I'm 20 days in to my 30 days with Reaper.

In the last 5 days, my time spent in each DAW as a percentage, according to Time Sink has been:

• Reaper - 99%
• DP - 1%

I am actually getting along with Reaper very nicely now. It's not required much customization, but a lot of learning about what can be done. In this post I'm going to go over some of the things that I've changed that really improved the experience for me.

UPDATE: Please see the new DAW Feature Chart for more up-to-date information and a way cooler chart.

As you may know, I've spent a lot of time in Reaper lately.

My time spent in each DAW as a percentage, according to Time Sink has been:

• Reaper - 91%
• Studio One - 3%
• DP - 5%
• Renoise - 2%

There may be a bit of a rounding error there ;) Again... Let's discuss how things have gone some more though...

Reaper isn't all roses and sunshine. Even though it's chocked full of neat features and more, there's some ugly warts.

I'm going to go through the things that have really bothered me in my Reaper demo thusfar...

I've been using Reaper for about 1 week now. If you follow my blog then you May know how much I hate Reaper. I couldn't even muster the discipline last time to go through with trying it.

This time I getting there though. So if you click-through, then you'll find a pretty sizeable list of some cool stuff that Reaper offers.

(You can expect the vitriolic post to follow soon enough though... this has been a tremendously painful piece of software to figure out.)

Recently I was told by my neurologist that the frequent pain/tingling/itching/weird sensations all over my body are likely due to small fiber peripheral neuropathy, which is not uncommon in people with autonomic failure such as I've been diagnosed with. I've dealt with the autonomic failure for years, and while it's a pain, I've mostly managed.

The neuropathy is affecting my ability to be a musician though. Specifically, it's greatly affected by ability to play drums. After playing for an hour, my hands will tingle for hours or days after. I think that this is partially due to me holding my drumsticks too close to the butt.

For a much more detailed look at the phenomenon that I think is contributing to my issue read this article.

READ THAT ARTICLE .

To help alleviate that I've decided to make a modification to my drumsticks which I already make myself.

Let me walk you through the basic process.

Trigger alert: I frequently mix imperial and metric. Whichever label I present first is the one that I used when making this. I have my reasons for mixing measurements (largely due to available tooling in the US), and if this bothers you then... well... too bad.

I also mix decimal and fractional measurements.

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The Studio One Effects Review and Studio One Instruments Review appear to have been one of the more popular posts on my blog according to analytics. In a close second Place are the Digital Performer series.

So now I'm going to review the included audio effects in the latest from Steinberg: Cubase 9 Pro.

There's 70+ of them. So hang on tight! (and please read the 'Rating' section first!)

Spoiler: Overall rating

6 days since my last post. It's because I've spent some time recently making something cool for the blog. This is an audio comparator.

Sorry... that's just an image. I don't want people loading a bunch of files on my front page. Click "Read More→" for the actual thing.

Hopefully you can figure out what it does by the UI, but consider this post the manual. Let's check out a few more examples and I'll explain how it works.

Create, Discover and Share GIFs on Gfycat

A Baking steel is basically just a chunk of steel that you stuff in your oven, heat up then cook on. It helps retain heat, evenly distribute heat and heat the underside of whatever you're doing.

Rather than pay $100+ for one you can easily make your own. Here's what we did...

Sometimes it's necessary to increase the depth of a Dado or a Groove very slightly. This is usually done by just adjusting whatever method you used to create the joinery, but often that is no longer possible without a lot of fussing since you may have set the device to new settings for other tasks.

Enter the Router Plane. This is an indispensable tool (that my wife bought me!) which allows for in situ adjustments of depth-vital joinery.

Here's what you do...

I received a very neat vintage scrub plane for Christmas. This type of plane has a heavily cambered blade which allows you to work across or diagonally to the grain. The camber allows the blade to both dig in the center while the upswing scores the edges to reduce tearout.

The grind on the blade was very poor, so I corrected it while attempting to remove as little metal as possible. The resulting look of the grind is not fantastic, but to correct it 'for looks' would require removing much more metal. This would reduce the life of the plane by many years.

Here's some more pictures of the process and plane.

The act of using a mouse to control a cursor is inherently an inefficient UI paradigm. Luckily there are a few things you can do to reduce both the physical and mental loads that mousing puts upon you.

One of these is "Mouse Anchoring"

I went out a short walk at the park down the street to get some wildlife for a project my brother is working on. I snapped a few photos while I was out.