Reaper for live use

[Tycho]

Talked a little bit about using Reaper live with VDMX over here: http://blog.iso50.com/23878/some-tycho-news (some more info in comments)

Thanks to everyone here on the forums for helping me out with getting Reaper tweaked for live use, been working flawlessly in rehearsals.

[PitchSlap]

How did the show go?

[Tycho]

Thanks for reminding me, totally forgot to post the results. The show went great and Reaper did not disappoint.

I ran an early Macbook Pro (the first generation of unibody) and a newer unibody MBP, both with SSDs. The older MBP ran Reaper Alpha 60 (I think?) x32 which handled all audio and then kicked out midi to the newer MBP which was running VDMX for visuals.

The audio interface was a MOTU 828MK2. We ran a bass, elec guitar, acoustic guitar, SPD drum pad, and two synths through the inputs and effected them live with various VSTs (toraverb, epicverb, reacomp, SSL-eq, etc..). This was all re-routed to different monitors and to the house. We had a click track running to everyone's monitors and separate vocal cues for the drummer, bassist and keys as well. Reaper ran at around 38-40% cpu usage and never had a hiccup. The routing / sends were pretty complex with all that stuff going on so I was pretty surprised how well it held up.

only one small thing, I had a few issues with SWS marker actions and transport not starting properly or going back to the previous marker after hitting a stop marker. Just had to hit pause twice though so no big deal. In the future I will probably just set it up so that transport never stops and there are gaps for improv stuff at starts and ends of songs and then just hit next marker on the foot pedal to get to the start of the click-locked portions.

All in all everything worked out better than expected and I will be using Reaper going forward for all live shows. Coming from Ableton it was so refreshing to be able to do complex edits directly to the live set in Reaper. Before I would have to do all the editing in Sonar (previously) or Reaper and then import it into Ableton because seriously, I have no clue how to get even the simplest stuff in Ableton done. I know it's not really supposed to be a traditional daw, but man, that app is a mess for real tracking / sequencing.

So yeah, I give it a 10/10 and can fully recommend Reaper for live use. It's not going to replace Ableton if you're doing a bunch of looping stuff, but I didn't use it that way to begin with so not a big deal.

Side note, I just played a laptop set (without the band) in Brooklyn last weekend and was able to run Reaper and VDMX on the same machine (since I didn't need to do as much live input effecting) and it worked out great.

[Justin]

Very cool, I enjoyed the music of the video too.. Let me know when you play another show in NYC.

Oh also, can we use this quote?

"[I] can’t recommend Reaper enough. It’s like using MS Paint your whole design career and then one day you discover Photoshop."

[moliere]

awesome setup. Once I get my new gear arrangement solid with our new live shows, I'm going to venture into triggering DMX for the lights, and eventually get into some synced video stuff like this. big learning curve for me though getting into video.

[Tycho]

Justin-
Of course, that statement gets truer every day for me (esp. since the new render actions). for sure will let you know about the next show, I thought you were here in sf though?

Moiere-
that's next for me too, going to get some LED stuff integrated with the visuals for the tour so got a lot of research to do.

couple videos of the show, the lighting at the independent is excellent to begin with so it really enhanced the visuals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvy0vGzPNFs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qE-ePDudHY

[dub3000]

sounds awesome, great track on that link.

[Brennan]

Oh man, that's my dream! To play the Independent with a REAPER-powered live setup! Good job!