Yamaha Starter Template

This Reaper template is designed to help newcomers to the world of Reaper get up and running with a virtual instrument as quickly as possible, without having to worry about setting things up and routing etc.

You will need to install the free Yamaha wavetable synth from the dropbox, this is an old but still useful General MIDI soft synth instrument which is very light on resources, and should work just fine on any Windows system.

Install the Yamaha synth by placing the .dll file into your designated VST folder, the one which Reaper will scan on start up,

Once this is done, just load up the Yamaha Starter Template file and you should be good to go.

Track one is an instrument track, which has the default piano loaded at start, to change the instrument sound, press P, choose the Re Midi Control as the plugin parameter set that you wish to alter, then arrow down until you find the program parameter, press tab to take you into the relevant parameter, and use the up and down arrows to change the sounds.

Hit escape to close the parameter list again.

If you wish to add another track, and thus another instance of the instrument perhaps then going on to choose another sound to compliment that on track one, just press the letter d on your keyboard, and Reaper will duplicate the settings on whatever track you were currently focused on at the time.

If you already have some midi data recorded and wish to clear this, press control, alt and a to select all midi data on the new track and press delete to clear.  Now you can again go to the parameter list to choose another sound.

Track two uses the same Yamaha synth, howver in line with the general midi standard, this midi channel is set to 10, which makes available a selection of drum kit sounds, again you may duplicate additional tracks to perhaps have dedicated drum sounds on their own reaper track.

This template assumes that you have your own midi keyboard controller connected and enabled with Reaper, however if you do not own a keyboard you may invoke reaper's own virtual keyboard by pressing alt and b to then use your computer keyboard as a means of playing and inputting notes, pressing alt and b again will close the keyboard.

Have fun making music with reaper!