How to use REAPER to record AUDIOBOOKS (for ACX) - QUICK TUTORIAL

hi folks my name is Thea copeland also known as broke MC i am an actor an audiobook narrator and a podcaster and today i'm going to show you how to use reaper to record audio books for ACX alright folks so when you open up a reaper this is what it will look like when you first open it up the first thing you are going to want to do is to make sure that your mic is being routed into Reaper if you don't do this you stand a chance of recording using your computer's internal mic many of them have that these days and your audio will suffer greatly because of it so I'm using a Mac if you guys are using a PC do your best to follow along it's been a while since I have used a PC to set your on your analog input you're going to go to Reaper first and preferences under preferences you will find your audio device section and as you can see mine has already set itself up for the avid mbox which is what I'm using to input my microphone with now if you have a USB microphone like a Yeti or something like that when you click on the audio device list it should come up in this list as long as it's plugged in and powered on and if that's a case make sure it's checked and then you're going to hit apply and okay the very next step is you're going to make a track now the easiest way to do this especially for beginners is just to go to track up here and insert a new track very easy it comes up right here you could also click end or you can right click in this dark gray area over here and insert a new track like that or you can just do the hotkeys command T and it comes up I'm going to I'll just leave those up there we can look at them and maybe I'll show you how to play with them a little bit later the very next thing you want to do is to check and make sure that your microphone is being read by that track the way to do this is you're going to arm your track to arm the track as you can see if you hover over it it'll tell you what a lot of these buttons do you're going to click on this grayed out red button so that it lights up and then you're going to click on this gray area here where it says where it's as analog input 1 now I know that my microphone is coming in to analog input 2 on my Inbox chances are if you're using a USB mic it will just come up under this list so make sure that's checked and as you can see because my track is armed there is a visual readout of my voice as it is being picked up by the microphone if I unarmed the track it goes away so I'm going to rearm that track and at this point we're ready to record to record we go down to the transport the transport section is anywhere where you have a stop play pause and record button and we are going to go ahead and just hit the record as you can see it is picking up my voice if you are enjoying this tutorial and you have learned a lot please don't forget to leave a potatoe so everybody makes mistakes we trip up on a word or our stomach makes a noise or dog scratches at the door or siren rolls by anything like that now when this happens you don't have to stop recording all you need to do is make a loud noise you can clap in front of the microphone you can snap or you can go down to your local pet store and buy one of these dog training clickers when you do this you will see a visual representation of where you made a mistake so when you go back in later to edit you can find out all the spots where you said the wrong thing or something crazy happened that through all of your process please don't forget to leave a positive review in the comment section below when you're done recording go ahead and hit stop and this dialogue should pop up this is the wave that you just recorded that is what you can see up here and you were going to say save all if you didn't like what you recorded you can delete all if there are more than one here you can always select ones to delete and select ones to keep but for our purposes I think you only always see one here and you will just click Save all now if you want to listen to it you just press play as you can see it is picking up my voice just like that now where I want my file to start I am going to delete the very beginning now ways you can do is to what you see when you hover your arrow and around here you get sort of these different these different icons what this means over here is that you can click on it and drag it in and it will start cutting out the beginning you can also do that here on this side click on it and drag in to cut out the end I'm going to undo that so I can show you other ways to do it um before I go any further I should have shown you this before up here you see this magnet here this is snap okay for recording audio books I find it to be advantageous to turn snapping off so we're going to unhighlight the snap as you can see it says snap disabled at this point now what that does is all these little lines that you see when it's on snap it would snap to those but if you turn snap off you can sort of just scroll to wherever you want and that way if you ever make a mistake and you want to join Clips at a very precise moment you can find that moment a couple other things to know on your Mac trackpad when you put two fingers on it and drag up you're going to zoom out and if you put your two fingers onto your Mac trackpad and drag down you're going to zoom in so now that snap is off I am going to drag this in to where I want my file to start and I can change you can see the cursor is here I'm going to click here and the cursor is now right before where I wanted to start I'm going to hit the spacebar which makes it play if you are enjoying this tutorial and you have learned a lot please now just to be clean I'm going to drag this all the way to the beginning it'll only let you drag it to the beginning you can like drag it past the beginning point which i think is very smart now as I told you before a good thing to have is a dog clicker you could have also snapped but that's what you see here this is the peak and the audio you see it like looks like a click sound now you know what a click sound looks like we'll just play it so you can hear it I know that I made a mistake there because I said potato I didn't mean to say potato so what you want to do here and this is the fastest way that you can do this is you're going to put your cursor right before where you want it to where your actual audio that you want to keep comes in that's here please don't forget to leave a positive review that is after my mistake I said what I meant to say once you have your cursor placed you're going to press the s button s is for split and what it does is it creates a cut in your audio file so that there are now two separate pieces which is super wonderful because here yet to leave a potato I didn't want to say potato I'm going to zoom in by dragging downward with two fingers and I'm going to look for the beginning of potato which I believe is here tato oh that's tato potato potato you might say patata I'm going to press the s button again and as you can see this is now highlighted that's the potato that I want to get rid of and the clicking sound potato I am just going to press delete it's gone now I'm going to drag this over and as you can see because snapping I'm going to turn snapping on just to show you if it's on it will snap to these little lines here and that's not what we wanted to do so I'm gonna turn snapping back off I'm going to bring this in here I'm going to zoom in further and here's a great thing also that the Reaper folks have done for you they have made it so that when you drag to cut files together there's an automatic crossfade between them now what that means and you can see with these little red lines is that it will automatically fade this piece of the file into this piece of the file which is great because sometimes you can get little clicks and pops if you don't do that and on a lot of other files that takes a lot more time to do it so I've taken this piece I've dragged it into this piece and you see a nice neat little crossfade between them I'm gonna put the cursor over here and press the spacebar to play back what I've just done don't forget to leave a please don't forget to leave oh look at that I am repeating myself please don't forget to leave a please don't forget to leave it so this is that to where I want to cut it this is great because now I can just show you how to do it again the cursor is set before please which is what I want to replace it with I'm going to press s I'm going to select this file place the cursor where I want it press this button and then this is highlighted I'm just gonna press the leap and it's gone and then I'm going to grab this and drag it over you see there is the crossfade and now we're gonna go back and listen again and you have learned a lot please don't forget to leave a positive review in the comment section below when you're done recording go ahead and hit stop no we don't want that a little bit there so I'm going to set the cursor over here press the S it splits it and the highlighted piece I would just press delete and it's gone now we're going to skip back to the beginning and I'm going to press the spacebar to play this back for you if you are enjoying this tutorial and you have learned a lot please don't forget to leave a positive review in the comment section below if you are enjoying this tutorial so I'm DJ broke MC not now this is your audio book potentially you have cut and spliced together a bunch of little pieces you've gotten rid of your mistakes and your mouth sounds and your dog scratches and you have your final piece the way that you're going to export it this is very important is when you put your arrow up here at the top you get this little selection cursor if you click and drag you find that you can select a portion of it now when I do audiobooks I tend to do all of the chapters in one project so I will put a space between the chapters and then I will just select each chapter to export on its own the other thing we should go over before we do that is an effects chain to meet a cxas audio specification requirements you will need to probably do a little equalization some compression and then normalization those are the three most important FX plugins that you will want to use so click on FX here show track FX window that's gonna bring this up and this has all of my many many effects now to make this easy for today I have actually created an FX chain so this is the FX for track 1 and I'm going to right click in here and I'm going to FX chains and I'm going to load an FX chain and I have demo 2 now what is in here we have what is called a parametric EQ a parametric EQ is basically a graphical representation of all the frequencies that you can record and these are your low bass e sounds and these are your high sounds and pretty much anything below a 96 kilohertz 96 Hertz is like bass guitar sounds I'm being very simple with this because why be complicated so essentially you want to have a high-pass filter which means that all of the frequencies above where you said it will come through and everything below that will be taken out completely that means the train rumbling under your house or the P and the B sounds that your pop filter that you hopefully have in front of your microphone is trying to get rid of will also be be taken away significantly this is just a very helpful filter to put on especially if you live in an area where there happened to be just low-frequency rumbles and there are things that we hardly ever notice most of the time so a high-pass filter in this case I'm using the Apple au high-pass because I know that most Mac's come with that free so you can at least throw this on without having to jump through any hoops the second thing that I use is the Renaissance vocal from the waves corporation now on websites like don't crack calm you can get this normally for around 40 bucks which is a great deal this is a super easy to use plug-in and it will make you're recording this is sound very professional because it has a gate which is very helpful because it cuts out any room tone when you're not speaking and it also has a compressor which will make your voice levels a little more consistent it means when you get soft and when you get super loud it sort of compresses those peaks and valleys together so that you have a more consistent sound level volume level through your recording if that sounds complicated don't overthink it just get a compressor and put on a vocal preset and I do recommend with this one the final thing I have is a normalizer this is also a waves normalizer I think you can get it for like 30 or 40 bucks on don't crack calm this is the l2 ultra maqam Maximizer and this I tend to use the preset for the 16-bit moderate limiting find the preset throw it on and then what I alter is the out ceiling at least to a negative point through point zero three I sometimes go to point zero for a CX requires a negative zero point three out ceiling which means that it will take your recorded file and it will find the loudest point in it and it will boost it up to that out ceiling so that it will never peak or anything like that in your final file and your threshold was pretty much it's like another compression which will help even out your you're yelling and your whispering okay so with these all checked I'm going to press play and you were probably going to hear a bit of a difference if you are enjoying this tutorial and you have learned a lot please don't forget to leave a positive review and the I'm gonna turn them all off real quick so you can hear again if you are enjoying this tutorial and you have learned I mean to you it probably just sounds a little bit louder that's essentially the basics of it but by putting on this high pass if you are enjoying this tutorial if you are enjoying this tutorial its gonna cut out just anything but as you can see doesn't really affect the sound of my voice it just cuts out all the unnecessary frequencies that are not in your vocal frequency range and it's just an important thing to do in recording as you can see in here if you are enjoying this tutorial and you have learned a lot please don't forget to leave a positive review in the comment the gate is set so that the blue is the input that's me talking and every time that falls below the gate it's essentially going to cut out all the room noise in this it does it in a really smooth way and it sounds super professional you're not gonna hear you know the slight air-conditioning buzz or the cat farting or anything like that so it's a it's a good thing to have and your compression level you can adjust until you have sort of like the loudness that you're seeking I don't like to compress it too much off the bat because it starts to sound unnatural and then if I click on this one if you are enjoying this tutorial and you have learned a lot please don't forget to leave a positive review in the comment section below if your readings aren't going up to the threshold you can always bring it down a little bit if you are enjoying this tutorial and you have learned a lot please don't forget to leave a positive review in the comment section below and that will increase your overall loudness which is a very good thing okay so those are your effects if you have an effect chain and you want to save it you can just right click in this section FX chains and save selected FX oh so they've save all effects as chain it'll bring this up you can title it it'll save it in your ethics chains folder which I bet you didn't even know you had I'm not gonna do that because I already did it um if you wanted to just add other effects you click add you choose from your millions of effects that you have or don't have vsts you can just scroll through and see what you have if you don't haven't bought any yet you're gonna find a bunch of the free Apple ones under a you I think that's Apple Universal audio or something like that and as you can see there's the high pass there is a multiband compressor which is going to be a lot more complicated than the renaissance vocals but if you know a little bit about compressors or if you want to check out a youtube video about it I'm sure you can learn how to use it without buying anything especially if you're just trying things out for the first time yeah so you can add you can remove effects that you don't want this is a this is the M compressor from Melda productions also free though not super easy to use if you're not familiar with compressors which I threw it in here to show you something you could get if you wanted a little something extra but um it's a little more than I want to show you how to use in this tutorial so I'm just going to remove it and these are my streamlined high pass parametric EQ Renaissance vocal compressor and l2 ultra Maximizer which is the normalizer alright and these are all mono because in this we are recording mono files if it were stereo you'd see two of these side-by-side but you're only recording one voice at a time so you only have a mono file okay so once again we have selected our chapter that we want to export and now we're going to go to file and we're not going to save the project as we are going to go to render okay when you render it means you're going to take your recording and you're going to make all of the splices and dices and EQ effects and everything and export it as one final beautiful file click on render the things you want to make sure you have selected here is master mix for your source bounds I do time selection that is what we have selected here when you bring this up for the first time it's probably going to be entire project now that's gonna be all your chapters in one but you want to do it chapter four chapters so you'll make the selection and you'll make sure this is set on time selection alright you will name it I'm gonna call this demo it's going to put it into your reaper media Det Reaper media folder and as you can see it's coming out as demo wave now for a CX they prefer a mp3 so we're going to go to output format and we're going to put on mp3 44 1 Hertz is good stereo we want to change to mono because that is what ACX wants don't worry about that don't worry about that don't worry about all those things constant bitrate is fine lame is fine and 1 9 to 2 kilobytes per second is how ACX likes it as well so then all of those things set master makes time selection your file name mono 192 mp3 and that's down here as well 192 we are going to hit render and I'm going I already have a demo in there I'm just going to overwrite it and it does it like this there's no peaks if there that goes red then you've done something wrong and you need to go back and lower a level because you never want that to have turned red during your export close and when you go into your Reaper file you will see that it's there and that's it I hope you all enjoyed this little training video on how to record audio books with Reaper for ACX if you have any other questions or comments or maybe I missed something so if we leave some comments in the comment section and don't forget to subscribe also check out my podcast to the New York open mic podcast I am Thea Copeland also known as broke emcee and good luck with those audiobooks ebooks [Music]

Channel: brokemc

Views: 5,719

Keywords: acx, reaper, audiobooks, audible, narrator, narrating, recording tips, audacity, podcasting, podcast, editing audio, audio, home recording

Id: CyDIj3phAs4

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 14 2018