Ok now we have a song using nothing but samples, I like to record the guitar first since the samples for it sound worse than the bass. So now you have to plug your guitar into your computer’s sound card somehow, this can be done a ton of different ways. Since this is just a rough draft recording you can just do what I do and get a 1/4″ Mono to 1/8″ stereo adapter like in the picture below. Then just plug your guitar cable into the adapter then plug the adapter into the line in of your sound card (it’s usually the blue jack, if you don’t have one you’ll have to use the pink mic in jack).

Of course if you wanna get fancy you can plug a mic into the mic input of your sound card and mic your amp, but then you’ve got a bunch of other things you have to do like get an XLR to 1/8″ adapter, set up the mic in front of the amp correctly so that it sounds best, and probably a bunch of other stuff. Since this is just a rough draft recording I’m going with the direct in approach I talked about above, if you wanna do the mic thing go for it, it’ll probably take longer and be more work, but it’ll probably sound better. I just found an article about guitar amp recording with examples, it seems to be pretty good check it out here: Guitar Amp Recording

Ok so now click the guitar MIDI track in reaper and press the delete button on your keyboard then click the R button on the guitar track to arm the recording. Next click the red record button right above the master volume and Reaper will start recording.

After you record the guitar part click stop and then hit the rewind button (or hit Home on your keyboard), then click play to listen to it. You can use the volume control to bring it up or down with the drums then just do the same thing as above to record the bass and vocals.

Next you’ll want to mix all the instruments to try to make them sound better together. I’m not that good at doing this but I found another article that seems to explain it well, plus has some pretty good visuals.
Check it out here: Getting your mix to…mix

Anyway don’t forget you can use the pan sliders to try to space out the guitars, or backing vocals if you have them, so that’s pretty much it for doing just a rough draft recording, feel free to experiment with different drum samples or effects to find a sound you like best.

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.