Today was the first day I had some spare time to look at the Reaper digital audio workstation software that I am planning to use with my Alesis V49 MIDI controller keyboard. I decided to watch the first video in the series “First MIDI Song in Reaper (1/8) and try to duplicate the steps. The first part involved downloading and installing some plugins for a piano sound and a synth sound. Both of those took a little more time than I thought it would (some of the installation steps had changed, and not all of the steps were given, so I had to do some sleuthing to get the files in the correct directories). The next set of steps were for creating a track, playing a short melody on the MIDI controller, then editing that track. Well, my piano skills are not that good, so THAT took a while (mostly on editing what I entered to match what the video had). The final part was to add two more tracks to add chords and pad sounds. I have not done this last part yet, but I am getting there….one step at a time…with some missteps and backtracking….