Video Tutorial - TuxGuitar and Reaper

The follow up to my Bass MIDI Sampler video. In this one, I show how to get TuxGuitar and Reaper to communicate via MIDI, so that you can compose in TuxGuitar, but play all your sounds using your own sampled instruments.

So what next?

So the main driver behind doing this was to compose and document my riffs in TuxGuitar (originally GuitarPro 5, but ir doesn't support 8 strings). I found TuxGuitar to be a fantastic free replacement. The learning curve is not too hard. Some stuff is not intuitive (I could do another video on that) and the one feature I'd really like to see - Support for MIDI Time Code (MTC) or Song Position Pointer (SPP) - would be great if they could add it.

loopMIDI

loopMIDI are (free) multiple virtual MIDI cables, used to create virtual (loopback) MIDI-ports that interconnect MIDI applications in Windows. This allows two or more applications to send and receive MIDI signals from each other - and that's how I get TuxGuitar and Reaper to talk to each other.

Within Reaper I set the appropriate MIDI channel and arm recording on the track, so that it is now listening for MIDI events on that loopback MIDI channel.

TuxGuitar

I only really looked at TuxGuitar (TG) a few weeks ago. I had low expectations - as much as I love Open Source Software, quite often the quality is less than desired - but not with TuxGuitar. It's a really nice application. Yes, it does some weird stuff. Yes, they don't seem very responsive on their support tickets or forums - but hey, it's all volunteer efforts (I should know I wrote Open Source software for years), and that's just part of the package. Fingers crossed, they think what I'm asking for is important enough to code.

On a brand new TG project, I setup the track to be for a bass guitar. Some of the settings are applicable to the internal MIDI synthesizers (like my selection of Picked Bass instrument), and don't affect what I want to do in Reaper. As long as I select Channel 1 (CH #0 in TG), then we should be good.

At this point, you can try it out - you should technically hear it come out of your default speakers using the internal TG FluidSynth [MagicSFver2] synthesizer. This is probably a good test. But if you want it to redirect into Reaper, you need to change this to loopMIDI Port. Not sure why two of them show up, but both seem to work.

Reaper

Once you've done this, you should be able to hear the sampler you setup in Reaper.

Last Words

So the last thing I wanted to show you is how I use this.

I do most of my drum grooves in Reaper customising stock grooves from MT Power Drum Kit. As I do this in Reaper, I will export to TuxGuitar as time goes on and the "Master drum beat" is maintained in Reaper. The only tip about doing it this way, is you have to create a MIDI clip, select All and change the MIDI channel to Channel 10, otherwise TG doesn't recognise it as a drum beat.

The rest I do in TuxGuitar, primarily to maintain the guitar tablature. If I was to re-export out of Reaper I would lose all that information.

When it's ready to go into Reaper, do the export and add MIDI items to my Reaper project. Here's a couple of screenshots not in the video.

Thanks for listening. I hope you've found it useful. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.