Programming MIDI drums in REAPER

[einride]

Hey all,

I'm trying to move away from Cubase SX2 (yes, I'm running SX2 in the year 2012 ) to REAPER, but I'm having troubles with some of the new workflow.

Case in point: in Cubase, if I have a MIDI track and want to insert for instance a bunch of eighth notes of hi-hat, I can just pick a 1/8 grid and click and hold my mouse button while dragging to the right. Want a snare beat on every 1/2 note, same thing. It's become second nature at this point; I can have a basic drum pattern going in 30 seconds, easy as pie.

Now, in REAPER, as far as I can tell, you have to double-click every note you want to insert? Is this truly the intended way of doing things? I tried searching the REAPER forums but found nothing that helped. I've been shift- ctrl- and alt-clicking everywhere, but no luck. There has to be a smoother, faster way to insert MIDI notes.

Any help or tips on a fast workflow for doing this?

 

[Terminus]

Yeah pretty much double click. I think it's easy but it is different than Cubase. You may be able to create some kind of macro key combo to do it in one keystroke.

 

[Damian B]

If I recall you can hit the "insert" key and Reaper will put a midi note where the mouse cursor is. Programming midi in Reaper sucks.

 

[Mutant]

Yep.

Just hold down insert and drag your mouse and voila

 

[chrism]

I use reaper to program drums and I don't find it too difficult. I'm not sure how it compares to Cubase though. The setup I have is click for note location, drag for duration, shift+scroll wheel for velocity. I'm not sure if those are the default settings or maybe I customized it a while ago but I find it pretty straightforward and it doesn't take long at all.

 

[006]

Still prefer the Cubase Drum Editor over anything else in any other DAW.

 

[einride]

Still prefer the Cubase Drum Editor over anything else in any other DAW.

I agree! Sometimes it really shows that Steinberg has experience with MIDI sequencing going back to 1989, all the other DAWs I've tried still have a bunch of stuff to learn from them in this area REAPER seems to have mostly copied their approach (the MIDI editor window looks suspiciously similar, with the diamond markers changing color with velocity, the bar-graph lanes down below and all that) but in some subtle ways it's a little bit more awkward to use, I find...

However: Terminus' suggestion about macros led me into REAPER's "Actions" menu, and from there I could assign a keyboard key to change the default action left mouse drag to "paint notes". That works pretty much like in Cubase, with a few quirks, such as the first note in the region not being paintable, apparently?

Anyway, thanks! I think this is workable now.