And let's say your Violin library has multiple articulations, and each one is in a different. 1 instance of Kontakt with 2 instruments will use less resources than 2 instances of Kontakt, each with only 1 instrument. All of these examples are a bit cramped because it's a single monitor view.It's done to preserve resources and to have multiple instruments in one place if you need to configure them (like sections, etc.) and for tidiness. Docks are lots of fun to experiment with and offer tons of creative potential for getting your own custom workflow.
Note that if you just click and drag you'll wind up with a floating window, not a floating docked window.Īs the example shows, once you have a floating dock it's a snap to transfer windows between it and the main window docks. 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. So far we've seen docks attached to the main window. By double-clicking on the divider, you can change this to give the top and bottom docks preference. You'll notice in the preceding examples that the left dock overlaps the top and bottom docks.
In addition to creating single docks that span the entire top/bottom/left/right, you can share the space among multiple docks. I think you're allowed up to 16 different docks in Reaper. Now let's put some windows in different docks. Notice the potential for quickly accessing different windows in the same space. Ok, so we see there are 4 basic docking positions relative to the arrange window - up, down, left, and right. Maybe those are Macs? Anyway, look for blue or grey boxes. I've seen it appear as gray on some tutorials, no idea why. Here's a basic example of docking the mixer.Īlways look for the blue bar or square. Quick disclaimer, these gifs came out choppier than the other ones. Additionally it lets you access multiple windows from the same dock by switching back and forth. Pretty handy.ĭocking is an extremely powerful feature to customize Reaper with the important windows you use, in the locations you prefer them to be. In this case, I could swap out Omnisphere with Stylus RMX in a matter of seconds, then save that as a separate track template. If you want to create a different multi-out VST, it's as simple as deleting the existing plugin and adding the new one to the same track. Lastly, select all the tracks and save them as a track template! Now you never have to do this again. This is different for every virtual instrument so I won't show it here. Next comes setting up the internal routing in the plugin. Much nicer, huh? Hiding tracks in one view or another is a useful feature for your own sanity. We can use the track manager to accomplish this. Then we'll hide the MIDI inputs in the mixer, so that they're only visible in the TCP. Let's hide the plugin and audio outputs in the TCP so that they're only visible in the mixer. However, we can hide certain of these tracks in the TCP, and others in the Mixer. And this is just an 8-output VST a 16 channel one will create double the clutter. You may notice that all these tracks create a bit of a mess. Now let's move into a bit of power user strategy. Next comes the 16 channels of MIDI Reaper created. Using the track manager we can take a look at the tracks we've created. All you have to do is delete MIDI tracks 9-16. Note that this command always builds 16 channels of MIDI, while Omnisphere only has 8.
Next step is to create MIDI tracks to the plugin. So, we have our VST plugin and 8 outputs now. Let's set up an instance of Omnisphere, which has 8 outputs. But the good news is you only have to set it up once. Setting up a multi-out VST can be confusing in Reaper until you learn the way to do it. He goes into detail on the things I gloss over or assume the user is familiar with. It's the best tutorial I've seen for new users bar none. If you're new to Reaper and want a grounding in the basics, DEFINITELY start with his Reaper 4 Explained series. There's a little bit of overlap between it and this thread, but he goes into a whole bunch of stuff that I don't intend on covering.
I'll keep updated links in the first post to all of the tutorials.ītw, I was going to call the thread Reaper Tips and Tricks, but that tutorial series already exists (and is very much worth your money, as are all of Kenny Gioia's Reaper tutorials). I don't want to have all the fun, anyone is welcome to post their own tips. Hopefully they will be useful to people starting out in Reaper, to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the program. So, I'd like to share some of the tips I've picked up. I've been using Reaper for a couple years, and I'm continually impressed by all the little tricks and techniques you can do that can dramatically speed up your workflow.