At first glance, REAPER's MIDI Editing capabilities may seem like a bare-bones, disorganized mess compared to other DAWs. This leads many to prematurely conclude that REAPER isn’t a good choice for those that work mainly with MIDI.
On the contrary, with some customization, the MIDI Editor can easily be transformed into a very powerful and flexible tool that will work perfectly well for those who compose for games, film, etc. (or those who just want to make it easier to use).
I've written this guide not as a comprehensive manual, but rather a “quick-start” type of guide meant to help any and all get REAPER's MIDI Editor working smoothly and efficiently as fast as possible.
This guide is current as of:
December 15th, 2023
REAPER version 7.07
Preliminary Info
This guide is written for those who have a general understanding of REAPER’s basic functionality but are either frustrated with the MIDI Editor or haven’t yet delved into its settings. Therefore, for the sake of brevity, I will assume that you know the program’s core functionality as well as what the Action List, MIDI Items, the Arrange View, the Preferences window, and Docking are.
That said, one particular concept does need additional explanation before proceeding: active and secondary MIDI items. These are identifiers that REAPER’s MIDI Editor uses to determine what is visible and/or editable within the piano roll. We’ll be setting things up so that the following is true:
- Active MIDI Items are both visible and editable in the piano roll. REAPER indicates this by drawing the MIDI notes/CC data as opaque. You can think of this as the MIDI Editor’s “focus”.
- Secondary MIDI Items - if any - are visible but not editable in the piano roll. REAPER indicates this by drawing the MIDI notes/CC data as translucent. Later on, we will be setting up the ability to toggle whether or not secondary items are editable.
A QUICK DEMONSTRATION
The out-of-the-box MIDI Editor settings are not optimally configured for the kind of workflow we want. Instead, we want something like the following:
In the above configuration, the following behaviors apply:
- The MIDI Editor is a single docked or floating window that serves to view and edit all MIDI Items across the entire project.
- Only MIDI Items that are selected in the Arrange View are visible in the MIDI Editor.
- The first item that is selected in the Arrange View is designated by REAPER as the active item.
- Additional items that are added to the selection in the Arrange View are designated as secondary items.
- Shortcuts allow you to switch which item is active within the MIDI editor. This allows editing of single items while being able to visualize other elements of the project within the piano roll as needed.
- The editability of secondary item’s notes and CC data can be toggled on and off within the MIDI editor. This allows for efficient batch editing across multiple tracks and works with things like humanization, quantization, articulation assignment (via Reaticulate), etc.
If you've ever worked with high MIDI track counts - especially in the context of large-scale ensemble projects - you can probably see how this configuration of the MIDI Editor is much more intuitive and efficient than the default behavior.
So, let's set it up!
Setting Essential Preferences
Open the Preferences window and navigate to Editing Behavior->MIDI Editor. Refer to the image below:
- Make sure all the settings within this red box are exactly as they are in the image. The wording and logic behind these settings can get confusing, so I’ve opted for the “just get on with it” approach here. If you want to know the reasoning behind this set-up and why it works the way it does, I’ve provided a more detailed description in an appendix at the end of this guide.
- This setting determines the opacity of the notes/CC data that belong to non-editable secondary items. 1 is the most translucent, 3 is the most opaque. Experiment with this setting until you find what looks best to you.
- This is where you set a custom color map file if you want to use one. Color map files determine how notes appear in the piano roll and using custom color maps can aid in visibility, depending on what you’ve set #2 to as well as what theme you’re using. Check out https://www.reapertips.com/freebies/midi-colormaps for custom maps and/or directions on how to make your own.
Before moving on to the next section, one more preference needs to be set. Open the MIDI Editor. If the Editor is docked, right click right above the piano keys to open the MIDI Editor Menu. If the Editor is floating, you can find the menu at the top of the window.
Navigate to “Options->CC events in multiple media items” and make sure “Draw and edit on all tracks” is checked, like so:
As the name of the setting suggests, turning this on ensures that we’ll be able to draw and edit CC lane data across multiple tracks when secondary items' editability is enabled.
(NOTE: There is one more setting you should be aware of. Open the MIDI Editor Menu and navigate to View->Piano roll timebase. If this is set to “Source Beats”, you will not be able to view or edit multiple tracks at once. The other three options will work just fine. Switching between any of them and “Source Beats” will not break anything, so no need to worry about that if you want to use that option at any point.)
Setting up Essential Actions
Now that we’ve set up the preferences, it’s time to set up a few essential actions.
OPENING/CLOSING THE MIDI EDITOR
By default, REAPER will open any given MIDI Item in the MIDI Editor if you double click on it. That’s fine, but it doesn’t help us efficiently close the editor once it’s open. So, we want the MIDI Editor to open and close with the same keystroke. The two most efficient ways I’ve found to do this (without using custom actions or scripts) are as follows:
Method One:
- Find the “Item: Open in Built-In MIDI Editor” action in the Main Action List. Assign it to whatever key works for you.
- Find the “View: Toggle show MIDI Editor windows” action in the MIDI Editor Action List. Assign it to the same key as above.
If you select one or more MIDI Items and press the shortcut, it will open those items in the MIDI Editor. When the MIDI Editor is in focus, pressing that same key will close the MIDI Editor. The potential downside of this method is that you cannot close the editor with the shortcut if it’s not in focus or no items are selected.
Method Two:
- Find the “View: Toggle show MIDI Editor windows” action in the Main Action List. Assign it to whatever key works for you.
- Find the same action as above, but in the MIDI Editor Action List. Assign it to the same key.
The shortcut will now open or close the MIDI Editor regardless of whether or not any given item is selected, making it a true toggle. The potential downside is that it won’t work until you’ve double clicked a MIDI Item to begin with (although you only have to do this once at the beginning of a session)
In my experience, Method One works best when the MIDI Editor is used as a floating window, while Method Two works best with the MIDI Editor docked. As always with REAPER, experiment and see what works best for you!
SWITCHING ACTIVE MIDI ITEMS
In any given selection of MIDI Items, we want to be able to switch between the active item (or “focus”) at the press of a button, like so:
To configure this behavior, assign the following MIDI Editor actions…
- “Activate previous visible MIDI item”
- “Activate next visible MIDI item”
…to whatever makes sense for you. I’ve bound mine to the “forward” and “back” buttons on my mouse, respectively.
TOGGLING MULTI-TRACK NOTE/CC EDITING
We want to be able to toggle the ability to select MIDI items across tracks and edit every selection at the same time (as opposed to just the active selection), like so:
We also want to be able to toggle the ability to draw and edit the CC lanes for all selected tracks at the same time, like so:
If we’ve set all the preferences as shown in the previous section, then it’s as simple as the following:
- Find the “Options: Avoid automatically setting MIDI items from other tracks editable” action in the MIDI Editor Action List.
- Assign that action to a toolbar button, a keyboard shortcut, or both.
You might recognize this setting from the preferences we set earlier. In doing the above, we’ve essentially created a toggle between a “Single Track Edit” mode and a “Multi Track Edit” mode, with “Single Track Edit” being the default. I’ve assigned this toggle to a double-wide text button on my MIDI Toolbar, like so:
(NOTE: When this “multi-track edit” mode is enabled, you will be able to draw and edit across all selected item’s CC lanes, but you will not be able to insert points across tracks. As far as I know, there is no way to do so. If I make a feature request for this functionality on the REAPER forums, I will link to it here.)
Final Thoughts
Now that all the essentials for the workflow are set up, you’ve got a solid foundation to customize to your heart’s content until you’ve arrived at your personal, ideal way of using the MIDI Editor.
I hope this guide was of use to you. If you have any questions, suggestions, etc. then don’t hesitate to leave a comment below. I will answer or respond to the best of my ability.
Cheers!
- Sam
Appendix - Explanation of Preference Settings
- Setting this to “per project” ensures that REAPER only uses one MIDI Editor window for all MIDI in the entire project.
- This setting defines what happens when the action “open items in built-in MIDI editor” is run. Setting this to “Open all selected MIDI items” ensures that - if we use that action - it will only open the MIDI items that we’ve selected. This allows us to be in complete control of what we’re seeing and editing in the MIDI Editor.
- Checking this box allows us to switch the active MIDI Item (the “focus” of the editor”) by clicking on items in the Arrange view. If we have the MIDI Editor docked, this is a very intuitive way of working. Since the dropdown box is set to “Media Item”, we can also work item-by-item which allows us more precise control over what we're working on.
- Checking this box ensures that the only MIDI Items we see in the MIDI Editor are the ones we’ve selected in the Arrange View. In conjunction with setting #3, we can now control both the active item and overall visibility with a few clicks. Additionally, when this box is checked, shift-clicking items in the Arrange View (adding to the selection) adds those items as secondary items.
- Checking this box ensures that any MIDI Item we’ve selected is also editable. However, keep reading…
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If everything else is set as above, this confusingly worded setting becomes a toggle between single and multi-track editing. Here’s how:
- If this setting is ON, REAPER essentially overrides the above setting #5 and disables the ability to edit secondary items on other tracks.
- If this setting OFF, REAPER does not override any of the above settings. Therefore, because we’ve checked “Selection is linked to editability”, everything we can see now becomes editable.