Glenn Fricker is one of YouTube’s most well known audio engineers and educators, with millions and millions of views on his recording and mixing tutorials. Glenn has been professionally recording since 1997, and in 2004 he won “Album of The Year” in Unrestrained Magazine. Over the last 20 years, Glenn has worked with artists from all over the world in a variety of genres, from death metal to pop punk.
Currently residing in his second self-built studio, Glenn places an emphasis on human performance and live drums. He tends to reject modern recording crutches like pitch correction, over-mastering, and time alignment. His unique approach, personality, and skills have garnered him a worldwide following of over three hundred thousand!
In this lesson, Glenn shows you how to make tempo maps in Reaper!
Tempo maps aren’t only for recording!
Since Reaper is Mac/PC compatible and free to use for 30 days, you can actually have bands you’re recording create their own tempo maps they can rehearse to before recording! When it’s time to hit the studio, this can save everyone a lot of headache. Luckily, creating a tempo map in Reaper is really quite simple.
The first step is to create a dedicated track for the click using the Command T keyboard shortcut. Next, open the Insert menu and come down to Click Source. The session tempo information will automatically load onto the the audio track you’ve created.
Next, you’ll want to select whole notes as the value for your tempo map. For the sake of example, let’s say you want to create a tempo change at bar 16. Right click on the bar and come down to Insert Tempo/Time Signature Marker.
A dialogue box will open where you can select the new tempo or even change the time signature. It’s really that easy! You can simply repeat the process at the next change.
One of the great things about Reaper is the ability to gradually change tempo between markers. It’s a built-in feature in the same dialogue box you get after right clicking on a bar to program a tempo change. Simply check the box next to Gradually Transition Tempo to Next Marker and Reaper will automatically speed up or slow down the tempo for you!
