Software You Will Need
In order to keep our lessons completely interactive we plan to use Cockos’s reaper as our Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
First off let us explain exactly what a DAW is. A DAW can basically be looked at as your studio inside of a computer. It is able to house almost every resource you will need (outside of a microphone and speakers) to produce a complete track. To get the most out of your DAW you will find yourself using plugins. Plugins are virtual effects and instruments. For these lessons we will be using VST plugins.
These plugins can be found all over the internet. Some come at a price, and many come free. If you take the time to look around you will find MANY free plugins, but filtering through them to find which ones are best is what will be most time consuming. Hopefully these lessons will help you find the ones that work best.
Now to Reaper.
The reason we have decided to use Reaper is not necessarily because it is better than any other DAW, but because there is only one version of Reaper that comes at two prices. Most will find that they will only need to purchase the $60 discount license. Even if you use another DAW, Reaper comes with an unlimited time length fully functional demo. This will allow you to open any project gone over in these tutorials.
Don’t worry about plugins for right now, we will get to those later as we need them (we don’t want to overwhelm you with a huge folder of plugins.), but don’t worry, we will only use the free ones!
So go ahead and download Reaper! The next steps you will need to take will soon follow!
