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Adding Effects on Audio Tracks

Lesson 13 from: Reaper Fast Start

Kenneth Gioia

Adding Effects on Audio Tracks

Lesson 13 from: Reaper Fast Start

Kenneth Gioia

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Lesson Info

13. Adding Effects on Audio Tracks

Lesson Info

Adding Effects on Audio Tracks

what's Ah, here. This kick and that's had some compression to it. Uh, we go to our effects, we'll go to let's put a compressor on their firsts. I'll use the reaper compressor called re comp said to around 4 to 1 to start about there. If the attack a little lighter release a little tighter. By making attack a little bit looser, you let the first transient get through without compressing it. If you make the attack two short as I'll show you right here, it crushes it too much. If you make this little bit looser, that first attack gets through, and then it kind of smoothed out the rest of it. You know something, this button over here or no makeup gain. What this does is as you're compressing it, it makes it lower in volume, and it makes up for it over here. But you could also do the same thing by just adjusting the wet sound over here. If you notice on the compressor is a wet and a dry Most situation you're not really gonna use that that you doing Parral mixing or peril compression. But it...

's on there just in case you want to do that. But in a situation like this, where you do with a kick you want compress it the whole thing. You don't hear any dry single come back in. You want to start off with it completely wet. There's no reason to bring any dry kick back in. That sounds a little more controlled. For now, we can only like I said, we could always change it later. We're not committing to this at all, so it's not a compress. Sorry. That said any Q after that, and let's add a little low end to make it sound a little beef here. Now I'm using a shelving. So everything from here for Cassie wise down gets louder as opposed to a peak. Thank you. That centers on one frequency the centers on this frequency all the way down. Give them or, ah, a wider sound. What kind of life? A low end. And then I use a Peking Q just to bring out some. They could sound a little fatter by taking some of the image down. And just in the band with affects how wide the actual cut is. So right now, this is a very thin cut its picking this frequency right here to cut, which is 524 kilohertz. No, 524 hurts, but it's keeping a very narrow in the band that's being cut. If you want to send someone natural, you go a little wider than that somewhere. And it was pretty good, and I just had a little more attack with our not high frequency Out with Peking que in the I guess around the two kilohertz area just affects the quickness of the kick, which year before and after I think it's a bit better, maybe a little too much of this. It's now it's bringing the other kick so kind of a different, more fat sound. But we could still work on the same thing. What I'm gonna do is even gonna change the settings just to make it easier. I'm gonna grab both ease plug ins and dragged them and drop them on this track that applies them to that truck as well. So we just tweak the settings on this one. What started this one? The EQ you bypassed and work on the compressor just to contain the volume of each hit make it sound bit smoother before and after. And that's Eddy. Cue what's reset thes by double clicking, going three. Talk like that and we'll start the low end. Just make it sound fatter and give you the same thing with the mid range. Bring it down a bit and maybe give it a bit of attack. I don't think even need it. It's not easy to kicks together. We could balance their level a bit. Either here or in the mixer. Over here is the Master Channel we want. Make sure it's not distorting, so it's going to keep this open. So that's our kicks. And let's say this so we don't mess up court new recording, and again we'll click down here, creates subdirectory for projects and copy all media items into that project. Now we have a record anything yet, so it doesn't matter, but we're gonna want to do that eventually. So now what's Ah makes him stand. Tracks. Take these out. Just double click over here. Speak to him. Switch the input toe snare for this near top in this near bottom. Let's put them in record. You have to make sure the level is good. Add a little Q and compression to this. Start off with our compressor began around 4 to 1 should usually work. We could just The attack goes too quick. It's a little too much. Light it up a bit, and the release affects the back end of the sound. So if if we make it shorter, it'll kind of compress it like Thomas make it sound, well, shorter. Where this release it longer kind of lets it hang out a little longer. It just snaps the threshold back quicker to grab it. Excuse me to grab every hit. That's just bring it for now. That's pretty que on there. Uh, she's the reprieve Q as well. Again, I'm using all these problems that come with Reaper to get an idea of what it comes with. So, you know, you have this report works with all third party Pogon, So if you like waves or any other fucking cos you more comfortable that it's still gonna work, I just don't want to show you how to use 1/3 party company, because everything I'm showing this video comes with Reaper. So you know you're good to go. So what's that a little top end to make its own prettier. No use a high shelving. There's a pretty good source toe. Explain the difference between a shelving and a peak you. So if I put this back to zero and he's a peacock, you instead. Yuki how it sounds a little. It doesn't sounds pretty. It sounds a little harsh because it focuses on one area instead of like opening up, which can sometimes be good for snare. Sometimes I get a little bit of both, just a little to make it a little crisper, and they use a shelving to make it sound prettier and to balance it out. If it gets too thin, I'll bring a lower pick you up in the HST range, make it sound fatter before and after. That sounds better to me. So what's copy this to this track against, like both of them? Just drag and drop them. What's turning off for now, right? He has a bypass, just struck this, the all the effects on the track go away. So if I turned it off here, that's before, and that's after. So what started with his bypassed it was here. The bottom stand Mike Now for me, I like bottom stand like to add some top into it. Never. We're looking for much attack, so probably don't even need to use the compressor. Just add a little e que to make it sound a little shiny or in the mix. So let's get rid of this low end and probably the peaking EQ. You just worry about this one showing the high shelving. Sometimes I'll use the low one as, ah, high pass and filter out all the low end. But this is not really bothering me. I'll just boost over here now. The most important part is how it matches with the regular snare. Because most of the beef or a snare sound you want from this one, you want to see a snare bottom up just enough to get one more top annual crispness to it. So let's go to the mixer and bring this down, and so we bring it up. Notice how the top end is not quite as pretty way bring us back in. But if you make this too loud, it kind of loses some of the punch or the attack. I'm not a big fan off I just wanna get some of the top in this top end. Que added to it, and it's better to do it from here that they had too much top in the queue on the actual snare track. So now we should record. Some of it may go back to this, not here, back to our raise your window. We should record it and make sure the phases of lying for snares. So put them both on record. Let's look at them closely as you could see this slightly off, but not enough to reverse the phase or move the mikes. Necessarily. What's here? The difference, though, with the bar inverted, not inverted. Let's just zoom out this way. So if I switch the phase of polarity on one of them, you can you can kind of hear the lower and go away gets little thinner That's fatter. That sounds thing as the little one gets kind of phase cancelled as it's playing. So it certainly don't want that. You want to check that with both microphones to make sure because you're basically Mikey going on top and one on bottom. So the sound is hitting the mikes in the opposite way, so you may have to revert them. In fact, when recorded this, I'm pretty sure I use money. Like I said before on the mic. Pre amp usually have a phase in verse, which most likely would snare mic listening bottom like you're gonna want to reverse that. But you should check. But if you get it right before it goes in, that's much better. Let's problems to deal if later. So those are snares and kicks would see what that sounds like together. That's pretty good for now. Again, we'll save it. What's had some other Mike's. This is going to be the overheads now. The difference on this track First, the other one's record. A stereo. Unlike some other D. A W's, there's no such thing as a stereo, multi channel or mono tracking Reaper. There's one type of track besides the fact you can use it for me video and folders and whatever. So when you record a stereo or mono, it's the same type of track you don't have to change. The only thing I'm gonna do differently is going to say you input to a stereo input. So when they miss overheads and I'm noticing. I haven't needed my snares yet. So snare tape to go down to the next one. Snare bottom. That's near B. And let's take these tracks out of record. Put this track in, by the way you can. Taking a lot of record like that by holding down command in the command in the Mac will control in the PC and take them all out of one time or back in. Actually, when you select them all, they act as a temporary group. So you do something like going to record. You could do the same thing just like all the tracks record. And they're all going to record for mute More Soul, which is part of the temporal group thing I mentioned before. All right, so let's check out our overheads. Good input. And right here you can see of mono or stereo thes the same inputs. Nothing's really changed just in mono. You choose one at a time and stereo. You choose them in groups, so we'll choose the overhead left and the overhead right. That's gonna record two channels of audio to this one track on. Does that stereo now? So with this in values you're gonna compress my overheads. Not really a big fan of that, but I had a little top into it just to make the symbols on a little better. But for most part, I know some guys like to do this. They'll take Let's put any Q on here first, they'll use the overheads of symbol mikes, and they'll take the low in the queue. Right here is a high pass filter, little out. Let me take this out of this filter out with low end. So it's just like a single Mike. I'm personally not a fan of that. I like to use the overheads to be that the kit, so like these mikes, is sitting over the drum set and treat the drums that is one instrument and then use all the individual mikes to kind of compliment that, but don't like to turn the overhead Mike's into symbol makes. But again, that's just me personally, people that do the opposite. So for me, I'm gonna leave this off and just add a little top end so there will prettier sounding and we'll brighter than you may think, but they still overall sonic a drum set some like that feels good and let's hear them all together again. Put these on record Google Mixer. Justice overhead against those now. For some reason, this is overloading Grable the tracks together and moving together as a group that was pretty good. So again we will save it. And one more track for the drums be room Mike's again. It's going to stereo and we'll choose room left and move right. Those two channels were going here, put it in Accord, name the rooms and what to take these tracks out of record. Just the room. Mike. Let's hear that. You could tell us kind of a big sounding room, something. It's already compressed on the way in. I got a bit more to it because I like roommates to be, is compressed as possible. Makes the room sound bigger. Then you could just the size of the room or say the size of the drums. But how much room likes you use and just seeing a bit So it's start off with just putting the compressor on there. Uh, here. Probably not gonna take you this said again to about 4 to more live when you compress them, they can really just the attack and released to hear how that works and bypass. Let's match the level little better by turning that off just makes him sound a bit more live. When you mix them with the kit, it creates how big you want. The drum set the base so I make the room. Mike's really fit. Their role is a room mike. So if we go to all these tracks into record, go back to a mixer, here's a room Mike's. No, it sounds smaller. That sounds so. I could really control how big we want to join us to be based on how the roommates are feeling pretty good. So again, we'll save that. Now, at this point, just to make a drum sound even bigger, I'm gonna add a reverb to the drums. So instead of putting them on the individual tracks, we're gonna use an effects send, which is where you make another track. Put the reverb on that track, and then you send the other tracks to it. Make it easier to hear what start off with just the snare, and we'll just send that toe a track, make a track down here, image on reverb brought to court drum verb for short. We'll put in effect plugging on there again. Reaper comes with one called reverb Re a verb, which is actually pretty good. Plug in against free. Um what? Start by sending some of the snare to it. So grab the routing again. Drop it right here. See, it turns to a patch bay or patch plug. Just drop it on there, and we have send, and it's gonna control the level to it, which could also see by hitting the routing on the snare track. And this controls the level, not this one. Sorry, this one controls the level two are re herb, so we'll bring it down a bit. And to post fader send which is really what you want to use for river post forward fader. So as you bring the drum up and down, the reverb stays in proportion. Where if you switch this toe pre fader as you bring the reverb or today I should bring the track up and down the river was going to stay constant. We don't want that. We want to revert to stay in proportion to the sound. So again we'll start here. Bring it to about here. Let's open our river plugging. I'm gonna write with this. Open it this way. Just so it's a bit smaller. And then over here we have impulse responses. Will take the dry sand down completely because we dealing with effects, sends and returns. You don't want any dry sound on the return because all dry sound is coming from the original track. You wanted to be completely wet, so put this full up, but double clicking everything in rip. It could be double clicked to go back to us to fall. So it's a good thing to remember is down here stubble cook. It goes back to us to fall. So I want to add some modules here to make river because right now there's nothing one of the ones you could choose an echo chamber or file, which is where if, using ir reverb, you could use that. I'm just gonna choose a reverb generator, though now what default to being pretty small. Let's hear it. So first it sounds pretty useless, but if we can turn it down, we could change the length and the room size right here. That's what becomes a little useful set redraws. It's one more useful that way. Let's bring this down a bit, and it's there, just the length, a little more. That sounds good. So now we'll add the same amount, which is set right here on the routing. That minus 10 on most the tracks except for the kicks, kicks a little bit lower. So it started the kick here and put this track in the record. That's too much. So bring this down. But there feels good. Same with this one. Now we could do it differently. Instead of dragging and dropping it this way, you could also go in the routing and Edison here and go to that track. But I find it more a little quicker just to do it this way, dropping the track, Make sure post fader and bring it down. It's here, that one. I keep that just a bit on the kicks. We did this snare with a little on the snap bottom drag and drop it. That was pretty good. Take them out to sink the overheads every time, and the room makes Manti or the tracks and record, so you hear the difference without it and with Satyan reverb on a separate track which call effects returning affects end. So those Then now, before we move on to the base, what's add some color to the drums so we could separate it from the base tracks. So let's take all these tracks. Had a record for now and with Cora drums their own color. Let's go with some kind of greenish like that If you wanted to, we could also put an icon in each one, either for the drums for all of them. Like this trek I can I got a D and choose drums and all the tracks have drums if you wanted to go back on the kick and kick and snare separate. But for the most part, we know it's a drum kit, so that should work. Now we could also do now is make a folder just to keep things organized. Put back on the top, kid. This button right here. Well, it Jones Now in a folder, we condemn this folder drums and spell it correctly, and now this controls all of it once you put them in record. Now for me for recording, I'm not really loving this reverb right now. My change it later, but for the German, he's feeling well distracted by it. So let's remove that track for now. We don't really need it. You know how to do it if you wanted to, and we just take this drum track out to lead it. I mean, we're back to this. That sounds pretty like that. And then we mix it. We always had more of Europe to it. If you morning too. So again now will say this. If you have any questions as I'm doing this in the middle of it, you're You can write him to me and I'll stop as long as it's not too in much in the way you have some now. I think we're good right now. Okay. Kuchar's enough. Save as we did. I could see him over saver, but never heard of anyone saving too much. So let's move on to the base tracks. Sure you miss anything? I don't think I did. Now, if you want to because they were folded here, we could compress the Germans as a total. If you want to get into that, I do that more from mixing. But if in tracking if you want to. Because of a folder, we could very easily make this big enough and put so effects on the drums overall. But I'm gonna leave it straight like this for now. So let's do some bass tracks to make these a little smaller. In fact, you can hit this right here to make them smaller little button that hides it. So let's take these tracks out of record and high. These making nice and small. Let's be some bass tracks. As you see, I made a new track and it did that. So that's not good. It put it in the folder. So we're gonna hit this button right here above the track and that pops it in to be in a folder again were completely out of not being a folder, which is what we want so I can close this and did it one more time on the drums. A hidden This could be a bass track when they were based. EI, as I mentioned earlier, we did three bass tracks. We get a base de I, and then we put the pedal in to his base D I to record the pedal like a distortion effect. And then we used miked up his AMP, which is also all being played live. Someone said our input tamano based EI and put it in the record. Now this sounds pretty good on the way in. So I'm not gonna go where we're about compressing it too much or even unique you because it sounds good on the way in for according I'm just gonna leave it. A simplest possible could always again and mixing mixing just a we're gonna tighter So it's got the base D on it to make another bass track will name a Space AMP know based pedal, and we'll set its input to a bass pedal here. Let's see what that sounds like. You can tell it's very distorted, but one of the nice things about it is you can blend it with this one, just get a little crunch out of it. So instead of boosting any like mid range to get more finger noise, you just bring this up and I'll cut more complicated mix a lot easier, as you see. So now it's at another track for the bass, AMP. Man said our input. Two bass AMP. and North, a bit rounder sounding. So now we can mix that with the D. I now is the same with the kick samples. I'm sorry as the same of the kick sounds, and the snare sounds very important. He's being phase or polarity, for instance. Let's do some recording of it, and then look at the way forms. That's enough. Take a matter of cord. What? Zoom in real close. They're not gonna perfect, But you kind of get an idea. That's most of distortion, one that's still doing up and here and kind of matching. But if you're not sure by looking at it, most important thing you could do is actually listen. So let's do that. Let's go two tracks at a time, starting with the base D I. What's mixing the AMP. What's invert the polarity off phase are keeping that button today. This is not the button I want. I usually have it this far out, so that's the button. I want so much thinner it sounds with it in get so hollow. That's because of the way forms are going, the opposite direction, each other. If you want to zoom in a little bit, I'll show you the difference when you pit this button here. We're really hearing. Is this theme stretch markers really hearing? Is this right here? So this is going up as this one is going down and this is going up at this one's going down. So they're fighting against each other, which creates some cancellation in the low end, which is why it sounds a little thinner. So if you put this back to this, sounds a lot more round. So once you get these two tracks right, we can then compare it to the distortion track and make sure that matters.

Ratings and Reviews

Buckeye Pete
 

Outstanding teacher. Kenny is by far the best of the Reaper instructor, and there are many good ones out there. He uses very understandable examples and presents in a fashion that the novice and expert can learn from. Great job Kenny.

user-603376
 

Kenneth Gioia best teacher on Reaper. thanks so much for time to teach. Reaper is my primary daw since last year - great daw. Thanks Creative

Grae
 

Mr. Gioia's "Kenny Mania" channel on YouTube has always been a TERRIFIC resource for my beginning to learn REAPER. That being said, his unique speech patterns always got old really quick. It's nothing against him, just a personal tick. Thankfully, Kenny is in top form during this course, and this is one of the most useful and feature-packed CL courses I've seen. Unless you're an absolute expert in REAPER already, there's plenty of information here to get you into becoming more familiar with my favorite DAW.

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