Benji Valdez

How to Record a song – Part 2: Rough Draft 1

The next thing you want to do is import the MIDI file into a Multitrack Digital Audio Workstation. Since I couldn’t find anything free and decent that works on Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux, I decided to go with Reaper since I read on Wikipedia that it will work on GNU/Linux if you use wine. It’s not free, but it never expires so that’s why I went with it. It’s around version 3.1+ last I checked, but you can also download older versions from here. I was using version 2.58 when I started this tutorial but I started having trouble with rendering wav files for some reason and upgrading to version 3.1 fixed it somehow, so I’ll be using version 3.1. Also I’m using the Windows version so hopefully everything’s mostly the same on all platforms.

Alright so you’ve downloaded, installed, and opened Reaper. Now what you want to do is close the little window that pops up and go to File > New Project; if you want you can listen to the sample song first, it’s pretty catchy.
Also before I forget, if you downloaded Reaper 3.0+ yours will probably look different than mine unless you downloaded one from version 2. All you have to do is go to Options > Themes > Default_2.0. You can use the black theme if you want but I got used to the other one, so the black theme looks weird to me.

Now your screen should be blank and their should be no audio tracks up. Now go to Insert > Media File… or just hit your insert key (Not literally of course! Put down that hammer.)

Now go find where you put Sonador – Bangs.mid and open it.

Reaper will ask you if you want to import the file on separate tracks, this should already be checked, so go ahead and click OK.

Now use the scroll bar at the bottom to adjust your screen so you can see all the tracks and your screen should look like this:

I’d recommend renaming the tracks so you can tell which one is which, do this by double clicking the text TabIt MIDI – Track 1 – Sonador – Bangs on the upper left or bottom mixing console. Remember Track 1 is Guitar, Track 2 is Bass, and Track 3 is Drums.

Now if you push play you won’t hear jack shit, why? Because you have to tell Reaper what you want to use to play your MIDI file first. I made a page on how to do this, but for this tutorial I’m going to use samples because I think they sound better, but if you’re curious and want to know how to get MIDI to play through Reaper you can check it out by clicking here.

Next click the fx button on the guitar track and in the filter list box at the bottom begin typing reasam. This should bring up ReaSamplOmatic5000, you can select it and click OK if you want to add it to the fx list and figure out how it works yourself, but I’ve already made some files with all the settings you need. You can download a zip file of them here. Make sure when you unzip them you use ‘extract here’ and put the extracted FXChains folder in C:\Program Files\REAPER\ or it wont work.

So now click cancel to close the Add FX window and select FX > Add FX Chain… and browse to C:\Program Files\REAPER\ then select Guitar.RfxChain.

Now your screen should look like the one below. If you didn’t extract the zip file in the REAPER folder like above you’ll probably get some error message about not finding E.wav, but you can fix this by clicking browse and opening E.wav from wherever you extracted the zip file.

Now do the same for the rest of the tracks, and hopefully you extracted the zip file to C:\Program Files\REAPER\ because the drums will be a bitch to sort out (Sorry to the non-windows users who have to do this, I wish Reaper was better at handling it . Both bass and guitar use E.wav and below is a chart of which files go to the drums).

Alright now press play and you should be able to here this:

bangs-midi.mp3

In Part 3 we’ll record over the guitar and bass parts with real instruments so that they sound better.