rudi
Senior Member
The following is a short summary of my experience with Reaper...
I have used Cubase since the days of the Atari, mainly for pop/rock type music and basic song arrangements, but I have always wanted to dabble in orchestral / cinematic / media type music.
After some research I came across this forum, and was floored by how good the compositions and mock-ups sounded. I tried to make my own attempts sound better, but found that that I needed better sounds, easy realtime control, and much more practice...
I was looking at various ways of using articulations (expression maps, control surfaces etc.) when I came across something called Reaticulate https://reaticulate.com/ which looked extremely impressive. Later I found out that it was developed by @tack of this very forum )... and that it ran on a DAW I had never heard of before called Reaper.
So I decided to try it out....
My First impressions
My initial impressions were rather mixed... the software was very compact and launched really quickly. It was easy to setup in terms of ASIO and MIDI.
Based on my first impressions, I didn't have any great expectations of Reaper, or how it would measure-up to what I thought of as more "professional" packages. Most of that was down to its interface that looked very... basic, dated, and amateurish...
If this sounds superficial, it's not, because first impressions do matter, and when you work day in and out with any software package, things like GUI, colours, fonts, ergonomics etc. count for a lot!
Nevertheless, I decided to carry on, mainly because of Reaticulate, and its generous trial period (60 days).
The other major obstacle was getting to grip with a whole new set of commands and terminology - basically that feeling of being lost when switching to a new programme.
Most of my questions boiled down to: "how do I?" for the most basic of stuff.
There were also plenty of terms that were new to me: actions, regions, items, how to create MIDI tracks vs Audio tracks... and huge menus filled with hundreds of commands. There was so much to take in, wrapped in an unfamiliar interface.
What I like
Here are my thoughts after the 60 days evaluation period (I bought the personal license in case you wondered )
- incredibly customisable, from the GUI itself to the menus, and custom actions.
- after a bit of research I found you can theme Reaper extensively. I switched to a more Logic like skin, which I upgraded to a more elaborate one for a small donation. I have been extremely happy with it (see screenshot in post below)
- I love creating my own menus, placing the actions I use the most often at the very top; creating custom sets of actions; creating / editing toolbars; and the easy way you can create and manage screen setups.
- the very fast loading times make it easier to start writing music.
- it is incredibly flexible (a huge amount of choice). One example is how tracks can contain different items such as MIDI and Audio) or be used as sends or aux.
- ditto routing... the interface do do so is a bit... crowded!
- it's very easy and direct to save and load templates, be they single tracks, groups of tracks, FXs, FX chains, even entire projects.
- I love the ease of creating folders per project -- just tick a box in the save dialogue box.
- there is a nice collection of basic but useful built-in FXs... and the chance to roll your own if you like programming!
- the VST/VSTi integration (I only use VST) is very nice. I haven't encountered any problem.
- having automation lanes underneath the tracks and being able to add them and edit them is done very easily.
- the piano roll MIDI editor is nice and includes lanes for Velocity and CC... it also has a basic Score view which I need to explore more.
- it is very easy to automate controls via MIDI.
- I also like the "save project as a new version" facility.
- there is wealth of further options to discover!
Things that baffled me at first...
- recorded items be they MIDI or Audio are treated the same way and can co-exist on the same track... once you get used to the idea, it actually makes sense.
- recorded items are set to 'loop' by default - if you try to extend them they repeat instead of just enlarging the item. It was easy to change the default.
- there are literally thousands of actions (built-in commands). I spent hours trying to find certain commands not knowing what they were actually called: is it under next, left, start.. is it called delete or remove... etc.
- when adding a new VSTi it would create automation lanes for every single control when adjusting them.... until I found the "Toggle auto add envelopes when tweaking in write mode" command and switched the default off.
- the overwhelming number of ways in which you can customise Reaper... it is a strength but you can easily end-up going down endless rabbit holes trying "one more thing". But it incredibly powerful and satisfying when you managed to find your "ideal" solution (see example below).
- one thing that puzzled me for a while was trying to record CCs as automation lanes as opposed to CC MIDI data in the MIDI editor. I tried several setups but always ended-up with both. After a lot of searching I found someone had written a small MIDI plugin that stopped the CC data being recorded as part of the MIDI track, leaving me with nice automation lanes to record to or edit to my heart's content.
- the sheer number of extensions... it's easy to feel swamped!
Conclusions
So, is Reaper the be all and end all of DAWs? Of course not - each DAW has its strengths and ways of working which will suit different types of users.
In my case I found it a good fit for my evolving way of working. I love being to gradually customise it to my exact requirements... even if it can take time to find out how to do so.
I am looking forward to making Reaper my main writing tool.
[content edited for typos and clarity]
I have used Cubase since the days of the Atari, mainly for pop/rock type music and basic song arrangements, but I have always wanted to dabble in orchestral / cinematic / media type music.
After some research I came across this forum, and was floored by how good the compositions and mock-ups sounded. I tried to make my own attempts sound better, but found that that I needed better sounds, easy realtime control, and much more practice...
I was looking at various ways of using articulations (expression maps, control surfaces etc.) when I came across something called Reaticulate https://reaticulate.com/ which looked extremely impressive. Later I found out that it was developed by @tack of this very forum )... and that it ran on a DAW I had never heard of before called Reaper.
So I decided to try it out....
My First impressions
My initial impressions were rather mixed... the software was very compact and launched really quickly. It was easy to setup in terms of ASIO and MIDI.
Based on my first impressions, I didn't have any great expectations of Reaper, or how it would measure-up to what I thought of as more "professional" packages. Most of that was down to its interface that looked very... basic, dated, and amateurish...
If this sounds superficial, it's not, because first impressions do matter, and when you work day in and out with any software package, things like GUI, colours, fonts, ergonomics etc. count for a lot!
Nevertheless, I decided to carry on, mainly because of Reaticulate, and its generous trial period (60 days).
The other major obstacle was getting to grip with a whole new set of commands and terminology - basically that feeling of being lost when switching to a new programme.
Most of my questions boiled down to: "how do I?" for the most basic of stuff.
There were also plenty of terms that were new to me: actions, regions, items, how to create MIDI tracks vs Audio tracks... and huge menus filled with hundreds of commands. There was so much to take in, wrapped in an unfamiliar interface.
What I like
Here are my thoughts after the 60 days evaluation period (I bought the personal license in case you wondered )
- incredibly customisable, from the GUI itself to the menus, and custom actions.
- after a bit of research I found you can theme Reaper extensively. I switched to a more Logic like skin, which I upgraded to a more elaborate one for a small donation. I have been extremely happy with it (see screenshot in post below)
- I love creating my own menus, placing the actions I use the most often at the very top; creating custom sets of actions; creating / editing toolbars; and the easy way you can create and manage screen setups.
- the very fast loading times make it easier to start writing music.
- it is incredibly flexible (a huge amount of choice). One example is how tracks can contain different items such as MIDI and Audio) or be used as sends or aux.
- ditto routing... the interface do do so is a bit... crowded!
- it's very easy and direct to save and load templates, be they single tracks, groups of tracks, FXs, FX chains, even entire projects.
- I love the ease of creating folders per project -- just tick a box in the save dialogue box.
- there is a nice collection of basic but useful built-in FXs... and the chance to roll your own if you like programming!
- the VST/VSTi integration (I only use VST) is very nice. I haven't encountered any problem.
- having automation lanes underneath the tracks and being able to add them and edit them is done very easily.
- the piano roll MIDI editor is nice and includes lanes for Velocity and CC... it also has a basic Score view which I need to explore more.
- it is very easy to automate controls via MIDI.
- I also like the "save project as a new version" facility.
- there is wealth of further options to discover!
Things that baffled me at first...
- recorded items be they MIDI or Audio are treated the same way and can co-exist on the same track... once you get used to the idea, it actually makes sense.
- recorded items are set to 'loop' by default - if you try to extend them they repeat instead of just enlarging the item. It was easy to change the default.
- there are literally thousands of actions (built-in commands). I spent hours trying to find certain commands not knowing what they were actually called: is it under next, left, start.. is it called delete or remove... etc.
- when adding a new VSTi it would create automation lanes for every single control when adjusting them.... until I found the "Toggle auto add envelopes when tweaking in write mode" command and switched the default off.
- the overwhelming number of ways in which you can customise Reaper... it is a strength but you can easily end-up going down endless rabbit holes trying "one more thing". But it incredibly powerful and satisfying when you managed to find your "ideal" solution (see example below).
- one thing that puzzled me for a while was trying to record CCs as automation lanes as opposed to CC MIDI data in the MIDI editor. I tried several setups but always ended-up with both. After a lot of searching I found someone had written a small MIDI plugin that stopped the CC data being recorded as part of the MIDI track, leaving me with nice automation lanes to record to or edit to my heart's content.
- the sheer number of extensions... it's easy to feel swamped!
Conclusions
So, is Reaper the be all and end all of DAWs? Of course not - each DAW has its strengths and ways of working which will suit different types of users.
In my case I found it a good fit for my evolving way of working. I love being to gradually customise it to my exact requirements... even if it can take time to find out how to do so.
I am looking forward to making Reaper my main writing tool.
[content edited for typos and clarity]
Last edited: