ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. Welcome to Gearwire.Com, series of educational vides on the Cockos REAPER digital audio workstation product. Today we’re going to be taking a look at a couple of different features. First off the Big Clock we’re going to look at. And we’re also going to look at the Track Controls. First off, let’s take a look at the Big Clock.

To use the Big Clock, you just select View and Show Big Clock. Real easy, so let’s find it here. There we go. And of course we have a giant, gigantic clock that will increment as the track plays.

The window can be sized and moved at will which is nice. The -- you can also press Alt-C to toggle on and off the display of Big Clock. So it’s, yes the results see right there. And then of course we’ll clearly display the current position of the edit cursor. That’s what, that’s the actual value that’s present in the Big Clock.

Also, right-clicking over the Big Clock will give you some more features. You can tell it to be docked in the docker if you want. You can un-dock it. You can use the, set the ruler time unit, excuse me rather you can set the time unit that the clock represents by either selecting with ruler that’s been set out here or you could pick second samples, hour, minutes, etc., or just close the Big Clock. Let’s close up the. There we go

Now let’s take a look at Track Controls. If you play this project, excuse me, if you play this project you can see that exactly the same sound is coming out of both speakers. Their different instruments and vocals are all competing together, with each other for the same acoustic space. And the reason this is because no adjustments have been made to the volume or pan controls for these tracks. The larger fader to the left here is used to adjust the track’s volume. The smaller one to the right is used to adjust the track’s panning, and that of course send some of the signals more to the left or to the right speaker as preferred. And to adjust these or any other faders in REAPER, you can use any of the following methods. You can click and hold down the left mouse button over the fader and then drag in the direction that you’re looking to go, releasing the mouse when you’re finished. Or you could hover your mouse over the fader and use the scroll wheel simply to adjust the level down and up. This is without clicking and is a little more tactile, kind of fun. You could also click on the fader and then use Ctrl-Down and Ctrl-Up to adjust the level down or up.

Now, to check out possible changes or to audition them, you want to hold down the Alt key while dragging the fader with the mouse. When you release the mouse, it will return to its original position. This can be useful when you raise the volume momentarily, just to listen to something and then pop it back. So let’s give that a try here. We already increased the level of the volume on the vocals.

[ROB WARMOWSKI ADJUSTING LEVELS OF TRACKS ON A PROJECT IN COCKOS REAPER]

And when I let go right there, it just popped right back to the level that it was at without me having to go hunt it and find the actual value which is very nice. That’s something that you end up doing a lot in a lot of different software.

To perform the same operation on more than one track, if you hold down the Ctrl key while you click on the Track Control panel or Track Number for each track, and then release the Ctrl key and then any fader or other movement will be applied to all the selected tracks. So let’s give that a try. We’ll be playing, hit Ctrl and click.

[ROB WARMOWSKI ADJUSTING LEVELS OF TRACKS ON A PROJECT IN COCKOS REAPER]

Let’s try that again. Let’s try that again.

Oh, there you go. If you click Ctrl and then select extra tracks, that’s when the faders will follow each other. So clicking is normally just clicking once down on a track will select a single track. But holding down Ctrl, clicking another track will then link these two.

So that’s a few of the features in the Track Controls within REAPER. Keep your eyes on Gearwire.Com in the future for more cool videos on different software. Thanks for watching.