Contents:
•
Introduction
•
Plugging In and Setting Up Soundcard
•
Installing VST Effects and Loading Them Into Reaper
•
Setting up ASIO Drivers
•
Setting Up Live Input/Effects Monitoring
Introduction
This lesson will cover the basics of setting up the recording program
Reaper. As well as how to use Reaper as a guitar effects processor in realtime. In other words, you can plug your guitar into your computer and hear the effects in Reaper 'live' as you are playing just like you would if you plugged into a guitar pedal or effects unit.
Reaper costs $60 for a non-commercial license (you are not making money using Reaper), which is a steal for what this program can do. $60 will barely get you a single cheap fuzz distortion pedal, let alone a nearly infinite number of effects when used with the many free effect plugins that are available.
A list of free effect plugins that I have used are listed
HERE.
Plugging In and Setting Up Soundcard
If you are plugging your guitar straight into your soundcard (without a mixer or anything inbetween your guitar and soundcard) then you will still want to plug your guitar into the "line in" on your soundcard instead of the mic input (for those using stock soundcards), since your guitar puts out more signal than a microphone it should work fine. The mic preamps those cards aren't very good and are meant for those cheap PC mics, so try to avoid them when using for anything that is music/recording related.
For those using a standard PC soundcard: See the tutorial on using the standard sound card mixer window located HERE.
For those using a multiple input recording soundcard: Open the mixer for your soundcard and press the mute button for the channel that you are going to be using. This is only for playback (not recording) so you will not actually be muting the input and the signal will be heard through Kristal. Because you can hear your guitar through your soundcard without Kristal even being open, if you don't mute the playback for that channel, you will hear a combination of the dry and wet signals when you monitor your effects through Kristal. Therefore, you want to mute the dry signal.
There should be a way to adjust the input volume on your soundcard and I have found that the Boogex works best if you have a very low input volume, so I probably wouldn't go up very far. So after you get everything setup try adjusting the sliders while you are playing to get the best tones