Mixing Rock with REAPER Stock Plugins

today I'm going to be doing a mix using only Reaper plugins so today I'm participating in the Reaper contest from the forum usually the rules are that you have to use only Reaper plugins and because this is a longer video I will do an ad read at the beginning this video is sponsored by skill share skill shares an online learning platform with over 29,000 classes on art design freelancing pretty much any topic you can find classes on the videos are great quality and their site is really focused on helping you learn right now I'm really interested in stop-motion video and I'll be using Skillshare to learn more about that I can see here that they have a lot of different courses on that topic already and so many other filmmaking topics I've been really enjoying what I've been learning about on Skillshare there's so much good stuff on there and it's now one of my first places I look when I want to learn something new if you want to use Skillshare for two months for free you can use the link in the description after that it's only ten dollars a month if you want to continue your membership and if you've signed up with Skillshare and and enjoyed your two free months let me know in the comments what kind of videos you've been watching if there's a particular favorite course okay so this is the song that I'm working on my father never loved me by trafficker and the BPM is 98 comes from the Cambridge MT site I wish I could say I've never heard it before but I've already recorded for an hour but when I went for a break I realized that the sound of the mix was not captured so starting over I'm gonna take all my audio files which are FLAC files if you don't know if lack is a lossless Lee compressed version of wave you can go to and from flack and wave without any audio quality loss Reaper will just play this back as if it was wave it decodes it in real time you will probably have a bit higher CPU because of it but they use flack just to distribute this easily alright so separate tracks so I can tell right away that these are really loud especially like the bass amp you know these go all the way up to the ceiling so we're going to turn this down by about 6 or 7 DB if I play this back now [Music] it did go to plus three but that's still much better than it would have been untouched I'm going to start off with importing track template to get these tracks organized so I'm going to right-click on any track go to my insert track from template and I've got my basic track folders here so I just put those up at the top of the session I'm going to take my kick over to my room mics I'm going to cut them and I'm going to paste onto the drum buss track which will then become my folder track there's no effects on anything the tracks they imported were just empty but colored a certain way named a certain way that sort of thing putting the shaker tracks into the percussion bus I mean the bass the eye on the bass amp into the base folder I know there is no acoustic guitar and I know there's no background vocals so I'll just delete those tracks and then electric guitar is there's a bunch of them and those go into the electric guitar bus and the keys Hammond goes into the keys bus and the vocal bus gets the leave I'll go okay so we're up to 30 so 38 tracks and I know that there's a lot of guitars guitar tracks here and they've just kind of gone crazy with microphones on these for some reason so the first set of guitars here just looking at the waveforms you can tell that they're either the same performance or similar performances going by the file names there's Mike One and Mike two and then Mike one and Mike two so that tells me that these are left and right guitars and I've just pandals left and right so it's all guitars sound like this [Music] okay but these next set they go for Mike one to Mike five so it's a bunch of different Mike's but it's all one performance which means panning is not really going to do much for us they don't seem to be like left and right stereo rooms or anything like that I think Mike fives that's a far rim I think Mike three that sounded more of a I got closer rim that's kind of odd [Music] kind of a fuzz mic not really fond of those two and so this one [Music] I think that combination works pretty well so I'm actually gonna just delete these other two going through this a little bit quicker because I've already spent many minutes doing this before [Music] I'm going to say that those are one performance and so these ones will be panned to the right and then these other three tracks will be panned to the left I'm using a control surface to adjust faders and panning okay so then there's another five mics now six mics for the solo so the solo sound like this alright so the first mic kind of thin sounds a bit distant pretty warm sounding that's a closer mic clearer think [Music] [Applause] is that a left and right [Music] [Applause] [Music] I can't tell I'm not a fan of like getting six different mics without any direction of how to use them to be honest I'd probably just use those two if I was recording this myself or if I made this recording and I listen to all those mics I'd probably end up with something like that or maybe also this mic too but that's a bit warmer thicker sounding so I'm actually gonna take these and just remove them from the track or from the project don't need them I'm actually going to set this to line up a little bit better so that's beat one essentially or that's a downbeat there so select all tracks and put a snap offset there turn on snap to grid and I snap that to barf beat bar five and I'll set a my start to you about here and what's listen to this whole song before I get too crazy with doing editing or anything like that I know that's a pretty good sounding track to begin with not a crazy amount of like surgery to do it on this and if I didn't mention this before I will do this with just the Reaper plugins and I will use my own impulse responses that I've made myself the same impulse responses that I've shared before and you can use them as well so here we go here's the full song [Music] well my father never loved me he let this lap his life is all [Music] [Applause] [Music] ha ha way [Music] if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day [Applause] [Music] being strong we would have drowned that same day [Applause] [Music] [Applause] go down Rory's in troubles Oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] learn no education that's worth the hard [Applause] [Music] no education the heart having been strong I could have easily lost my way [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] so that doesn't sound half bad with no effects on here very minimal even volume adjustment on this I think if you left a studio with stuff that sounded like this with just the road tracks you'd be pretty happy so obviously it's lacking certain things like reverb and delays and other sorts of special effects everything could probably use a bit of compression nothing too crazy I think this is a pretty good recording and it should be a pretty simple mix so I usually start a mix with the drum buss I don't always but usually I would say often I'll actually select all the track's and just turn them down but that you know it's just my way of working so bring up the drum buss and I'll start building the mix from there so I'm gonna take I don't know this section here maybe and starting with the overheads [Music] there's quite a lot of hi-hat in there might actually just adjust that a little bit right from the start [Music] often I like to make my overheads kind of do you know the overall sound of the kit depending on how they're recorded it usually is a pretty good balance of kick snare though the symbols that they're not just simple mics so if I can use the EQ on the overheads to get a better sounding kick and snare sound I will here's off so there's overheads and now I'll just bring in the snare next then a kick kick sub Tom's [Music] now this pan those Thomas a little bit and I'll bring you in the room Mike way too much symbols in the end the room mics if I was recording it I definitely would have fixed that so basically we can only use this as a sort of a loaf eye effect so we'll come back to that let's hear that one more time here [Music] where's that Tom's pretty good sounding Tom's there is a lot of bleed on these but you'll see it really just enhances the sound of the drums makes them sound more real so I'm going to go to this section right here so those Tom mics actually do a better job of being rim mics then the rim mic did but regardless I think this is a pretty good sounding drum mix you know just with panning and levels [Music] [Music] all right so let's bring in some effects so I'm only using the caucus folder of effects so we're going to compress this a little bit I'll do an exact four to one and bring down the threshold a bit here actually I'm going to want to not have the kick-drum overpower this compressor so I'm just saying to high-pass to 60 Hertz [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] if we sold the kick or the snare you can hear that it it's actually been gated most likely so there's a bit of bleed but is way but its way turn now so so that's a benefit for us as long as there's no mystery gears and things like that I didn't hear any just on the first couple listens to the song so I think we're good with that but that means that we don't need to add in another gate we don't need to hard edit anything so there's a je s plugin that I use quite a lot called the transient controller I might try that on the snare just to boost up the attack a little bit it just adds a little bit of a pop to that snare drum it's also quite good on kick [Music] onto this rim we'll put on our ecomp and we'll do 12 to 1 fast attack and fast release and fast RMS size so I'm basically making a distortion box with that [Music] [Music] all right so let's get that bass guitar in here [Music] we have a look at this bass guitar it's got these hard clicks that's really difficult to remove with the built-in stock effects we could basically just limit it to I'm not sure what those Peaks are but you want a really fast attack it's still kind of clicky so let's try to make this a little bit faster by lowering the RMS size and now it's distorting [Music] so I'm finding that it's not really possible to get rid of those clicks too easily that sort of popping sound is always going to be there yeah that's just kind of making it a little bit too distorted for me [Music] we'll probably have to rely more on the bass amp I think there's a bit of a phase issue here with the two mics so I'm actually going to zoom in here on the the bass bus and we're looking at both of these and the bass di reaches the computer a little bit earlier than the bass amp that's because the bass amp signal has a lot more as things going on with it I mean it has to go through extra circuitry for the amp the speaker that's going through the air for a short distance before hits the microphone you can choose to either delay the bass di or you could move the bass amp earlier I don't really have a preference for that and it basically comes out the same now we're only talking about two millisecond offset really let's just look at some of these yeah so that's that's lined up better they weren't completely out of phase or anything by just doing a slight nudge in of one of the mics or one of the signals gets it more aligned throughout the entire song alright so let's go back to the drums and get our level of the bass with the kick drum I'm going to EQ these two signals together rather than EQ a bass di in the bass amp separately [Music] let's leave it like that let's put on another recap and we'll just do four to one [Music] alright let's find a spot with a house shakers in it and bring those in [Music] I'm gonna cut out all the lows because there's really nothing important there yes that's better [Music] all right I'm going to use the where's a je s saturation plugin just the basic one this to i-45 it does affect the volumes with a little hard to to hear how that changes things but essentially we're just kind of adding in a little bit of saturation to both the drum buss and the bass that [Music] shaker is not a very important part of this at least this section of song [Music] you know what as much as I love that big boomy base I think we're going to need a bit of our e^x comp on not the base bus on the drum bus I'm just gonna do like a tube and EQ here and so I'll just compress everything below 90 96 [Music] you [Music] yeah I like that let's let's move on to the guitars and so these first four guitars can move up on there all together [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so with that EQ there I'm trying to find a spot where I can still hear the bass and the guitars which I could fit them both on the same screen [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you [Music] I've been putting these these two mics in at the same amount of gain [Music] hear them [Music] together so you can kind of get a different character with the two I think I actually like that a bit better and these other I think was three mics those other [Music] the warm one [Music] and with these you you [Music] you and I'm just looking at the the meter here to make sure that they're pretty about well balanced okay it's all the guitar six for the solo now there's that other section here where these guitars do something on their own and I've got that those panhard left and right or just to the left [Music] that might be a good indication that the the solo should be panned to the opposite side maybe we'll just do like half 50% to the left and we'll turn those up one at a time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so I know I'm going to want to affect these three tracks together so I'm just going to insert a new track above it and make it a folder got a shortcut to do that I'll just show you that real quick I'm using the shortcut command shift F for the script me two beats create folder from selected tracks plus rename folder so that is in the repack extension all right let's get this Hammond organ in here [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] feels about right there and get this lead vocal in here [Music] [Music] so first I'm going to use a limiting style compressor so ten to one and I'll do probably a little bit of a faster release than this and maybe even like a one millisecond and I'll bring this down so just want to make sure I'm getting like 6 DB of gain reduction that that's kind of my go-to and so if I'm hitting minus minus six or so I can turn up the output by six and it'll be are roughly the same volume but feel more powerful we would have drowned that same so that's getting rid of the the loudest peaks it's really pushing them down quite a lot and quickly we're doing another one and this will be not ten to one but like one point four and we'll do lots of nice eyes which just means that it's going to look below the threshold and we'll get a lower amount of gain reduction for anything below the threshold this one can be a little bit slower than that so let's try this again going for about six maybe ten DB of gain reduction [Music] we would have drowned that same day [Music] [Applause] [Music] even when the still go down worries and troubles all the next day [Music] if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day all right so with it off we would have drowned that same day add a bit of EQ to this we would have drowned that same day [Music] [Applause] [Music] if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] all right and then we'll just put on that saturation plugin again which I've got somewhere here you can put on the exact same setting on the vocal bus we would have drowned that same that's a slight edge to things now let's get some spatial effects on here so we're gonna do reverb one herb two and delay I have go-to plugins for this sort of thing and you'll see that in my my paid mixing courses for this challenge we're using the reaper plugins but i will use some of my own impulse responses so if you're going to use reverb the reverb plug-in re a ber be with impulse responses and you have this you usually want to have the set on its own track with the wet control all the way up and the dry all the way down we use the quick add and go to file and then choose a impulse response i'm using the ones that I've shared before I think when using one to 5:04 a I don't remember what I don't remember all the details of how that worked but 125 is is the time for it so this is a very short reverb 125 milliseconds RT 60 turn this down by 18 DB that's just gonna make it a lot more useful it's still probably going to be pretty loud coming out of here I'm going to take the send from the vocal bus into reverb one and probably turn this down quite a bit we would have drowned that same we would have drowned that same day okay so I think I need a little bit of EQ on this we would have drowned that same time getting a lot at 1k we would have drowned that same day if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day okay so that's kind of widens things up on the lead vocal I'm gonna do another reverb I'm just going to copy over that one and choose a different impulse response and we'll go with one of the longer ones maybe the the two 5001 a so it was just double the length and we'll take again the local bus send over to that track I'm gonna mute the first reverb so now we're hearing the second one let's go to a different effect if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] be strong we would have drowned that same day if my mother if my mother if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] be strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] [Applause] [Music] even when the Sun go down will resume troubles all the next day [Music] so I like that we can also use that on the Hammond so I'm going to take from the keys buzz into let's do the big one for that and go to a section of Hazard Hammond [Music] if we want to delay this a little bit I'm going to use Reda lay and we'll just make this like a pre delay control I'll just set this to like 12 milliseconds see how that sounds 25 so adding in a delay before it delays the onset of the reverb and that can add or create separation between your source and the reverb and let's hear that again with the vocal now turn off the reverb or the delay if my mother hadn't been if my mother hadn't been strong it just delays the sound going into the reverb and that just creates some separation I'm using a separate plug-in for that because reverb doesn't have a pre delay function there's this pre reverb function but it's not it's not the same as a predominant end the guitar solo into reverb one where is that our solo it is [Music] you [Music] what I was doing there was playing around with the panning and also using the mono button on the send so the individual mics here are panned half to the left right by using the the mono button made it essentially a single channel going into the reverb I'll just show you looking at reverb one and the guitar solo you can see that the guitar solo reverb is also coming out on the left and if we want this to be coming up more on the right you can pan it like this but it's technically going to turn things down I also set it to Mono first [Music] so we're sending that reverb a mono some and then we're panning it so that now it has an opposite tilt another thing you can do is reverse the direction of the panning or with the width control essentially do the same thing but because we're sharing this with multiple things it's a little easier to do it on the one send that we want affected in a different way so let's just make this like I think 50 just to match the guitars [Music] all right let's also do a delay for that guitar solo and so this is going to be a more traditional guitar delay let's make it stereo in this case as well so we're gonna take the pan turn that down 2-1 and we'll do 0.5 for a sixteenth note and I'll bring the feed back up til I got it on - twelve then click add tap and it'll take the pan go the opposite direction just add a little bit of stereo spread by delaying this right side by five milliseconds extra and counsel messing around with filters so it depends on if we want this to be kind of a bright or dark sounding delay or if we want this full range so right now it's set at full range giving us audio from 0 to 20,000 Hertz let's just make this eight thousand and five hundred so pretty filtered and these are just I just made up those numbers so you know there's there's no rules you just whatever it sounds good so here is the delay I'll mute the reverb printer there you can really hear the difference between these the stereo and the mono button on the send so with it in stereo our delays are going to be more to the left if we put in mono then it's going to process those two signals equally and you can see here on the the delay send it's a little more even we could keep it on stereo we can flip this direction around [Music] [Applause] I think it sounded pretty good that's basically it it's going to be a pretty minimal mix because the guitars are well recorded there's a some noisy spots but don't be deal the vocal sounded good to begin with everything was well recorded so it doesn't need a lot so yeah I'm gonna take a break and give it a listen and then and come back with some with I don't know what all right so I gave the song a listen and I had some thoughts definitely could put some somewhat of a longer tail on snare it's a pretty short easy way to do that is with some reverb so we'll just send to that longer reverb that one it's not the best sounding reverb it kind of sounds gated actually so I'm actually going to just put in a new reverb and put in another delay another reverb and let's try a longer one I'm gonna go with the 501 a and this one is going to receive from snare [Music] [Music] [Music] now I remember that a B and C are different fade shapes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I mean it's really not a great sounding snare reverb but here it is without and with full drum mix without snare reverb [Music] it's still a bit loud bring that down to minus 19 I find that everything from reverb needs to be turned down a little bit yeah turning it down 18 DB in the impulse doesn't it doesn't seem to be enough often so anyways so that is better with that percussion maybe that needs a little bit of the reverb so I'll just send that to probably oops not the lead vocal I want send to the reverb one the shorter one [Music] never loved me Livia's life is always raised up in the South raised up the hard hard way [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] being strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] I'm gonna try a different guitar EQ for just these two guitars I'm gonna set my mono button on for the master [Music] I'm actually gonna just solo one [Music] I'm going to try that for both of these guitars and see how that sounds [Music] it's a pretty subtle change but I think it adds a bit of separation between those two pretty similar sounding left and right guitars and took out some of those loaves that we really didn't need so I'm going to do something similar on the right side I mean the left side so again ma knowing that soloing just the first one [Music] let's try that let's put the two on their solo dolls hermano [Music] all right so there's all the guitars together without the EQ [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well my father never loved me he let this life is alway [Music] never loved me lippies life is all [Music] you he let this lap is always yeah I think having in that that really long reverb does help a bit with the lead vocal tempted to try it with the delay as well I like more more more is better in this case in my opinion I think with everything else kind of like pretty tight and dry and the vocal having a lot of like texture and stuff with with all these different reverbs is good [Music] [Applause] in the south the hard hard way [Music] [Applause] so on the master bus I'm using recom and I going to do something pretty similar to how I compressed the lead vocal with the second compressor so just a very light ratio on here and I'm gonna take sixty Hertz and below out of the detector input there's different there's different modes here there's the feedback pre fader don't tend to use that one but let's try that one just for today I have other compressors that I use more than recom I'm more comfortable with those and I have my favorite presets and I mix through them and it sounds great but this one's a little more trial and error but I know that everyone has this one so the main thing is just how it sounds [Music] [Applause] in the south the heart ha way [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] [Applause] [Music] be strong we would have drowned that same day [Applause] [Music] go down Laura's in troubles all the next day [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the allure no education that's worth the hard [Music] [Applause] no education that's worth the hard [Music] all right so here what I've done is a pretty light compressor it's working all the time on every note of the song I've set the release to 350 which is on the slower side but I've also used the auto release so it's going to kind of adapt to the music as well threshold is pretty low feedback pre fader detector input is what I'm using here and it has a different sound than the main input so I'll just compare those [Music] [Applause] the south the hard way [Music] [Applause] not drastically different but I think it's a if you just listen to the snare it makes a difference so anyways you know this isn't like a go-to setting for me or anything like that this is just kind of where I ended up with probably have different settings if you started your mix with these with a compressor on the master rather than adding it towards the end and one thing I almost never do is using the dry control so when I had the dry all the way down like I normally would with the compressor I was hearing hearing that it was compressed and rather than just turning up the make up gain I would turned up the dry signal so it's getting some of the uncompressed signal mixed in there it needs a limiter as well and I'm going to use the jas of enter aizen limiter clipper because it's already pretty loud I'm gonna set the threshold to zero and ceiling at minus 1.5 let's see how this goes [Music] [Applause] the heart our way [Music] [Applause] if my mother hadn't been strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] be strong we would have drowned that same day [Music] we'll go down worries and troubles all the next day [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the Loulou education that's worth the hard [Music] [Applause] no education had to work the hard [Music] be strong I could've easily lost my way [Music] so I'm just going through and making fine changes you listen to things differently or you hear things differently when you have limiting our compression on the master everything kind of sits a little bit differently so I'm just kind of doing small changes like in that last verse I was finding that the vocals sound a little bit thin and so just backing off that low-cut a little bit on him and the snare wasn't quite quitting through so I added in the soft clip or limiter just a hair of that but also I wanted everyone to kind of like hear how the song was going as a whole not soloing things [Music] all right so as a static mix I think that is pretty good that's a very good spot to stop that's the point when you would print the mix and and see see what the client thinks see what the band thinks no I think I've said this before in a video you don't have to use parallel compression on every mix you don't have to use drum samples on every mix you don't have to re a pen and you don't have to use Melodyne and all those things sometimes you just do what the tracks need and that could just be EQ and compression that could be adding some reverb that could be throwing everything you have doing sound design all that kind of stuff just to get the right sound in today's case it doesn't need much it started in a really good spot so it didn't take much to get it to to the level where I'm happy with it it doesn't sound dissimilar to how it started I don't like when a mix drastically changes the sound of the raw tracks especially when they sound good to begin with and that's where I'm going to leave it for today thank you guys so much for watching I hope you've learned something this was a lot of fun please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter support the reaper blog through patreon and visit reaper blog dotnet for a lot more tutorials [Applause] [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 26,926

Keywords: the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, jon tidey, cockos reaper, reaper mixing tutorial, reaperdaw, reaper stock plugins, mixing in reaper, reaeq, reacomp, reaxcomp, mixing a rock song, how to mix in reaper, reaper tips and tricks daw, cockos reaper tips and tricks

Id: WQZ0nivlCvQ

Length: 77min 4sec (4624 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RominRonin]

Added to watch later list. I'm interested in comparing his workflow with mine.