ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. This is Gearwire’s series of education videos exploring the features of the REAPER digital audio workstation from the Cockos Corporation. This video is looking at the routing, audio routing features that are present in REAPER. Routing is of course the art and science of getting your audio from and to wherever you happen to need it to get from and to. And one of the greatest advantages of using a digital audio workstation as opposed to a hardware console is that the opportunities to send audio hither and yond are much greater inside a digital environment than they are in a hardware environment.

So, we’re going to take a look at just the beginnings of some of these features. We’re going to take a look at this project that we have loaded up here. This is just a small rock project. It’s got some drums here on channels 1 and 2, it’s got some guitar on channel 3, and some distorted bass on channel 4. So let’s see what we got here

[ROB WARMOWSKI PLAYING A PROJECT ON COCKOS REAPER]

Now, one of the things that we might want to do is we might want to actually send the bass over to the drums for processing in place. There are some situations where you’d want to do this. If you’d want to experiment with the mix and send the bass into a drum channel and then compress of them both of them together and use that as your final print, you may end up with a better sound. So, in order to actually get this bass here on channel 4 into channel 1, what we do is select the I/O button on the bass channel, which is right here. The I/O buttons are all present on every channel. We select the I/O button, and we can see here that there’s a series of options that we can take. One of which is for MIDI hardware. This is not what we want, but you can send MIDI hardware -- you can send output from any of your channels to any MIDI hardware that you have. You can send back to MIDI channels inside of Reaper. You can also receive any audio from any channel to any channel, but we’re going to actually send the bass up to the drums channel here.

So under sends, we’re going to add a new send, and we’re going to say send this bass to channel 1, which is named [PH] 02 Hard Groove [INDISCERNIBLE].

Now, we’ve done this and what has happened is that the bass has actually increased in volume a little bit to our main monitor because there’s actually we’re hearing the channels twice, one is in its original channel and one’s up here in channel 1. We can change the fader addition here that is thrown up on the send and reduce the bass that way. Actually, let’s spell out really what’s going on by soloing the drum track that we just sent the bass track to.

Now, we can hear the drums and the bass together, and we can hear the relative levels of the send if we actually play with the fader, the send fader right here. Another great thing about Reaper is not only is all this stuff wide open and obvious to you but it’s also pretty flexible. I can choose whether the send shows up in the track as post fader or post effects or pre effects, which is great for situations where you want to have pre effects. Also, the other option here is that you can send any audio that’s rolling on any channel to any hardware output that is present in your setup, and right here we just have a couple because I’m running on a fairly modest system here.

So, that’s just some of what REAPER can do in terms of routing. You can watch further REAPER videos that we produce here at Gearwire for more information about how to master the routing effects in REAPER. Thanks for watching. This has been a Gearwire.Com video.