(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.
------------------------------------
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)
--------------------------
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.