Always Echo Current Midi Track
by Yamuna Jivana Dasa

In Reaper, every time you add a virtual instrument on new midi track, when you play your midi keyboard, it will output that track. This is not ideal because all the tracks will play back together. Drums, keyboards, bass, ouch! You would have to unarm all other midi tracks with F7 , and/or turn monitoring off with F8 so that only the track you want to hear will play back when you play your midi keyboard.

There is a setting  in Reaper which is more efficient with midi tracks: It will arm the midi track only when you select that track, and when you move off that track, it will not play it back, so that if you have selected another midi track, that track gets armed and it only is echoed back from the midi keyboard.

I think it also makes sense for recording anything, either midi or audio: you don't want other tracks armed to be recorded onto, except the one you are dealing with, which is probably the one you have selected when you are about to hit the R key to record into your project.

Of course when you are playing back a project with space bar, it still plays everything else recorded so this isn't a problem during project playback.

So here's how to enable that setting.

In Reaper, go to Preferences with Control P.
From the main tree-view, open the second item from the top called "Project". In other words, press right arrow on that item to expand it. Now down-arrow to the "Track/send defaults" menu item.
Shift-tab around 10 times to a drop-down button menu called "set default record settings for new tracks". Hit Space bar on this to bring up its context menu. Up-arrow once to "Automatic record-arm when track selected". By default this is not checked. Press Enter to check it. It will close the button menu, and you can space bar back into it, up-arrow once to hear it is checked, and escape out of it again to not make changes. Now pressing tab 13 times or so takes you to the Ok button. Press it and your settings should be changed for any new tracks you add to current and new projects.

This is not a Projects setting but a global one so you need not update it from the Project settings Alt Enter, where you would tab 3 times to "Save as default project settings" button. That isn't necessary because, again, this is a global projects settings function from the Preferences dialog of Reaper.

If you have existing tracks in your existing projects prior to you making this change, you will need to apply this setting to those tracks manually before this works:
select all your midi tracks, press Applications key, go up to "Automatic record-arm when track selected". That's around the third item from the bottom so press up arrow around 3 times to find it. Press Enter on this setting.

Again, with this change in place, whenever you arrow up or down in your project to a Midi track, only that track will echo your keyboard's playback. So, if you arrow to a track hosting a synth with a piano, your midi keyboard will only play the piano. A drum track will only echo the drums on that track from your midi keyboard when you arrow to it, and so on.

If you're coming from the days of Sonar 8.5.3, all that I have discussed in this article is the equivalent of Sonar's Global Options Dialog, and checking the "Always echo current midi track" checkbox. In Sonar I think this used to be a default setting.

Please send corrections or clarifications to this article to ykhandoo@gmail.com
This article is an in-memorium dedication to Sonar 8.5.3 and JSonar!
Last updated: 31 October 2025