Time for more . . . REAPER: SHARING IS CARING

While learning Reaper I realized that there was a little bit of Logic "looped regions" workflow that I had become quite dependent on, but a similar workflow in Reaper seemed near impossible. Luckily Embass on the Reaper forums came to the rescue.

As seen below, in Logic when you have a region/item and that is looped, you can still grab the right edge of the "1st" region/item and drag it to change its length, and when you do this all the following looped/pooled items reciprocate their individual length, while maintaining the total length of the looped/pooled item/region. I often like to change the looped length of a percussion loop to create rhythms whose patterns weave in and out of each other. I'll often change a 4 bar loop pattern to a 3 bar pattern . . . but when that doesn't sound good I want a quick and easy way to change it back.



So in this example ↑ (discussing the blue audio track) I have a 4 bar item that I'm going to loop three times beyond "the original". Now it's a 16 bar item that's 4X the length of the original item. Next I decide that I want to change the length of my item (and all of its loops that follow) to 3 bars instead of 4. In Logic I can simply grab the bottom right corner of the original item and reduce its length with a drag. All the following loops of that item will follow suit and decrease in length to 3 bars, and the total length of all the loops will still remain 16 bars. My understanding was that in Reaper the only way to accomplish this would be to grab the far right edge of all my looped/pooled items and drag them to the left until my original item is down to 3 bars in length, then I'd have to glue the item as a new item that's 3 bars long, and then re-drag the loops that follow it back to the desired total length of 16 bars. A couple extra steps - but not a huge deal. But later I want to extend that original item (and its subsequent loops) back to its original 4 bars again. In Logic I'd just grab that original item's bottom-right corner again and drag it back to 4 bars and voila all the loops follow suit. Again accomplished with one click+drag action. In Reaper however my original 4 bar item is gone from my Arrange Area and I can't drag my 3 bar item to expand it back to 4 bars because it was glued as 3 bars . . . The only way I could think to go back to my 4 bar item and recreate those three loops of 4 bars each, would be to hunt down that original 4 bar item and drag it back into Reaper.

So Embass created a custom script to replicate this workflow. Basically, with your item selected, you place the edit cursor anywhere in your item where you want to begin looping from, execute the custom action, and the following pooled items will reciprocate the length change and continue looping to the same total duration as they were before you changed the individual loop length. The huge genius of this is that it works not only when you're making the loop lengths shorter, but also longer!

You can see the fab workflow and steps necessary to create the custom action in his gif:


He also provided these handy workflow tips that allow you to see the entire duration of the item that's available to you for looping, laid over the item you're working with so you can see exactly where in the waveform you're making edit choices. The first of these uses a Dummy Track and the second uses a Duplicate Active Take. I prefer the latter choice, but they both work just fine.

Dummy Track:


Duplicate Active Take:


All thanks to Embass.
Enjoy!