08 Mar 2022
DAW
March 8, 2022 Sam

Pro Tools style clip editing in Reaper

There is a bunch of pre-made Reaper tools that make it work in a really similar way to Pro Tools – one of these being “Pro Tools to Reaper” – https://www.protoolstoreaper.com/

But there are some super simple Pro Tools workflows that can be set up quickly by using Reaper’s Custom Actions.

One of the features in Pro Tools I used the most was the ability to super quickly edit clips. When I made the switch to Reaper it took be quite a while to adjust to how Reaper handles clip (or Item as Reaper calls them) editing.

The 4 custom actions that I made and use ALL the time are :

  1. Trim item START to Mouse Position (A key)
  2. Trim item END to Mouse Position (S key)
  3. Fade IN items to mouse position (D key)
  4. Fade OUT items to mouse position (F key)

How to set up the actions

The basic principle of each of these is to hover the mouse of the position that you want the edit to happen at, press the keyboard shortcut and boom, edit done.

In order to set these actions up you will need to install the SWS / S&M Extensions if you haven’t already (you definitely should…). For each of the action just load the Actions window and click “New Action”.

All four of these actions follow a similar pattern – Store the current edit cursor before setting a new edit cursor position (to the current mouse cursor position). Then you perform the particular fade/edit action. Then lastly you are resseting the state of the edit cursor and selection to how it was before you performed the action so that the item does not remain selected and also the edit cursor position is not changed.

Trim Item START to Mouse Position

  1. Xenakios/SWS : Store edit cursor position
  2. View : Move edit cursor to mouse cursor (no snapping)
  3. Item edit : Trim left edge of item under mouse to edit cursor
  4. Item : Unselect all items
  5. Xenakios/SWS : Recall edit cursor position

Trim Item END to Mouse Position

  1. Xenakios/SWS : Store edit cursor position
  2. View : Move edit cursor to mouse cursor (no snapping)
  3. Item edit : Trim right edge of item under mouse to edit cursor
  4. Item : Unselect all items
  5. Xenakios/SWS : Recall edit cursor position

Fade IN Items to Mouse Position

  1. Xenakios/SWS : Store edit cursor position
  2. View : Move edit cursor to mouse cursor (no snapping)
  3. Fade items in to cursor
  4. Item : Unselect all items
  5. Xenakios/SWS : Recall edit cursor position

Fade OUT Items in to Mouse Position

  1. Xenakios/SWS : Store edit cursor position
  2. View : Move edit cursor to mouse cursor (no snapping)
  3. Fade items out from cursor
  4. Item : Unselect all items
  5. Xenakios/SWS : Recall edit cursor position

With these actions set the the A, S, D and F keys you can use one hand to quickly chop and fade items with one hand while keeping the other hand on the mouse. They will also work with multiple items selected when holding SHIFT.

Sam