Making a drum beat in Reaper 5?

[hydr0]

Hey guys, I've installed Reaper and I am barely familiar with it. I know how to equip my MIDI keyboard, pull up VSTs and some other basic stuff, but have tried all day to use a beat sequencer. I found one called Megababy which is already included in Reaper, but I can't load any samples into it. This video at around 4:04

uses another VST, Battery 4 (a drum kit I think) but when I checked for it online it was $200. What drum kit should I use with Megababy?

To clear up any confusion:
I just need a piano roll/grid that lets me draw in hits using sample packs that I've downloaded by browsing to the folder and choosing the sample, with free software if it's necessary.

Screenshot of Megababy
http://imgur.com/MRZMoVd

Help is very appreciated, so far I've had a lot of trouble with DAWs on Windows

 

[Sulihin]

MegaBaby looks pretty cool. Back when I used Reaper (4.x) I would just do my drums with samplomatics and MIDI and various complicated multi-track routing schemes.

I think the trick with MegaBaby is that it is just MIDI generator, so you will need to also use a Samplomatic to load the samples. Check out 16.6 in the Reaper manual for some discussion on how to use the Samplomatic and the ReaDrums template to set up some drums. I think if you use that with MegaBaby you can be on your way to programming some beats!

 

[hydr0]

It was 16.16 but I found it anyway

Nitpick aside, thanks so much for the help! I kind of figured MegaBaby would need some routing to another source, but I'll try what you said.

What do you use instead of Reaper now? I really like Live 9 and was considering saving up for the Intro version since I tried the demo.

 

[hydr0]

MegaBaby looks pretty cool. Back when I used Reaper (4.x) I would just do my drums with samplomatics and MIDI and various complicated multi-track routing schemes.

I think the trick with MegaBaby is that it is just MIDI generator, so you will need to also use a Samplomatic to load the samples. Check out 16.6 in the Reaper manual for some discussion on how to use the Samplomatic and the ReaDrums template to set up some drums. I think if you use that with MegaBaby you can be on your way to programming some beats!

I tried using the part in the manual like you said to but I can't precisely move the hits around unless I use something like a really tiny beat division. Is there a way to freely move the hits without them snapping to the grid? Otherwise I was able to use my samples, though

 

[Sulihin]

Oops, sorry about the typo!
I think MegaBaby is intended to be an off/on at that sequence point thing. If you just lay out the MIDI in a MIDI clip you can get more precise control over where the notes hit. You just don't get the benefits of a sequencer. You can create patterns in the sequencer and then chain them or do other things. So I guess it's more about which way of setting things up you like. Check out 13.45 in the manual, if you haven't already.

Just found out Reaper 4 has MegaBaby too. How did I miss that!

I picked up Ableton 9 Suite when they were doing the get Ableton 8 and get a free upgrade deal. I really like the session view for playing around with patterns, but often miss how good Reaper is for routing and mixing. And not caring if a track is midi or audio. I mostly went from Reaper to Ableton because I thought I needed a better sampler. If I'd known about TAL-Sampler, I'd probably just have gotten that and stuck with Reaper, but I like Ableton a lot at this point, so don't really regret it or anything.