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An Introduction To Digital Music Creation, Part 2 - Printable Version

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An Introduction To Digital Music Creation, Part 2 - MetalRenard - 05-20-2011

This is the 2nd part of a 2 part tutorial. The first part is HERE
Please don't reproduce this tutorial without my prior consent.

An Introduction To Digital Music Creation, Part 2

Getting started: Know your interface
Reaper's Interface Explained in colour
I advise you open that image in another window and read this guide here.

RED: This is a TRACK. You can create as many tracks as your system's performance allows for, taking in account the number of VSTs (instruments and effects) you use in each.

ORANGE: This is the SELECTION menu. It determines how things will react with you. The magnet means that things will only move according the the increments that define BEATS (If you don't know what a beat is then you need to learn about the fundamentals of music. Most people learn this in school so I won't go into detail here). Test the others to find out more about them.

PURPLE: In this order: Skip to beginning; Play; Pause; stop; Skip to end; Record; Loop. The loop button makes the music repeat over and over. It's handy for when you're finding sounds and want a small section to play over and over while you modify it.

GREEN: Play back speed bar, BPM (Beats Per Minute, the speed the song is at) and Time signature. (I won't discuss bpm and time signature here, google them to find out more).

BLUE: This is the RACK. Here, all the tracks you create are stored (you can also see the rack on the left).

YELLOW: The MASTER. This is exit point for all your tracks, they all gather at this point, and this is what you hear.

Loading an instrument/effect and getting it to play something
Lets begin by creating a New Track. You have 3 options, here are the 2 fastest ways, 1) Press CTRL+T, 2) Double click inside the Rack area.
Now that we have our track, we can look at the menu it has on it (if you need to, refer to the interface image from before). The bar that slides is the track's Volume control. For now we will ignore "io" and "env". Out target right now is the FX button!

Click on the FX button and a menu should appear like this one:
[Image: SelectVST.png]

If the menu called "Add FX to: track X" doesn't show up, you have to double click inside the "FX: Track X" menu in the white area.
We're going to begin by selecting an Instrument VST otherwise known as a VSTi. Go down the menu until you see "instruments". Click once and a list will appear to the right with the available instruments (if there aren't any, refer the the 1st tutorial on adding VSTs to Reaper).

Remember that we installed Kontakt Player before? Double click on it now. Let's have a look at Kontakt's Interface.
To the left you have the library. Here you can select which instrument you wish to use by moving through the drop-down menus and double clicking on what you want. In the free "Player" version you can find a drum kit. Double click it and wait for it to load.

Now exit the FX menu. We are ready to start writing music!
Remember in the Track section, there was a box with dots in it to the right?
To create one, hold the CTRL button and hold down the left mouse button, now, drag the mouse to the side. Try and make a box that is three beats long. This "box" is called a "Midi Item". Double click on the newly created midi item.

[Image: MidiDrums.png]

This menu that appeared is the Midi Editor. It allows you to add notes and program your track.

GREEN: This is the Piano Roll. It is one way of writing information into Midi format. It is quite simply, a piano, you can even press the keys. Each key will send information to its own set of FX in its Rack. In this case, certain keys correspond to drum samples (sounds) like the Kick, the Snare and the cymbals. You can play around to figure them out.

RED: In this area you can extend the midi item. The grey bar will make the midi item contain more information, make it longer. If on the other hand, you grab the white border, you can extend the midi item but it won't contain more information, it will just repeat whatever you put before the grey bar. It's almost the same as a copy/paste except all the parts remain linked.

ORANGE: This is the time reference. Each segment represents one beat.

BLUE: This is the Velocity control area. Here, you can control how hard an instrument is played. Try lowering it and listen to how the drums, or whatever other instrument you put there, changes. Higher quality instruments have more varied velocity recordings.

Hit space to have Reaper play back what you have made.

Last step!
You may be unhappy with how the drum track sounds. This is now the Production side of music.

Go back to the FX menu on your track. Double click in the white area again to call up the Plugin Menu. Go to the "VST" section and look for "ReaVerbate" (refer to the image from before to learn about this menu).
Now redo this same process, except this time, choose "ReaEQ".

What we have just done is create a FX Chain. Reaper will interpret the Midi Item you created. Kore Player will play it and the audio created by Kore Player will be processed by ReaVerbate and ReaEQ. You can configure these two VSTs aswell until you're happy with the sound.

Congratulations, you're now ready to make music! https://soundcloud.com/metalrenard/a-lifes-work
FAQ

So what next?
Now you can start my tutorial on how to compose music!

As for this area of music, the next step is to try different instruments in Kontakt Player and try combining different effects. You can't put more than one VSTi per track, but you can put as many VST effects as you like. Don't forget about SampleTank too!

RE: Reaper: Music at your fingertips, Part 2 - MetalRenard - 07-29-2013

// Updated both of these tutorials with more recent information and a couple of different images //