Your Favorite DAW Tips and Tricks

[MindMunch]

I know tons of tricks on Reaper, but I wouldn´t know which one is obvious.

Anyway, one thing that helps me a lot is to create buttons on the MIDI editor to set the selected notes to custom velocity values. This way I can make a button for each intensity of my drum sampler. It becomes easy to choose how hard I want each hit to be without having to guess or memorize the velocity range/region that triggers each sample intensity.

While there are no actions that allows you to set the an exact velocity value, there are actions to 'add 1', 'add 10', 'remove 1' and 'remove 10' from the velocity. So I create a new action where I stack 13 "remove 10" actions (the max velocity is 127, so stacking 13 'remove 10' actions assures me that the value goes to 0) and then add as many "add 10" and/or "add 1" I need to reach the velocity value I want for the button.

 

[AboutBlank]

Cubase:
instead of pressing "G" and "H"(germany?!) for zooming in and out just press STRG and zoom with the mouse-wheel.
Nice!

 

[AudioGeekZine]

Cubase:
instead of pressing "G" and "H"(germany?!) for zooming in and out just press STURGIS and you have TACT.
Nice!

Don't give out the secret dude

 

[El_Gato]

I use Reaper on a Mac... so my favorite tip is to SAVE and do it OFTEN! It's so unstable on Mac it's retarded.

Edit:
Oh, and for any newbies that want to learn great tips and tricks for whatever DAW they're using, I would HIGHLY recommend these videos...
http://www.groove3.com/str/
The $30 month pass or whatever is a great deal. Just get a pen and paper and take notes and prepare to be blown... away that is.

Using Reaper on a Mac for a couple of months and not a single problem so far. What OSX version are you using? You can set autosave to the time you may need, 3 minutes here.

I got the 30-day free pass a month ago for the groove3 vids. Really useful as I am a Reaper noob. Not so much info as other DAWs, so also very useful for some of them.

 

[Shaun Werle]

I work in pro tools and I know most of the shortcuts (that i use). Nothing special, But knowing the short cut speeds up on the editing side.
But i do quick edits while tracking guitar/bass, And i am always clicking short cuts to get it done quick and keep things moving!

 

[KBMoser]

cubase 5 to copy and paste and event -

you could copy, move your tranport meter and hit paste... or

select desired events with your mouse, hold alt and click and drag to a new location, release alt... this is for severe editing.

 

[pipaguapique]

Thanx for the Command + .
that was awesome!!

pretty basics in PT, but really handy and time saving:

Command + H for healing regions

Comand + right arrrow when naming tracks to go to the next one instead of clicking the ¨next¨ button

Shift +S for soling selected tracks (weather they are gruped or not) or Shift + M to mute them

and my favorite!!

Control + Command + Click on the ¨Vol¨ text to change Waveform display to Volume

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

Just because I love retracking infinte amount of times I've set up nice macro on ´
The macro is basically: stop, return to left locator, delete marked file, record.

I have a macro in cubase that does this exact set of commands. Love it, only I made it: stop, delete, stop, record.

I also use the G and H keyboard shortcuts a lot (zoom) as well as what jeff said: dragging the playhead down and up to zoom.

Command+T (I think) for the tempo window

Disabled Z and assigned it to the above macro (the "fucked that up do again macro) so I don't accidentally while doing an undo keyboard shortcut.

Command (again I'm not at my mac I might have that button wrong) + C and V for copy paste.

Command +D for duplicating.

Command + A then hit P to set the locators around everything quickly.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

cubase 5 to copy and paste and event -

you could copy, move your tranport meter and hit paste... or

select desired events with your mouse, hold alt and click and drag to a new location, release alt... this is for severe editing.

Oh yeah use this one as well. Nice if the singer only wants to use one chorus for all the choruses in the song.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Ya know how PT can be really buggy sometimes with certain plugins? If you have a session that won't open, hold SHIFT while opening it to make all plugins inactive. Often you can re-enable all the plugins again (a row at a time by using the 3 modifier keys) and go back to working as usual.

Now if we could have a way to know which plugin is the problem that would be even better.

 

[AboutBlank]

cubase 5 to copy and paste and event -

you could copy, move your tranport meter and hit paste... or

select desired events with your mouse, hold alt and click and drag to a new location, release alt... this is for severe editing.

and STRG holding will place it exactly on the same spot as the original

 

[AudioGeekZine]

and STRG holding will place it exactly on the same spot as the original

according to google this means CTRL or Command on mac