Using Reaper as a live sequencer

[Nick from Cinic]

Hi. I'm new to Reaper and I'm using it as a sequencer for my band. So I'm putting a click track in there and routing it to the drummer's headphones, plus I'm adding some synths and various sounds that we can't recreate live and routing that to the desk and this all works fine in rehearsals.

We're about to take this on the road and what worries me is the time between the songs so I have a couple of questions:

Does anyone else use Reaper as a sequencer, or is it supposed to be just for recording/mixing etc in a studio environment?

Secondly, is there a very quick way of loading up projects by either assigning a particular key on the keyboard, or better still using some kind of midi controller where pressing an assigned button will load a specific project.

Its currently taking 30 to 40 seconds between the end of one song and the start of the next one which isn't too bad (assuming we will be getting some sort of applause after each song) but I'm getting bogged down with everything else that's going on and I need this part of the process to be quick, easy and reliable.

Thanks

Nick from Cinic
www.cinic.co.uk

[Fergler]

I would love to recommend it but unfortunately I cannot. There are too many ways to accidentally create stuck notes in the MIDI chain, via various oversights, bugs, whathaveyou in the way.

[BenK-msx]

Look into Project tabs, and associated actions in the actions list.

Should help.

[Win Conway]

I have used it live a lot, project tabs and PIPs helped a lot, however once we started using a lot more MIDI it got relagated back to the studio in favour of hardware sequencing.

[ashcat_lt]

I highly recommend that you render the things to wav or even high bitrate mp3 and load it onto your mobile device of choice. Pan the click one way and everything else the other. Make a playlist to match your setlist for the gig, and have somebody dedicated to starting and stopping and making sure it's actually playing the right song. Put it in Airplane Mode. Most importantly: Turn off "shake to shuffle"!!! I learned that one the hard way.

Edit - To be clear, my suggestion isn't about not trusting Reaper. I run Reaper live for my band, but we use amp sims and other effects on our guitars and have a number of MIDI things reacting in real time to our performance. You just want to play some static backing tracks, and Reaper is overkill for that.

[dub tree]

I highly recommend that you render the things to wav or even high bitrate mp3 and load it onto your mobile device of choice. Pan the click one way and everything else the other. Make a playlist to match your setlist for the gig, and have somebody dedicated to starting and stopping and making sure it's actually playing the right song. Put it in Airplane Mode. Most importantly: Turn off "shake to shuffle"!!! I learned that one the hard way.

Pretty solid advice. So many little things can be overlooked. I've used Reaper live on stage a handful of times, and sometimes the tiniest little thing can go wrong; in a studio environment, it might take 20 seconds or less to iron out the glitch, but 20 seconds seems WAAAAAY longer when you're on stage in front of an audience.

Now don't get me wrong, I've had some really great gigs using some weird, complex Reaper setups, but i've also had at least one complete disaster that was caused by some randomly occurring buffer underruns. In the studio, that's an easy fix; just stop the playback, open up preferences to 'reset' the audio interface, and you're done. But you can't exactly do that in the middle of a song.

Murphy's Law, and "keep it simple, stupid," apply here.

[Nick from Cinic]

Thank you all for your advice. I'm leaning towards the MP3s suggestion although one of our tracks uses the tempo setting to control a MicroKorg arpeggiator so I'm not sure how to deal with that one.
Cheers.

[Mink99]

I am thinking of that :

http://www.thomann.de/de/cymatic_audio_live_recorder_lr_16.htm

[ashcat_lt]

^^^That ain't English, but it looks like overkill to me. The phone I'm typing this on would do it. Is there not one person in your hand with such a device?

For the Korg thing, is that actually being played in realtime by a real person? Does it need to be?