Reaper or Studio One for drum tracking?

[Adamamam]

Does anybody have experience of tracking/comping/editing drums in BOTH Reaper and S1?

I've been using Reaper for years, but I find the take handling/comping can be a bit rage-inducing.

I have S1 (artist) but never use it really. I'm about to track an album's worth of acoustic drums and am tempted to use S1 because the editing/take handling looks less likely to make me cry.

I don't intend this to be a REAPER GOOD S1 BAD (or opposite) question; I own both and will continue to mainly use Reaper out of laziness probably for most uses.

Drum tracking though? S1 or Reaper will produce fewer howls of fury?

[Forum Admin]

I'm a PreSonus Studio One fanboy so I'm biased, but comping and takes-to-layers for me seems way easier/logical to my brain in S1 than in other DAWs.

This short video gives you a feel for its functionality:

https://youtu.be/L-gI-TUYCBg

[James Perrett]

I'd have to say that the default settings for takes and comping in Reaper aren't ideal for drums but I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are options and possibly custom scripts that make things much easier. It would be worth a good look around the Reaper Stash and the Reaper Forum.

However, when I'm doing drum tracking I just treat any DAW just like a tape machine - albeit with an almost unlimited supply of tape. If I make a mistake on drums I'll either just go back and start again or, if it is otherwise a good take, keep it but record another take.

[Adamamam]

Thanks for the replies!

I'm going to try S1 this time I think. Why not?

[jxnWHITE]

If you're on a PC, you could consider Cakewalk by Bandlab. Multitrack/speed comping has been a most productive feature for quite some time. I have S1, find their take lane management to be a bit limiting. Looked at Reaper but went with making music vs. tinkering under the hood all day. And as inexpensive as Reaper is, Cakewalk by Bandlab is still less.

[Tomás Mulcahy]

Oh dear. Is it that bad in Reaper? Pro Tools is a breeze for this kind of thing. And I've just changed over to Reaper instead. Like, how bad can it be? Can you drop in, move takes around, group media items?

[James Perrett]

Oh dear. Is it that bad in Reaper? Pro Tools is a breeze for this kind of thing. And I've just changed over to Reaper instead. Like, how bad can it be? Can you drop in, move takes around, group media items?

Yes, you can do those things. Dropping in works just as you'd expect with tape and you can group items and move them around as a group (g to group, u to ungroup). One gotcha that always seems to get me is clicking on a take will activate that take and I find it easy to click on the wrong take when doing something else. The take system is very configurable and I'm fairly sure that there are ways round most of the issues but I tend to only explore the help resources when I'm stuck and have time to look. The only time I use takes is when I'm in the thick of a session and there is no time to experiment so I tend to stick to the way that works for me rather than finding out if there is a better way to do things.

[Drew Stephenson]

Yeah, I've kept quiet until now because I've not seen what the trouble is with Reaper - which didn't really help the OP. But I thought I'd just chip in to say that, like most things Reaper, once you get your head round it, it's very capable and allows many ways to skin a cat.

[Eddy Deegan]

I used Reaper for a while and whereas it did the job I never felt truly comfortable with it so I looked around.

Eventually I settled on Studio One. I struggled to get along with it for a while but after going through the learning curve and the frustrations that came with it I now realise that most of that frustration was down to the docs as opposed to the product. It works in a way that once you get it is very logical and now I feel very at home with it. It's probably the nearest DAW to one I would have written if I'd created my own.

So for me Studio One is now my DAW of choice. With specific regard to comping, Studio One does it in a way I find very powerful and useful. There is an informative video here about how it works in Studio One. It has an annoying intro but you can skip that, and the information in the video is pretty handy IMHO.

Can Reaper do it? Absolutely it can, but you need to take some time to establish which of the comparable workflows is best suited to you

[Adamamam]

I've used Reaper on many occasions for comping/editing etc and it can do all that stuff, but the 'auto splitting' can and does create a complete mess if your takes are different lengths.

If you haven't used Reaper, it will boggle your mind to see how this works!

There's a thread here for anybody who wants to see the full horror!

https://forums.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2030670