In the interests of getting something recorded sooner rather than later, let's cut our loop down to something more manageable, by defining a loop of eight bars. Reaper's recording capacity is only limited by your available drive space, so you could create a loop recorder with a cycle that lasts for hours. Remember that this affects the transport in both recording and playback modes. Reaper plays to the end of the current bar, then jumps to the start of the bar you have selected, like a hardware loop recorder. To see how this affects the transport, press Play, then click at the start of a different bar on the timeline. To enable this option, select Options / Smooth seeking (seeks at end of measure). Smooth Seeking forces Reaper to wait until the end of the current bar before progressing to the next location on the timeline. To achieve this in Reaper, we'll make use of a custom Action (which we'll get to soon), and a playback feature called Smooth Seeking. Loop recorders tend to take a different approach, and only jump to the next selection when they get to the end of the current bar. By default, Reaper immediately jumps to any point within the timeline as soon as you select a new location or issue a Goto command. Now we need to change the default playback behaviour of Reaper so that it acts like a hardware loop recorder. With this setting enabled, the items on the playlist stretch to match any adjustment in the project tempo, so you can speed up or slow down the tempo and the items within the loop stay in sync with each other.
To make this happen, select File / Project Settings and set the 'Timebase for items/envelopes/markers' value to 'Beats (position, length, rate)'. Loops are based around a defined number of bars and beats, and we want Reaper to use this number as the basis for all recording and editing. Setupīefore we get started with the loop, there are several Preferences settings that need to be tweaked to make Reaper loop-friendly.
#LOOPING MACHINE FOR SINGING HOW TO#
In this article, we'll take the complex back to basics and show you how to create a loop recorder of your own in Reaper. Limited to a finite time - and, more often, a set number of bars - loop recorders have taken many forms, from the original concept based on a loop of tape, through to today's solid-state recorders full of MIDI power and flashing lights, such as the Korg Kaoss Pad or Native Instruments Maschine. One of these devices is the loop recorder. Some devices succeed in the market even though they take the opposite approach and purposely limit your ability to record and edit, focusing on fun and creativity instead of complexity. By providing us with an unlimited number of options, DAWs have made it harder than ever to escape the "just one more edit” syndrome that prevents so many recordings from making it out the door (no pun intended). Since the advent of digital audio recording, recorders and editors have grown in power and functionality, and yet, with all of this power at our disposal, it seems as hard today as it was 10 years ago to focus our creativity. Build your own loop recorder in Reaper and test the limits of your creativity.