Mixing a song on Reaper | My mixing process

hello i'm paul douglas in this video you'll see me go through my mixing process as i mix a piano based instrumental full production in reaper now if you haven't seen my video on how i wrote and recorded this song i recommend you at least have a brief look at it i'll put a link in the description below hopefully you'll pick up a few tips and tricks for mixing your own songs using reaper please subscribe ring the bell like and share this video now i guess i'll start by just a very brief explanation of what is mixing um the idea is very very simple um you've recorded a load of tracks you know maybe drums guitar bass piano vocals whatever all mixing is is make sure that all of those are at the right volume relative to each other so making sure that nothing's overpowered anything else you can hear everything clearly that you need to that's it that is mixing now it sounds simple but in practice it can get quite complicated i try and keep it as simple as i possibly can now i have a multi-stage process that i stick to and the reason that i do that is to stop me sort of my mind wandering and trying this and then trying that and getting you know confused and in a mess so you can see my project uh loaded up in reaper here um now first things first a couple of preparation stages before we even start mixing first stage maybe i could call this stage zero get organized so the reason we do this is to just make your life easier later on in the mixing process so you can see here that i've um i always have a standard consistent way i arrange my tracks i always have drums at the top then bass then guitars then pianos or keys if i had any vocals in this uh in this project they would come next and you can see i've used colours for all the tracks now there are only 10 tracks in this project so it's not that it's not that difficult to find a track that i'm looking for but it's not unusual to have 100 maybe 200 tracks in a project and if you've got that many you need to have a way of locating tracks quickly and having a color scheme is one way of doing that um so i mean there's several ways you can do this in reaper right click on a track uh we get a track color and you just pick a color out of there relatively new thing in reaper if you go to options and themes theme adjuster color controls and then you can use these so if i picked that one there i could just pick a different color for it and reaper actually defines these themes for you which is a feature i've started making more and more use of recently second preparatory stage um of course stage 0a or something um go through each track in turn and make sure they're all good enough so make sure there are no clicks and pops or audio drop outs make sure you know if you're recording a guitar and you've got some amp hum before the guitar starts make sure you cut that off um go through and make sure each track is as good as it can be um this again will make your life much easier when you come to actually do the mixing proper you hear people say the phrase fix it in the mix sometime there's no such thing really you can sort of make compromises and improve things but you know it's much better to fix it on the way in so if ultimately if you find that you have a track that's unusable you know re-record it okay so so we're all prepared we've got organized all our tracks are as good as they can be let's switch to the mixing panel which is what we're going to be mostly using here so on the pc the shortcut for that is control m and here we are this is where we're going to be spending most of our time in the mixing process just one thing i will say about the layout of the mixer here as i said before we've not got that many tracks in this project but if you did have loads and loads of tracks there are some layout options uh you can use here so i've got that auto arranged tracks in mixer set here so that will auto arrange them but you can take that off and uh just move tracks around um itself if you want so you see i've moved that pad synth track over there you can also set show multiple rows of tracks when size permits this is important if you have a project with lots of tracks so with that set on if i just um make that window smaller you can see that it's arranged them into multiple rows if i take that setting off and i do the same again it doesn't do that they disappear and you have a scroll bar to scroll through them so if i had a project with many more tracks than this what i would do is i would have that setting on and you know i'd make this window as big as it can be on the screen and i'd have multiple rows of tracks so i can see as many as possible at the same time okay stage one is game staging what is gain staging well gain staging is when you have all the faders in their default positions so um that would be there you know you can see where the default position is by this line these little lines here on the tracks where our mouse point is going with all the faders in a straight line there we want all the tracks to be the same volume or roughly the same volume why do we do that well supposing uh you've gone through your uh song and you've got the levels uh pretty much where you want them but you've had to turn one track right the way up to the top to get it at the correct volume and then you start mixing and you realize oh actually i need that trap to be a little bit louder where'd you go it's already at the top of the fader so there's nothing you can do so what we're trying to do with gain staging is make sure that there's a similar volume in that straight line with all the faders there so we have enough room on the fader to make the track louder or quieter as we see fit it's essentially just making your life easier for the next step so that's gain staging uh there are a couple of ways i do gain stage teething gain staging in reaper if you have a plug-in on the track so let's uh let's pick this guitar as an example here so i have bias fx on this track making the guitar sound we open that up i can control how loud that track is using this master output here so if it was too loud i turn it down if it was too quiet i can turn it up like that if you don't have a plugin on the track we can add a plugin to control the volume so if i add a plug-in there and let's just search for oops vol volume adjustment there we go so you can see here uh currently um that plug-in will increase the volume by 6 dbs take it down i can go up so just by using this volume adjustment plug-in and that's all it does is alter the volume of the track um we can uh increase or decrease the volume with the faders all in that default position so when you finish this if we just go through what you will see is with all the faders this position you'll play the song the volume of all the tracks will be roughly the same i'm just going to uh tell you about stage two which is optional which is loading in a reference track uh what's a reference track you may have a particular sound that you're going for there may be a song that you like but you want the song to sound you know sonically similar to and if you load it into reaper um then as you're mixing you can compare what your mixing moves are doing in comparison to that track now i haven't used a reference track here um one you know i don't want to play a commercial track video because of copyright restrictions and two uh i didn't really feel the need to in fact um so that's a stage that's up to you stage three is an initial static mix basic levels so what we're going to do here is we're going to listen through to the song from beginning to end maybe two times um and we're just going to move the faders just up and up or down to get the volumes relatively direct to each other and we're not going to do anything complex and we're trying to do this stage quickly the idea is to get quickly get a basic mix that sounds pretty good where all the instruments are sound okay sound pretty good for 80 to 90 percent of uh the song um it's important to not dwell on this and i would say don't take more than 15 minutes to do this stage so we just play through the song and we're just going to move ada's as we see fit [Music] of course this song is mixed so i've already gone through all these stages but you get the idea that's all we're going to do it's a very basic very basic mix where we're just moving the faders to where everything sounds pretty good for most of the song and that gives us an initial mix that we can build on at this stage i'm going to make a very important point about taking regular breaks throughout this whole process um especially if you're mixing on headphones like i do you may think i'm crazy to mix on headphones but it's the best option in this room for me given the equipment that i have available to me um so i would say you know 15-20 minutes and i know that doesn't sound like a lot of time take a break doesn't have to be a long break just five minutes walk away go and have a chat with someone watch a bit of television whatever um because your ears do fatigue quite quickly especially with headphones on and if you don't do that you will start making mixing moves without being able to judge them properly and you'll come back the next day and listen to it and go what was i thinking so take regular breaks stage four check headroom what do i mean by that so play through the loudest part of your song the loudest part my song here um right here right at the end and what you're looking for is these numbers here how loud the whole song is now if that master track if it peaks at say above -6 dbs create a submix bus sub mix track um so how i would do that is i could create a track here i could just call it submix and what i can do is i'll then root take the master send off all the tracks and i'll route all the tracks instead of to the master fader i'll route them all to this um sub mix here and i guess the easiest way to do that is to use the routing matrix so here we go so you can see all my tracks are routed to the master fader there i'm going to take all those off instead i'm going to route everything to that submix that i just created and the submix track itself is now the only one rooted to the master fader we can still hear everything what i can now do is control the level of the whole track using this submix failure so if this was peaking at above six i could use this one to bring it down so it doesn't and the reason we're doing that is simply for headroom to give us enough room so when we start messing around with the levels of individual tracks and we start making things louder that we're never in any danger of peaking out on the master fader and getting distortion and ruining the track okay then stage five is eq now very brief explanation of eq eq is like a volume control for individual frequencies so when you've got instruments that have a very similar frequency response you can clear up fighting frequencies you know you could take out a bit of two kilohertz in in one track and boost a bit of three kilohertz in another track very important to to be able to have that very fine grained control to make sure all your instruments sit uh nicely with each other in the mix now i can't tell you what eq moves to make in your music that depends entirely on your music and always be guided by your ears you know um there are several standard eq moves that you can make but you know if it's a standard move that everyone that you found a tutorial online that says oh you should do this if it sounds rubbish in your song then don't do it you know do something else instead always be guided by what it sounds like now reaper's eq the built-in eq re-eq is actually very very good so if we look here on this trim guitar left i have um this rear eq plug-in and it's a fairly standard uh e plugin and as i said it's a pretty good one um so you've got four um points that you can control here um and you can see the moves that i've made so now this illustrates one of the those standard eq moves that i was talking about so very often with melodic instruments it's common to use what is called a bypass filter and that does what it says it passes through high frequencies and it blocks all the rest so if you've got um a track like this where most of the low end is coming from the bass guitar and the bass drum i don't want low end from other instruments interfering with that like guitars so i um round about that 100 hertz mark there i pass everything all the frequencies above it and cut all the frequencies below it and that's what that does if i if i turn that off you can see that frequency response there is just a straight line enable that and um yeah cuts off all the low end in that instrument it doesn't fight with the bass again i've this is a sort of standardish move for guitars i've cut a little bit at 1k there boosted a little bit uh at 2k and boosted a little bit at 10k there now i'm not going to go through a load of standard eq moves because there are a million tutorials on online on youtube um that will give you that information but again it's very important be guided by your ears and your own song and your own idea of what you want to sound like one last point to make about eq in general uh favor cutting over boosting so if you've got an option between cutting a frequency on one track and boosting it on another i would favor cutting it on that one track and if you're going to cut a frequency so lower it then then make that cut a narrow cut and you're going to boost make that a bit wider so what that means is if i just exaggerate here so if i pull that right right down i can control how the shape this curve here by using this bandwidth control so when i say cut narrow i mean let's make that narrow there um and then if i change this to be a boost i say boost wide so you can see that's a narrow boost that's a wider boost that's another general rule again it's only a guideline so it may not always be applicable but cut narrow boost wide okay then into stage six which is compression very brief explanation of compression if you've got a track that's got a wide range of volumes so it goes very quiet and very loud what compression does make the quieter parts louder and the louder parts quieter so instead of having that big range of volumes you get a shorter range of volumes and what that's going to do is make it easier for that track to sit in your mix consistently rather than you always having to fight with the volume on that track and pulling the volume up when it's very low and pulling the volume down where it's very high so i've got some compression on the piano tracks here reaper's compression plug-in built-in is very good it's called rear comp let's just open that there and let's just play um the track [Music] now what you can see happening there is see this little red bar coming down so every time you see that coming down it's reducing the volume of one of the higher volume bits that's it really now i'm not going to go through a detailed tutorial on compression again there's loads of those online and on youtube you can give yourself a bit of a head start by using one of the presets as a starting point before you mess around with the parameters and i've actually used an acoustic guitar preset on the piano here and what you'll end up doing is playing your track and just controlling the threshold here so if i pull this right down the piano will go a lot quieter and you can see it's really really clamping down on those louder ones now if i push it back up [Music] so that's how you basically use compression is control that threshold parameter until you get to a level where your track is sitting nicely in the mix the other thing you can do is use let's just start again it's called make up gain so if i use this control [Music] and hear it going louder what we're effectively doing there is the volume at the top has come down and then we're lifting the whole volume of the track back up again and that that's what i mean by squashing okay we're nearly there now stage seven is automation now as you're going through uh your track and your mix you're moving the faders up and down to get everything at the right volume you may find that there's one track that you have to do that a lot on you have to okay this bit needs to be louder but this bit needs to be quieter oh this bit needs to be louder again this needs to be very quiet um and you find yourself throughout the entire mix uh constantly moving the faders up and down and if you've got that on more than one track um well you're scuppered really because how do you move quickly between tracks what you can do is use automation to record those moves you've made on the fader and play them back so you don't have to move the fader manually now in this track i didn't use any automation because i didn't need to it just didn't need it so let's uh let's perform a quick uh example there let's take the drums track we click on this trim button you can see all the parameters we can control with automation volume is one of the most common ones if we uh where it says automation mode select right here um what this will do is any moves i make on the fader it will record them so let's just play the song and i'll move the fader as it's playing so you can hear i took the drums right down there and brought them right back up again and you can see that that's made this curve here that volume automation curve if we then um select uh this again and now change that back to trim stroke read what that will do is it will read back those volume moves that i made on the fader so have a listen i'm not doing anything to the fader at all now here are my hands and you can hear the the move that i did make on the fader is now being played back without me actually having to move the fader manually okay so we're at the last stage now we've done our eq and compression any automation necessary or after we've done our first initial basic static mix we're now on to uh mixing down to a stereo track so in reaper that's very simple if we go to file render and there's a few different settings set you can choose how much of this track you want to render so you could have the time selection so we just if i selected that much it would only render that much of the track or back to that uh render dialogue um we could select entire project and there's a few settings there not going to go into um you pick a folder for your track to go into and a file name and there's various settings that you can play around with here uh generally i would have thought that the defaults will be okay it's a long time since i first installed reaper so i can't remember what the defaults are but um 44.1 kilohertz sample rate and stereo is the um good that's uh cd uh quality um wire format 24 bit pcm is what i always render down to and then we click the render one file button um it's going to change the file name of that so i don't um overwrite the one i've already done render one file and there we go there it is rendering that file down to a stereo wav file okay so there you go you have your your final stereo wav file mixed down you're not quite finished what you want to do now is you want to take that file you want to listen to it on lots of different systems so uh you know your computer through headphones hi-fi system uh stereo that might be in the kitchen your car stereo uh listen to it on something you know with really crappy tinny no bass response speakers like a phone um listen to it on as many different systems as possible and make sure it sounds good on all of those if anything needs changing take notes and you can go back to the mixing process and make um make little adjustments there and listen out for things like you know anything fighting for space in the mix anything that overpowers everything else and it's good to do that on systems that you're familiar with so you know what you know what sounds good systems but you know don't have unrealistic expectations don't expect a huge amount of bass coming out of the phone because it's physically impossible with a tiny little speaker okay so that's it we have our uh hopefully final mix down stereo wow track now the next stage in the process will be mastering and we'll take that file that's come out the mix process and put that through a mastering process which is actually a lot simpler and should be quicker process than mixing now look out for an upcoming tutorial on me taking you through that exact process taking this track my mix down track here and putting it through the mastering process and hopefully at the end of that we have a track that's ready for release okay then thanks very much for watching please subscribe and hit that bell like and share this video don't forget to check out the links in the description below keep making music and i'll see you again in the next video cheers you

Channel: Paul Douglas

Views: 49,792

Keywords: mixing a song on reaper, cockos reaper, reaper tutorial, reaper, music production, using reaper to make music, digital audio workstation, daw, songwriting, songwriting tips, how to write a song, record a song using reaper, making a song using reaper, how to master a song in reaper, how to mix a song using reaper, how to record guitar on reaper, how to record digital piano on reaper, ezdrummer reaper, Paul Douglas, Paul Douglas Musician, PaulDouglasMusician, mixing music

Id: 1xfU7IM4oBU

Length: 26min 1sec (1561 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020