stupid ? perhaps

am a reaper newbie. please tell me there's a way in reaper to overdub without copying over stuff that's already on the track. i usually hit ctrl/r a couple measures ahead of time when i'm doing guitar or bass parts and then start playing right when i stopped recording my last clip. and when i do this it just destructively recordsover those couple of introductory measures, which leaves me with a couple of measures of nothing where the previous stuff was. i guess i'm wondering if there's a "sound on sound" recording button somewhere i'm missing like i've seen in cakewalk products before? thanks in advance sam

Actually nothing in Reaper recording is distructive. Under Options choose "Show all takes in Lanes when Room", then make sure that you track is sized big enough to see multiple takes. Now you will notice that each of your takes will be in a separate "lane" and depending on which one is highlighted that is the one that will play, so simply cut (put the cursor where you want it to jump from one take to the other and press the "s" key to slice. Now highlight the sections of take one that you want to play, and then highlight the sections of take 2, that you want to play and you are all set. There is a really great section on takes and lanes in the user manual, the quick start as well as a separate "Takes and Lanes" guide that User Tallisman wrote for the forum, just search for it. Oh and welcome aboard. p.s. check out the punch options too ;-)

thanks for your reply! i actually have a copy of the manual v2.5 and i found where it says you can right click the overlapped area of the track and select "play all takes", which seems to fix my problem. i must have missed that part earlier. sam

thanks for the replies! i will def plan on learning how to piece together takes to make the best track possible. i'm pretty slow at all this daw stuff, not a natural on the computer, that's for sure. side note: this forum is great, quick replies to even simple questions from newbies. that's one of the main reasons i decided to go with reaper in the first place. sam