I’d love to discover a way to record a continuous performance (no cuts/overdubs) that starts without click and then continues to a click in the middle of the piece.
An external metronome could be triggered by foot pedal, for instance. But could it be done all within the DAW? Has someone devised a Reaper script for such a thing?
Yeah that would work well if I were precise enough to know when to automate the click in and out. If I’m playing free-tempo, I won’t really know when that click should begin.
My Reaper experience is more to do with dialogue editing than music creation, but I might still be able to help if I understand the problem correctly.
When you say “click”, do you mean a single click, or the beginning of a click track?
Do you want the sound of that click to be included in the recording, or only heard by you while you perform?
Can you ELI5 the conditions where you want the click to start? Like, is there anything unique happening at that point?
Do you have the option of using a midi input device, even something as simple as a single midi button, that could trigger it to start manually?