At first glance, REAPER's MIDI Editor 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 MIDI composition.
This is not a comprehensive manual. Rather, this is a “quick-start” guide meant to help you get REAPER's MIDI Editor working smoothly and efficiently as fast as possible.
Last updated:
March 25th, 2025
REAPER version 7.35
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 Actions List, MIDI Items, the Arrange View, the Preferences window, and Docking are.
However, 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, quantizing, etc.
If you tend to work with lots of tracks that contain MIDI (such as in virtual orchestration) then 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.
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.
(There is also 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 you don't need to worry 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 considers the MIDI Editor a floating window that you need to close manually. That's pretty cumbersome, so instead we'll set up a single shortcut to toggle showing and hiding the MIDI Editor (the same way the Mixer works).
- Find the “View: Toggle show MIDI Editor windows” action in the Main action list and assign it to a keyboard shortcut.
- Find the “View: Toggle show MIDI Editor windows” action in the MIDI Editor action list and assign it to the same shortcut.
Now that shortcut will open and close the MIDI Editor regardless of where the current window focus is. Note that in order for the shortcut to work, you'll need to have opened the MIDI Editor in the first place (i.e. double-clicked on a MIDI Item).
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. To help keep track of which mode you're in, assign this toggle to a double-wide text button on your MIDI Toolbar, like so:
Conclusion
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.
If you want to take it a step further and expand REAPER's native MIDI editing functionality with very useful and powerful scripts, I've created a four-part guide to help you do just that:
Advanced MIDI Editing in REAPER, Part 1 - Script Installation/Set-Up
Advanced MIDI Editing in REAPER, Part 2 - Editing Tools
Advanced MIDI Editing in REAPER, Part 3 - Zoom Control
Advanced MIDI Editing in REAPER, Part 4 - CC Lane Management
The theme I'm using in the screenshots and GIFs is the Reapertips Theme
Appendix - Explanation of Preference Settings
- Setting this to “per project” ensures that REAPER only uses one MIDI Editor window for all MIDI in the 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 than track-by-track.
- 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, adding items to the selection (shift+left click by default) adds those items to the MIDI Editor as secondary items.
- Checking this box ensures that any MIDI Item we’ve selected is also editable. However, keep reading…
- 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 overrides setting #5 and thus 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 that's visible also becomes editable.