title: The Idea With Reaper — Some Thoughts
tags: reaper
h1:

# 1
*This was originally a reply to a youtube comment [on this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgKV3nw0-hM).*

The idea with Reaper, to me at least, is that the out of the box config is just an example. You take the bits it gives you and craft a DAW moulded to your particular needs, rather than something designed around a hypothetical average typical customer. 

Something I do is to clear out most of the menus and keyboard shortcuts so that what is easily accessible is what I'm like to need, personally. The core thing to learn is the actions list. Almost everything in Reaper is done via an action, which can be triggered from the actions list. Menus and toolbars and keyboard shortcuts are then just quick ways to access what you could access via the actions list. And you can reassign every keyboard shortcut, and change every menu and toolbar. Don't use something, remove it, or relegate it to a submenu. (Reaper has an option, on by default, that places the default menu as a submenu at the bottom of any customised menu, so the occasionally used things are still there, just an extra menu away for those odd occasions where you need them.)

Much software employs UX experts to try and make a one size fits all UI that works well for everybody. But in doing so there are many compromises. Reaper really opens up when you learn to customise it, so that anything you don't use can be removed from the menus, what you use a lot can be made very quick to access, and tasks you repeat often can be automated. But that's not something you can learn overnight. (It's similar with a text editor called vim which, if you learn it in depth, allows you to do a lot of tasks very efficiently compared to everything else, but has a hard initial learning curve, and has a reputation as an escape room since the way to quit isn't obvious to a beginner. But it is always the case, especially with professional software for complex tasks, that the trade off is an initially hard beast to grasp, since all the hard learning stuff is put at the start of the learning curve, rather than later on.)