Reaper and Keyboard Shortcuts

Reaper is heavily configurable, more so if you know you way around scripting and custom actions. The discussion here is about keyboard shortcuts. There are a few principles to think of:

• Optimise The Common Case: Make the things you do most often the easiest to access;
• Unmodified Keyboard Shortcuts are Valuable: the easiest shortcuts to use are those that don't require pressing modifier keys like control or shift. Second easiest tend to be those that use only one modifier, and so on.
• The Default Shortcuts Are Only An Example: once you are familiar with reconfiguring shortcuts, you should consider one of the default bindings sacrosanct.

Starting with the last of these: in the action window you can find if anything is bound to a key using the Find Shortcut button. Go through all of the unmodified shortcuts and, if you don't use the regularly, unbind them. Do likewise for the ones that use modifiers: shortcuts are for things you use regularly (emphasis on you: shortcuts convenient for somebody else mean nothing to you).

Now obviously this is not advice for beginners. Beginners are advised to take shortcuts as they are until they know their way around Reaper. But I guess the point where you learn how much you can customise Reaper is the real threshold when you transition from beginner to intermediate.

Also, bear in mind that you can save and reload shortcuts. You can even use Reaper's portable install and screensets to produce multiple Reaper-based applications, one for each workflow. Perhaps you use Reaper one way when composing and arranging, another when doing sound design, another when mixing, and yet another when mastering.

If, for example, you are mastering, you don't need easy access to the kind of things you need for composing and arranging; when composing and arranging, you don't need access to the things you need for mastering.

This customisability is something that sets Reaper apart from the regular DAW's; the capacity to bind arbitrary actions to arbitrary keys, MIDI messages, and OSC messages does likewise; and the capacity to produce your own actions by scripting or by combining existing actions into custom actions, again makes Reaper far more adaptable to your needs than, say, Ableton. Sure Ableton is great if you fit its intended workflow, but if you don't, it fast becomes awkward.