While bringing up the best DAW is fighting words for many home recording enthusiasts and independent musicians who often argue over Pro Tools, Studio One, FL Studio, Ableton, Garage Band, and many others, Reaper has something none of the others do for the technically minded musician. The ability to practically reprogram it and even build completely original effects.
What Is Cockos Reaper?
Cockos Reaper is a digital audio workstation (DAW) that independent musicians can use to record their songs. It has multitrack capability and comes with plenty of effects to help your recording sound great. It has everything you need to make professional sound recordings right out of the box, and it’s free to try with no limitations, only requiring a small investment once you commit to using it.
What Makes Reaper So Great?
Reaper has many features that make it a contender for best DAW, and it has a strong community of supporters, but what we want to discuss right now is its openness to customization. You can change almost everything about it, from how it looks to how it operates, and for many of us, the ability to create unique effects is too good to pass up.
How Do You Create Effects In Reaper?
Reaper uses the EEL2 programming language in many areas, including its effects and video processor. It also powers the OSCII-bot, a separate program for converting between OSCII and MIDI. The language is similar to C and is not difficult to learn using the available documentation.
Is Making Effects Hard In Reaper?
Building effects in Reaper is surprisingly easy, and you can start using them immediately, with no need to compile or upload anything. You can try out your first effect in a few minutes, then spend a while learning and crafting.
What Kind of Effects Can I Make?
In short, you can make any effect you can think of.
Once you have Reaper installed, you can go into where you add effects to a track, and all of the effects that start with JS are examples of effects you can create. You can even see the code for these effects by clicking the small edit button near the top right of the panel after you add it to a track.
While making your effects would have had a bigger learning curve a short time ago, now you can use ChatGPT to make them instantly!
How Do I Make My Effect?
Decide What You Need
The first step is to decide what you need. For this example, we are building a simple gain boost because Amplitube amplifiers often sound better when you put a gain stage before them.
Open the Editor
Once you know what effect you want, open up the effect editing window so you can start inputting code. Click on add effect, and in the window that pops up, click FX at the top, then create a new JS FX instead of choosing one of the already made effects. You will need to give your new effect a name and description before a blank effect appears, and you can click on edit to open the editor.
Get Help From ChatGPT
Once you open the editor, you will see some default text responsible for the blank effect. Go over to ChatGPT and ask it to create a volume effect for Reaper using the EEL2 language, which will give you code that looks like this:
desc:Simple Volume Control
slider1:1<0,2,0.01>Volume
@init
volume = slider1;
@slider
volume = slider1;
@sample
spl0 *= volume;
spl1 *= volume;
Disclaimer – We found that ChatGPT was better at creating effects once we created a GPT with the EEL2 language uploaded. You can download the file and create your own GPT or use ours.
Test It Out
Copy and paste the Code that ChatGPT gives you over the default text. Click X at the top right to close the window, and when you do, it will ask you if you want to save it. Select yes. When the window closes, you will be able to test out your effect if there are no errors.
While Chat GPT can make creating effects fast and fun, spending some time learning the code will make it a lot easier to debug when you have a problem.
Keep following Geeksided to learn even more ways to customize your recording studio.