The YouTube channel I put it continues to be an amazing source of questions from our (hopefully) loyal readers. I got a few questions from user stacksmwa about some pretty general Reaper production questions. Since there’s a few, I’ll break them down question by question over my next series of posts.

Stacks gave me a scenario: he has a four bar loop with eight snare hits. He wants to turn those eight seperate hits into, from what I can tell, one track. A lot of people do this because, for one, its just easier to copy and paste eight bar sections than it is to cut and a snare/kick hit every bar or 1/2 bar. This is pretty simple, but its not really called consolidation in Reaper, its called “rendering.”

I created a scenario just like Stacks’:

 

Even though you can’t see bars two and four, they’re there. I just have the camera zoomed out a bit so these images aren’t hilariously huge. But, as you can see, theres two snare hits per bar and four bars. Now the next thing you need to do before you actually render is select your four bar loop. It should look like this when its all selected:

Time to render! In Reaper (unlike in Pro Tools), you have the choice to render your track into a separate stem (either stereo or mono) and mute the original. Since we’re doing this to a snare, we’ll render it into a mono stem and mute the original.

Keep your loop selected and go to Track -> Render selected tracks to mono stem tracks (and mute originals). Your arrange window should look similar to this now:

Now, instead of copying and pasting individual snare/kick hits, you can just copy and paste the entire four bar loop. You can do this with loops of any size, however.

I’ll be tackling more questions in the coming days so stay tuned!