Step recording to a click

I have to admit that I make bare use of Reaper, great program, but I only know how part of it works. Anyway, I'm laying down a midi keyboard track that has to be precis on the click, I went through and did the keyboard part, but can't get it to actually be on the click no matter what I do. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Welcome to the forums! :) What is your audio interface? Are you using its ASIO drivers?

Thanks for the welcome. I'm using an OpenLabs NEKO machine, Reaper is included on it, it's a keyboard with windows built in and is a self contained work station. I'm just using one of the virtual instruments that came with it, so I'm not sure what you mean on the audio interface, I'm just recording the midi data and then I render the audio when I'm done.

I asked because "recorded material does not line up with the metronome/the other tracks" has pretty much always to do with the audio driver or a wrong setting in the Reaper preferences menu. The Neko comes with Reaper pre-installed and properly configured and so that should be working. I'm not sure if I understood your problem though, you're recording MIDI and if you playback it's not in sync? Or is it out of sync after rendering? Do you have a latency (lag) problem while playing the virtual instrument? Can you describe what your doing in a bit more detail?

I am assuming that Reaper is the source of the click, and not an audio file dropped into Reaper. To quantize right click on the midi item and select open midi editor, click on edit at the top of the midi editor, and click quantize events. Select "all events" and "real time preview" and see if you can get it to work for ya. To Quantize while you record, right click the "in" button next to the vertical fader for that track, and at the bottom click on "track recording settings."

Yea, it's a little confusing. So basically I had the project set up at 120bpm, I went in to the piano roll editor and set it for 1/16 notes and hand entered each note to get my riff (it's in 13), after the fact I set up a click track at 120bpm and 13/4, but it isn't clicking the same as the riff. I tried moving it 1bpm at a time from 110 to 130 and it just doesn't hit at the same time, it gets further and further off the longer it plays. I didn't use step recording, I just mouse clicked the notes in. I need to step record it in so that the 1/16th notes are on the same beat as the click track. It might be that I just didn't set things up properly or in the right sequence to get it going. thanks for any suggestions.

Ok you're right that's pretty confusing. :) I assume that you have the timebase in the project settings set to "time" instead of "Beat (position, length, rate)". That's the only thing that can decouple your MIDI item's tempo from the click track. But unless you changed the tempo at some point, they should be in sync even with the timebase set to "time". You did set up a click track by going into the project settings and selecting a time signature of 13/4 and inserting a 'click source' track? If you did that after setting up the MIDI item with the riff, the MIDI item will still have the default 4/4 signature but it will have the same tempo, and notes entered in the MIDI editor must align with the click. I can only assume that they're all late due to a wrong audio device setting and this plus the wrong timebase makes this all seem so convoluted. If you look in the upper right corner of the Reaper window, there are some informations about the current audio format/latency like "48000Hz 16Bit 2/2ch 512spls ~11/11ms ASIO". What does that say on your screen?

well, Quantize had no affect, everything was already on the beat, but thanks for the tips, I didn't know about that real time quantize thing. Best I can tell, I've got all the timebase set up as you describe, the settings on top say: 48000hz 32bit 4/4ch 256spls ~6.0/5.9ms ASIO does that tell you anything? thanks

oh I feel like an idiot. So I set up a new project and got all the tempo and time signature stuff set up, did the click and then step recorded the riff, and guess what, it's in 14, not 13, so that explains why it was off. Before you think I'm an idiot, it's 16th notes with a slap back echo on it, it's really funky to count :)

Hey cool that you got that sorted! Next thing would have been to ask you for the project file in order to look into that here and I was looking forward to see the odd rhythm. :) The numbers you posted told me that there's nothing gone wrong with the audio settings either. No need to "feel like an idiot", I'm quite sure all of us have been on the wrong track at least one time in the course of learning Reaper.