![]() ![]() Start with a new, empty track immediately above your existing tracks, name it ‘Guide Backing’ or some such, then click the folder icon at the bottom right of the track’s TCP panel. ![]() That way, I can mute my original tracks and leave them untouched while I work on the reverse overdubs. I like to start by bouncing my backing tracks to a new temporary stereo mix. Here’s a reversed guide backing track, plus six vocal overdubs, all trimmed perfectly to the selection boundaries and ready to reverse and recombine with the session. The key is to ensure that your reference tracks remain in tight alignment with your newly recorded material as you flip their playback direction back and forth, and the simplest way to do that is to ensure that their start and finish times are perfectly aligned. But with just a little messing around you can get the same thing out of Reaper. Simply flipping the playback direction in a DAW is a lot easier, but you do lose those important contextual cues. This allowed the musicians to hear the temporarily reversed backing tracks while laying down their part, making it much simpler to get a musically coherent performance. It was all very cumbersome! The great advantage, though, was that any existing recorded tracks were always perfectly aligned with your backwards recording. This would also invert the track order, so you’d have to re-patch your mixer, and then be very careful that you recorded on the correct track. Back in the tape days, this trick was much more difficult to achieve: we actually had to physically swap the reels of tape from one side of the machine to the other, so that the tape would run in the opposite direction across the heads. There’s also a ‘Toggle Take Reverse’ command in the action list, so you can map it to a single keystroke if you like. In Reaper it can even be done non-destructively - just right click on an item and select ‘Item Settings’ then ‘Reverse Active Take’. Reverse TrackingĭAW software has spoiled us a bit for basic reverse audio effects, enabling us to flip the playback direction of a piece of audio with a single command. You can see this process in action in Video 1. So if you’re getting into varispeed recording it’s best to either bounce your MIDI tracks to audio, or use Reaper’s freeze function. The playback speed of your virtual instrument tracks will change, but the pitch won’t modulate. Keep in mind, though, that varispeed doesn’t work in quite the same way for MIDI tracks. It’s a very easy technique to reproduce in Reaper: the varispeed control is sitting right there on the transport bar, and it really is as simple as adjusting it up or down, arming a track and recording as normal, before resetting the playrate to the default for playback. ![]() The late Sir George Martin famously played an acoustic piano part with the tape running at half speed, resulting in a tinny, harpsichord-like timbre when played back at the normal rate in the finished mix. Another example is the instrumental bridge to The Beatles’ ‘In My Life’, from the 1965 album Rubber Soul. ![]() For example, recording something at a lower speed then playing it back at the standard speed would yield a high-pitched, squeaky tone, perhaps most famously exemplified by the Chipmunks albums, from the late ’50s onwards. This had very practical uses (I remember varispeed saving the day once when I had to record an acoustic piano that had been tuned a quarter-note flat), but it could also be used to create interesting timbral effects. Varispeed Recordingĭecent open-reel tape machines had a varispeed control, which would modulate the rate at which the tape travelled across the heads. I’ve also created a few videos to help you get a better feel for each example. Thankfully, Reaper allows you to replicate them all fairly effectively, and in this month’s column I’ll take you through a few tricks, explain how we did them back in the dark ages, and how to achieve the same thing in Reaper. While it’s not something I feel huge nostalgia for - computer-based recording has been a revelation in terms of efficiency and workflow - I still like to employ a few creative techniques from those days. I’m probably among the last generation of people who learned to record on open-reel tape. How to recreate open-reel tape trickery in Reaper. Setting the folder track record mode, ready to bounce down a guide track to record the reverse recordings against. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |