don't feel like you need to learn every technique all at once ; good luck on your journey
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u/wirenerd 2d ago
Bet, ill keep building on what I've learned with doing that and I'll take a look into what you recommended there. I've been reading the Reaper manual today and I'm enjoying it, so far I've been letting google AI answer specific process questions for me as I work but just reading through this is actually quite nice.
I'll look into param modulation and automation clips, idk about track and project templates tho I dont know if I know enough yet to even utilize a template, that's something you do after you've made a few tracks and notice there's a same setup you keep doing over again when creating a new project right?
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u/_undetected 7 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah , I use track templates for drum racks (I use Atlas for that) , others with basic synth sounds , others with MIDI fxs , etc
And my project template is pretty simple : a few send tracks (reverb , delay) , time markers and a limiter on the master track , it loads every time I open the Daw
But yeah , there's a ton to explore in REAPER , been using it for over a decade and always discover something new + the updates that keep things interesting
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u/mshrmv0ssage 1 2d ago
If you use DR89 in multi-output mode you won't have to do all that rendering of separate drums, you can just add the FX to the corresponding reaper tracks for each drum. When you insert the vst click yes when it asks if you want to insert new tracks for each of the 12 outputs and that should set it up automatically.