Lessons

Lesson Info

Click Track and Headphone Mixes

we have to make a click track because this band likes to play to a quick and be a little tighter. So let's make one more track team in sort of track down here. Let's take these tracks at a record. For now, I'm gonna use now we could use a click track up here. Where is it? The Metrodome. But what I want to do just what's more customized. And I can control where it's being sent. That person, it's on track instead. So gonna make up. And I was sold. The German wants to hear He gave me the cow bell Sandy wants to use. So I'm gonna make a custom click right here instead. So I'm gonna go to my directory and find the sound he chose. Not in there. There it is, the cow bell. We just drag this in onto that track and it sounds like this. We will put this right here and by default. When you bring something in, it puts a little fade on it like this, which would get rid of bringing like this out here. Or you can change the default in our preferences under medium defaults, see, create automatic fade i...

n and fade outs. You could turn this off and it won't do that. So if I bring this in, just depends on what you're doing. If you doing a lot of stuff, we are dragging things in your body. Want to turn that off? But where it helps is if you're splitting your items a lot, it puts a little fade in and fade out. So things sound a little smoother. It just really depends on what you wanted, uh, use it for. And that's why you change the preferences as you're doing it. So snapping has turned on so I could put this right here and we're gonna put this every quarter notes services at the court. Let's make sure this is said the corner notes as well, right on there and with duplicate. By holding down command in the Mac or controlling PC and just duplicate it like this, that's just one bar. But now we could just swept them all, copy them and paste it here and just go to do that. I was just animal together, so I'll do that and then grab them all so I have more each time. And that should be enough for this piece. So it's here that sounds with everything else in record. Vogel, which we have not named yet or given a color. So let's get a color. I like this orange color here and the cow bell. We can give a random color, too. Let's give it one random color That work for the vocal will give it a Nikon. Let's try a mike. There's a microphone here. I think I like this one. That's good enough, old timey Mike. If the cow bell I see it, we have for that that might even be accountable is a bongo his cow bell and they go look like put these oh tracks in record. So this is a good example where I could show you track grouping. So let's check that out first. Could you see right now if I do this, have to go back to each and every track, Or if I had to grab from here Teoh here now, including the folders. I really want to put the photos to record, so it's a good idea to use track groupings. Let me show you a trick Roping works. Say this. You start by opening track groups, which is under. I believe it's under so used to doing with a key command which would be shift G his track groups, but should be in the menu as well. Here we go track grouping parameters so I could see it shifty. Like I said, I use shifty all time, so I never check out to see where does in the menu. So you could do is you need to select the tracks first. We could just open it first and could see right here. Zero struck the tracks so nothing is in the group. Yet we have Group one, which we could rename if we want. I'm gonna actually rename this quarter Accord group or basic tracks and record. The reason I'm leaving that record is I'm not gonna choose all the different options. Like, for instance, if I grable the tracks, I want what should be the vocal. I'm going to select, um, holding down command or on the Mac, Or come on control on the PC. And just like all the tracks I want to the base tracks and our John tracks. And normally you think attract groups you'd select, say, volume, master volume slave and they control the volume I could do with temporary groups. But you can also do very specific things with it. That's why name that basic tracks record you can choose just a specific parameter. For instance, we're going to choose record arm. We could choose slave or master for this because when he's doing altogether so we'll choose the record. I'm slave and then close it Every time I go into record, they're all going to record together. But just the tracks we chose have to worry about selecting the tracks first Every time we go to record. Uh, it doesn't want to work, because what did I just do? Go back to shift G and take a look here to go back to selecting my tracks again? What's to record on master then and slave? I'm sorry. We should do 1/4 on master and slave. Yes, because if we did record arm slave, it's waiting for the master to control it. So we just do both for that. Normally, when you doing the track groups, you just hit all and then they all work together. So it hit all you close it. And now if you move the fader on one of these tracks, you see, all favors moved together. That's how you typically would use it. But again, for this for making of unique group, we would select all these again, and you have to select a soul. Reaper knows which tracks you're talking about, that shift g and clear them all and just used record. My master and slave close it. So now every time I recording any of the tracks, they all going to record, but not counting, obviously the folders which we didn't want to go to record and also not counting the click, which we don't want to record just like that, it makes it a lot easier to pop in and out of accord. I would think that click a little bit lower courts a little annoying. And just like that, we're ready to record. So again we'll save you should make sure missing anything else I want to show you before that to do to do recording takes well before we record takes as I mentioned before the cow bells a little annoying. So when I'm in the control room, I don't wanna hear the cow bell. I want the drama here, the cow bell. So I give him his own separate mix. Now, if you have, if you have this many inputs on your order fate audio interface, you probably have a bunch of outputs as well. And you could use every output or every extra pair of outputs a separate headphones sentence and what you want to do with that is you'd take what? See, a new track will name headphones, and we're not gonna give it a color. But we will give it an icon because it does help it to make it. We could see what's on track typing and h go down to is that listeners had phone this was it as phones. There you go. Right there. So we know this is a headphone track we could use to turn this on and off for the talent out there. But we have to do first is we have to send everything to this track and that it be ascend to the headphone output on your audio interface. So we're gonna go into our routing and right here is a master parents sent. I haven't mentioned this yet, but from most recording don't have to worry about this too much. The master parents send is gonna go out. I'll put one in two on you are going to face. And for most of us, that's what we do. And every track your opening Reaper starts off with this turned on. But for this track, we're gonna turn it off and that this way, this track is not gonna come to our speakers. In fact, if you look over here on the routing, see what's red that lets us know what this track isn't going anywhere, which is good, because we just turned it off, but we could send it somewhere else instead. So instead of going to the master parents send here, we're gonna hardware output as Ascend. And we could choose all the outputs here. This is began. Based on your set up, I'm gonna choose headphones left and right, which I named already. But again, it doesn't really matter which I'll put you choose it, but is a good idea to name them as I did on this, remember? Where is so? It's a stereo output. I'm gonna leave a post fader this way. If the person out that complains it's still too loud out there. We could always but just the level here to his head phones out there. So right now, this track is gonna go the headphones instead of going toe. What means speakers? And now there's a few different ways of doing this. To now send it to their. The hardest way it works is to just send each track by dragging and dropping it there. But that's a little bit annoying, because if the go and grab each one, so it's a good time to show you this thing called the Routing Matrix. The writing matrix is basically the heart of Reaper in terms of routing, because you can route anything from anywhere using this matrix. Just open it up. It's going to kind of messy. I'll try to make it needles. You could see what we're looking at, and it's right down here. The rounding matrix. And here are the tracks we're looking at now. She doesn't look too messy. We just want to go toe that track in this track, Okay, so if you look at it right here, Hero attracts we made. These are folder. He's our kicker or drums, Bass folder and D I and all the other tracks here. You can see they're all going to master parents. Send right here, Right here. So you could take them right out just by dragging them down neater. Or you could leave them in. Oops. You're a steady hand. Yeah. Okay, so now all these trucks are back the way they were accepted headphones Because you don't want the head from going to the minister. Parents sent. The headphones are already routed. If we can move over a little bit, be hard to see right here to the headphone output right here with headphones plugged in. But let's keep it neater for this part. So, you know, to see everything. Okay. I wanted to see. So now we could do you take all these tracks here and send them toe are headphone track, which is right here. So just drag from here all way down. Hopeful every day with a steady hand. And I did everything except for, um, headphone track What you can't do anyway, if you look at this, use X ray here. That's just prevents us from sending attract to itself. For instance, the drum track to the drum track. You wouldn't do that because you gonna feed back. So there's no way of sending a headphone track to the headphone track anyway. But now these are all sent as if you cook on them. Post fader sentence, which is good people, the volume full up. So the mix on each one of those tracks is exactly the same as the mix we have here, but it's being sent to the headphones instead. But what we can do differently, though, is just here the cow bell sent there. We could take the cow about out of the master parents send for us right here, which is the same thing is doing it right over here. Go to the routing and turning it on and off here. So now if I hit play, you could see the cowboy was going here because this track is being sent right here to the headphones I was wearing. His headphones was here in the click, but we're not here in the click. So that's the head full mix. You could set up different mixes. You can set up many of these as you want and just send each one to their own separate output where is like. So don't have the drummer have their own mix Where the quick is made louder, maybe louder. Maybe they don't want hear the vocal. Where is in the control room? I want to hear the vocal, so I'm gonna have the vocal obviously turned on. But maybe the drummer just wants to hear the click, not the other instruments. And you could simply just adjust that in his mix. You could turn off right here is the vocal You'd hold down option on the macro Ultimate PC. Click it. And now it's not going to the headphones. But we're still hearing it in the Mesta parents send, which is our control room. But what's with this back on? So we can hear it? So they're they're headphone mix is hearing everything, and we're hearing everything except the cow bell, which can get really annoying when you're working 16 hours a day. So we will say this project again. I believe we were ready to actually starting record. Did you have any questions you want to bring up before that? Sure. Okay. How do you set up que mixes for musicians? That's just keep your head. Okay. Um hi, candy. You're doing a great job of explaining complicated stuff with the amount of tracks you're using. Do you find? Do you find use track templates, A lot energy. You alter your project preferences for you start or do you use a combination of both? I always use track templates. I haven't mentioned that in here because obviously it's a quicker thing to do. OK, but what you could always do you want to mess. Anything up here is you could select. But this is This is one of the greatest things about Reaper is you can select, say all your tracks right here and you could just do a group of tracks. Let's say we just wanted the drums, and you always have. You join us at the same way. You don't even make it. Don't even make a template for your project. What you can do to you could make a ah project template and start with that, which could also do is just grab this here from these. Let's start with the drum folder. Grab these right here, go to track, save his track template. It's gonna open up and save it. We'll call it live drums which already have one here. But I just caught live drums, too. And then we just save in case I mess anything up. And then if we accidentally deleted this or starting over, you could just delete this Goto insert new go to track and track from Template Gordon When we just chose live drums, too. And boom, everything we just did it saved right there. Make sure it's still working. So all that time we just spent doing this could be completely saved. And like I said, I don't have to even do it track templates. A nice track that what's a nice but I mean project templates you could do as well, but I find track tables to be even mawr useful. I could see I just put this in the wrong spot, so I'm going to river to the last say version. But you can go recent projects according to recording, and they were back to We had Yes, OK, saying was because tractor parts are so flexible. I find it easier just to make one for dramas. Baker for base, for guitars, for background vocals and just settle up exactly how you want him and then you just got to hear to track and insert track from template. And then you just choose the tempo of the, uh, the group of tracks you just saved, and they all just pop in with the input set up with the effects set up. If his effects sends, you could say that as well. So you definitely want to track templates if you can.