Which first? Learn Reaper or customize Reaper?

as Nicholas suggested I also suggest you to discover what reap can do for you and your workflow - which is strictly personal - first. find what your workflow needs first. I've been thru' this 2 months ago. I realized reap could be tailor made all around my needs like anyother DAW and I was amazed. and I wanted to build my super macros straight forward. I very soon realized this was a wrong approach for me and mostly my workflow. during the learning process I used to have a notepad where to write actions-macros I imagined would be useful for my workflow. only later (now) I'm starting to create them properly

For me, customizing/reorganizing menus is a big point. I try to keep there what I need on top and not so important functions on the bottom (or in subfolders). I consider this an ongoing project, still reorganizing things, depending on my workflow.

Just go make music and the rest will follow. You'll spend more time talking about how to get something done than actually getting something done otherwise. It ain't city planning.

I'm in transition, too, coming from Cubase. For me, the workflow and customizing the action commands go hand in hand. Some of the default Reaper commands are intuitive, and for some I've just gotten used to hitting a certain key combination in Cubase, so I've changed them to suit my needs. I haven't even scratched the surface of what this program can do, but I feel that it will be worth the learning curve.

I'd recommend finding out what you miss most in Reaper and what blocks/disturbs/annoys you most, trying to move this out of the way and then finding out how your workflow can be integrated "the Reaper way" and slowly modifying/customizing along your way. For me, the first stumbling block was mostly keyboard layout and the behavior of the edit cursor and related to that, changing some options in preferences. Then I "learned Reaper" while "unlearning Cubase", instead of trying to make it "Cubase all the way". It's always hard to more or less start from scratch without knowing if it's worth the effort but it turned out more than great for me and probably most other users, long (haha) before all of the customization options were there. I don't use 99% of that stuff, but I think there's no harm in using it from an early stage with some caution (in order to avoid missing some good stuff).

What I have done is print out, and go through, the keyboard shortcuts one at at time with Reaper, marking up that list greatly with notes and marks as I go. It is not as bad as it would seem at first looking at the list. For some to work you have to set Reaper up (for screensets etc.) but many take less than 5 seconds each, or less (many you can just skip). Doing this in small doses every day or so, for a little while, I have found to be quite beneficial when starting out with Reaper (as well as creating custom shortcuts and actions). Here is a link to a slightly out of date, but well organized, actions list. Any pdf file in the Reaper folder is available under Help\Documentation. Reaper will make its own actions list with any changes included under Help\html..\Keyboard If you haven't already, I suggest Downloading the SWS plugin from