Reaper DAW 101 Part 3:- Routing - Busses, Sidechain and more

hi everybody Adam Steele here from hot Pole studios and today we're talking about Reaper BAW in the first part of this series we talked about the basics and how to get to grips with recording audio and MIDI and in the second part we talked about the inbuilt effects that you can use in Reaper now we're going to get into some of the real nitty gritty stuff and we're going to talk about how to do routing or routing depending on where you're from which means how to send a particular sound to another channel and what that can mean and what you can do with that and how it can get quite complicated but really be quite effective let's show you all that right now [Applause] [Music] before we get into this too deep I just wanted to tell you that this show is brought to you by you guys through patreon if you check out our patreon we are supported entirely by you guys you guys help us to keep the lights on as it were help us to keep filming more stuff like this and in return we try and give you things like early access to the videos direct access to us for things like mixing advice all sorts of things check that out it really helps us out thank you once again so you can't really talk about routing without talking about effect because without the entire idea of effects you don't really need lots in terms of routing so if I were to hit play on this project I've got sounds [Music] so I've got my drums I've got my guitars I've got everything and if I wanted to add effect to these you'll see I've got a couple of e cues here on the drums and on one of the guitars and they are inserts inserts are the most simple way of thinking about routing which is to say you've got a sound you're running it straight through that effect and straight through to the output of that channel that's nice and simple but we don't always want to do but we don't always want to do that quite often we'll want to send a little bit of that audio or all of that audio somewhere else and one of my favorite examples of this is a reverb so well we'll start simple with the send I did talk about this in the basics but I'm going to go over this again very briefly I'm going to make a new channel called reverb and I'm going to add the reverb helps when you can spell reverb a plug-in over there entirely wet so that's on a separate Channel so now if I want to send some drums if I look at the drums on our Edit window I can see that there's this tiny little button that's got root on it I can click that and that will bring up the routing menu alternatively if I'm on the mixer window just to show you this then there's the routing button here as well if I click that brings up the same window now that everything is set as usual we'll talk about this very quickly but the sins I can add a new send I can find the name of the track that I want or the number of the track that I want which in this case is reverb and click that and that will then send the drums through to the reverb so if I solo the drums you can now see in the mix window that the drums have got sound and the reverb has got sound if I was to solo just the reverb we'll hear that and that's just reverb now why would I want to do that this is very important why would I want to have the reverb separately there are so many reasons but the main reason for me is what if I wanted to send some of the guitars to the same reverb what if I wanted to send some of a vocal to the same reverb that makes life easy because then I've got one reverb separately that's on a send and also then if I change anything in that reverb that effects all the channels all at once the other reason is now I can do things like I've got this reverb here what if I want to add an EQ after that reverb to take out all the low-end maybe I'll high end just on the reverb and not screw up the sound of the drums or anything else that I'm sending to it that will now become say a real if I want a radio effect the drums are really push the mids but only on the reverb and have those drums as they were without being affected you can now hear that that reverbs really quite mid focused I might not want to do that in a mix but there are so many options I can do things like I could distort that I could compress it I could do anything with that reverb before or after the reverb on that insert right there and that doesn't affect everything else that I'm doing that can be really quite a useful thing to do now that sends and inserts here's another thing that may be useful for you now this send has a level here if we bring up that routing in fact let's bring up the routing page again because that's all just there but if I click on that separate reverb we only get this little bit so it's not taking up the entire space of the screen and we can see that there's a volume here of how much we want to send we can actually pan the amount of the drums that are going to that reverb separately without changing the pan on the drums now here is a drop-down that's very important where it says post-fader post plant if I turn down the drums and then turn them up that effects the reverb as well and that's because that send is currently set as post fader if I do a drop down here I can make it pre fader but post effects which means that the drums will go through this EQ with that little notch that's in there for whatever reason then if I change the amount of drums that we're hearing it doesn't change how much is going to the reverb they're then completely separate sometimes you do want that because that then means that you can have separate controls so that you can have separate tracks that don't get affected and depending on your workflow that can be really useful and also before that was pre effects so you can actually send the raw audio out from a channel to another channel and also have all the effects on that channel so you're not copying and doubling and tripling channels this is something I do a lot with something like I don't know a bass but I'm going to do it with the drums here what let's let's do this so here's something that I do quite often let's just get rid of that reverb and just make a new channel underneath drums keep missing the country so let's just say let's compress these drums really really really hard okay so those drums are now being compressed really hard but what I can do is I've made a new track called drums clean if I now find my routing window I can send the drums to that drums clean and I can do it pre effects which means that I now get another channel with the original drums with no compression or anything on them without having to undo all the work that I've already done on the original Channel so you can have a really complicated setup on a channel and if you then decide you need the original sound somewhere else I don't then have to copy and paste all that the audio files I can just have a send and that also for me is a benefit because then if I edit the audio because of copy not copied and pasted them I'm not having to do that over and over and over I still have the freedom to edit things once and still have all these copies of the track that are going on separately that can make workflows a lot easier so now I've got clean drums and a distorted drums and they're running completely separately of each other which means that I can have a really easy way of doing that you can also use this for I've every now and again done things like had a vocal go to a a reverb but without compression so that as the singer gets really loud you get more reverb all that kind of thing but that doesn't affect the heavy compression that's already on the main vocal in the track that's really quite an effective thing and it's just about in your mind where the cable comes from in the routing and where it goes much like on analog mixing desk where you are patching things in from it's just the case of in your mind going while I want the sound to go from here to here before that happens the next thing I'm going to talk about here is sending something out to an external effect let's say you've got a separate outboard compressor or outboard EQ you want to send sound to that or even something like a separate headphone mix let's say that you don't want to use you master output you want to send that so you've got a different balance somewhere else what you would want to do there let's bring up the mix window again let's use the routing on this guitar right here and open this up so the first thing we have is the master send which is sending the audio from this channel through to the master which is what we tend to hear we tend to hear the master coming through the speakers but then right at the bottom there's audio Hardware outputs this isn't the same as sends in Reaper this is physically going to send the audio out of a channel on something like the sauna so for us at the moment analog 1 an analog 2 are the master outputs but if we send this out for analogue 3 out the unlock Hardware I've now got a choice of how much volume or to send to that if I was sending that to a compressor for example I might want that to be pre fader so that when I'm changing the level of what I'm hearing in Reaper it's not affecting how the compressor works but that will then just get sent out and do its thing if I then wanted to I could then have a new track that's got record armed and then treat that as a new source coming in that's one way to do that if that's what you want to do or if you're running live sound this way you can send several different tracks out of different outputs so you could have the bass coming out of one out put the guitar coming out of another so that your guy who's doing the mixing live has control over everything separately I've seen that done quite a few times however I tend to find that if you're working and you actually want something like an outboard compressor as an insert so you you want to send the sound out to this outboard compressor then bring it back it's a real hassle to have to have a separate channel with a separate record and all that kind of stuff and delay compensation so that's where a plug-in called re inserts comes in re inserts is amazing because what reinsert does I can decide here by bringing this up this will then send this audio out through the outputs that I choose so I can go analog 3 & 4 or anything like that I can send MIDI out if I've got MIDI outputs and I've got a MIDI track I can then send that and then I've got Hardware returns so I can choose what channel it comes back in for and there's automatic device latency adjustment so it knows that there's going to be some latency in the audio interface because there always is it's not always much but this means that it's automatically going to make sure that it comes in perfectly in time and then I can change the amount of volume going to it and coming back from it and I don't need to then record anything or have any really complicated routing this one plug-in will mean that my vintage analog equipment will then be treated like a plug-in for me that's great because it means that the routing is really simple and I get to use classic gear instead of sending audio I could just say non non and send out of a MIDI channel to something like my Yamaha dx7 keyboard and then use the hardware returns for that so if I've got a MIDI channel that's been played in here I can have by using re-insert I can send the MIDI out have latency compensation all that kind of stuff so that when I hit go it will just start playing the dx7 into that channel and treat it like that and then you can freeze or render that track which I'll talk about in another video to then keep that permanently if that's what you need to do at this point I'm going to talk about gating a little bit because it's something I didn't talk about in the previous episode about effects because gait thing I wanted to talk about in combination with routing because half the time I find that a gait is really something that is routing dependent so I'm going to use firstly I'm going to try a gate on the drums because then that should be quite easy to talk about so I'm not going to talk about this for too long because I want to talk about the routing part of this more than anything so if I bring up a gate it's got an infinite threshold right now so anytime it's not going to do anything [Applause] [Music] but let's say we only wanted the hits of those drums to come through that but but when we hit play you can see the green they're bouncing up and down on those snare and kick hits so if we bring our threshold up to there and then hit play and listen for it we'll hear it start to kick in around there and cut out the sound when it's not loud enough to get past that okay so you can hear the that threshold on the gate when the sound goes above that we get sound so the release is how quickly it closes the gate again which can make it more natural the attack is actually the opposite of a compressor it's kind of how slowly it opens up if you too quick with an attack on a gate it can sound strangely clicky hold is once it's triggered how how long it just stays open which can be quite a useful thing you can do clever things like you can use this on a reverb to give that big 80s feel without doof kind of thing you can also use the low pass and high pass here which actually just they don't change the sound of what you're doing they change what the gates listening for in terms of what you want it to use to open that gate if you've got a really heavy kick drum but there's a lot of cymbals going on you probably don't want the cymbals to open the gate so you tune this so that just the low part of that kick drum that buh-buh-buh-buh-buh is making the gate open similarly you can do that with any other kind of drum or anything else where you don't want Rumble to open the gate you don't want simply wash to open a gate that can make it nice and clean if we use the preview filter output tick box that'll show us exactly what it's listening for as well cool so that's one way of using a gate but now we get into the idea of routing so let's say we want to gate on these guitars but let's say I mean this is a bit crazy but let's say that in this case we want the that bom ba-dum ba-dum bum but for the guitars so the guitars will go good on based on when the drums hit there are times that you might want to do something like this especially in electronic music so let's set up this on the guitars [Music] see it's never going to be affected by the drums unless we somehow use the drums as what you might call a key or an auxiliary input because a gate has a detector and the detector is literally the bit that detects when the gate should be open or closed you can either send this guitar you can you can send its own signal to the detector or you can use something else with the detector how do we do that routing so what we're going to do is we're going to look at this drums channel and we're going to add another send but this is where it gets clever we're going to add a send to our channel for guitars which is channel 3 guitar 1 Mike's old normal it's a silly name but here's where we get clever underneath that scent it says audio 1 & 2 going to audio 1 & 2 and we don't want that we want the audio 1 & 2 which is the stereo of the drums to go to some new channels on the guitar track let's say 3 & 4 because we're not going to hear those so if we hit play you'll see on the mixer now you can actually see the guitars coming through fine but then also there's an extra two channels where the drums are pumping and what we want to do is go back to regain now and you can see it says four in two out at the top because the four in now this guitar if we look at the routing for this it says the track channels it now has four channels left and right and then extra ones that we're not hearing and it's got a receive two three and four and rege a is a plug-in that has four inputs so we want to change our detector input to auxiliary input and that means that now if we preview filter output that that is now what's making the gate so now that sounds really weird to me but let's bring it in with the drums [Music] [Music] cool so that side-chaining compression now a lot of the time I see this done in mixes especially in electronic music the opposite way round where the kick drum and usually it's the bass are kept opposite of each other so that when the kick drum hits the bass doesn't play now the way that you do that we're almost there here we're going to change our gait we're going to add the dry signal in which is the original sound of the guitars so that they're both playing and then we're going to hit this button that says invert gate duck because ducking is what we want so the wet and dry are now completely opposite of each other so when they're both playing at full volume they actually cancel out so this should now do the exact opposite effect [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] it's making me a little seasick there but the idea is that the signal that's hitting the gate is making it go the other way and only close the gate when there's enough signal from the original so you'll actually hear especially on synths and bass on house music you'll hear that but what what what what that's using a gate in this way so that you can then have that nice and timed at this point we need to talk about grouping because one of the ways that I make mixing simple for myself and one of the ways that a lot of guys especially in the analog world make things simple for themselves is they will mix into groups or buses depending on the way that terminology is the same thing so let's say you've got four guitars you might do a little bit of separate EQ or whatever on those guitars but then when it comes to a full mix you'll tend to have a guitars bus so you'll have a group or a bus whatever you want to call it that is just a fader or a stereo pair of faders that do just that it's most common with drums because let's say you've got 20 channels of drum microphones you don't want to be leaning over that trying to change the volume of all of it you want to send all of that to somewhere that's just a a stereo group where you can just make that more or less you can compress or EQ the whole thing together you can do that as simple separate things that clear the mind and make mixing so much easier for you that's something I do on every mix that I do because it makes my life simple there are two ways to do it there's the traditional way which is using send to make groups or this the way that I tend to do it which is a more modern way which is folders so let's talk firstly about the more traditional way which is sends the guitars are a really good example here so like I've said before Reaper doesn't have group or bus tracks and audio tracks and instrument tracks and it just has tracks much like an analogue desk just has inputs and outputs the channels that's how Reaper works it is simple in that way so what we're going to do is we're going to look at routing the first thing we're going to want to do if we want a guitar group or a guitar bus is we're going to need a track to be that bus to be the group so I'm going to make a new track I'm going to move it over so that it's kind of close to what we're doing but it could be anywhere and I personally tend to have my groups right at the end much like an analog mixer would do I tend to have them all together but let's call this guitar buss and I'm doing it in capital letters just for my own peace of mind so that I can see I tend to find that capitals stand out for me and so if I hit play that won't do anything [Music] [Applause] [Music] because those three channels of guitars haven't been told to go anywhere other than the master output so let's solo one of these guitars and look at the routing so the routing might play so the routing for this is going out of the master so if we want it to go out of a group we probably don't want it to go out of the master as well although we could if that's what we want to do for some reason if I uncheck this master send the faders will still go but we won't hear it because it's not coming straight out of the master now this is where routing can get a little complicated and you've got to think about it all in your mind so now we want to send this to the guitar buss and that will come through the guitar bus so the reason we're now hearing it is because even though it's not coming out of the master send its going to the guitar bus and the guitar bus is coming out of the master send so if we look at the routing for this guitar bus the master send is ticked here and instead of ascend and instead of the send on the left we see a receive on the right because everything that sins has a receive in terms in inside of Reaper Hardware sends you get to choose but if you're sending something in Reaper it has to be going somewhere and that receive is right here so that's now coming through and through the master send I'm going to do the same with both of these other guitars I'm going to uncheck the master send send it through the guitar buss and the same with the guitar solo so that's all coming through now if we unsolo it all hit play [Music] it all sounds exactly the same as it did before the key difference is if I solo this guitar buss channel now that's all coming through there which means I now have a separate volume slider for all of the guitars together and also I can now send that entire guitar bus to somewhere like a reverb so I'm not having to do it individually so I've then got a much more broad control I can have effect like let's say there's an EQ that I want just on all of the guitars so if I [Music] so if I want a treble boost say on all of the guitars at once that's now done just once and I don't have to change it every separate time I find this quite useful with something like drums where I might want to use compression on all of the drums all at once by having them going through a group or bus that then gives me a stereo set of drums to work with without taking away the fact that I can still balance and affect the separate drum channels if it turns out that the balance wasn't right or something needed changing there [Music] in this way I tend to find that my mixes at the end have a drum boss bass rhythm guitars lead guitars acoustic guitars main vocals backing vocals effects and maybe since so in less than 10 channels then I can have a really complicated song with over a hundred channels going on and once each individual one is edited and balanced and that kind of thing I'm only concentrating on those and nine or ten channels at the end and it makes thinking about it so much easier now for the more modern way of doing it that I find works really well for me this is something actually learnt from Cubase but then was implemented in Reaper and it's something I use a lot and that is folders so again if I make a new track and call it nano guitar folder I will find that there's this makes life simple so I've gone back to the routing of having the separate guitars coming back out of the master send so everything we just did has been reset back to normal so if I make a guitar folder channel the first thing that I have to do is make the guitar folder Channel on this window on the Edit window be above the other channels that I want and then what I have to do is have to shift and click all the channels that I want to be in this folder and then drag them up and you'll see a blue line up here and when that blue line just shifts in slightly underneath where it says guitar folder I let go and you'll see how these three tracks have now kind of gone indented a little bit so now that's changed things it's not changed the sound as with the old group busing method but you'll see now that there's kind of a shadow as appeared of the waveforms combined and if I solo the guitar folder that's now it's all coming through that folder and then we can do things like we can use sends from the folder we can use effects on that folder like we did with the traditional bus method now why is it more useful like this it's more useful because technically speaking each of the separate tracks is still coming out of the master send which means that even though it's kind of cascaded to a folder if I want to do something clever like rendering out separate stems because it's coming out of a master send we can get a nice clean file of that it's something that saves a lot of hasil and one of my favorite little tricks if I right click on where it says master here there is a button I like to tick this says clickable icon for folder tracks to show and hide children now what that does is is this tiny little arrow appears here on the guitar folder and if I click that all the other guitars that were in that folder have now been hidden now what that means is if if I've got 20 tracks of drums or 30 tracks of drums I can shrink that down into 1 so in terms of clarity of mind I can do that to all my different groups so I just see drums bass guitars and on one page I can have a hundred-and-something channel mix and I can just see the groups and then if I need to at any point I can then pop them back open and adjust something pop them closed again and that's not affected anything audio wise that's just a visual thing for me that really makes life simple I use this a lot as a really good example if I'm recording heavy guitars I might have three microphones on a guitar cap maybe a room mic close mic a different closed mic and then let's say that I've got that twice left and right and then I'm quite tracking it left and right that's twelve channels of guitar that's a lot of guitar but what I can do is I can put all of those microphones for one take of guitar into a folder I can then have each set of guitar microphones in their own subfolder and then I can collapse it all and once the editing is done in terms of mixing that makes my life so much easier because I can collapse twelve guitar channels into just four guitar takes and then I can collapse them into one guitar folder if I'm just doing overall tonal shaping and that just means that everything's nice and easy for peace of mind it means I don't have to then render anything collapse anything down as powerful enough to play that many WAV files without a sweat so I may as well not you know slam things down if it turns out later on that one of those microphones I decided I didn't like or something like that I can dive in change the balance collapse it all again and it saved me so much time because I'm not going to route through old versions of projects everything's still there and with folders as well this down arrow is on the Edit window and I can click that a couple of times to shrink everything down so it's all still there but it's taking up minimum screen space which especially on smaller screens or with really complex kind of setups like so if you've got 20 channels of drums and you want to see when the drums stop and start but you don't need to see the details of 20 channels of drums you can pop them open pop them closed again if i zoom in a little bit I can have it so I can see all these takes and then if I click this once it shrinks them down click them again it shrinks it right down so I can very quickly start opening and closing things without having to dive into subfolders or anything like that without having to have anything hidden it makes life nice and fast there's one more thing that I want to talk about in terms of routing today and that is monitor effects something that I've been using quite a lot recently is sonar works so now works is a really good plugin and hardware solution that I use that can either correct the way that my headphones are working or correct the way that the speakers interact with the room even though my room's fairly well treated here it's just that extra last little bit I it's not installed on this computer but I'm going to use an EQ to demonstrate a very similar thing so if I open up the mixer and if I bring in an EQ on the master track then if I was to say I needed less low mids more highs whatever that the point will stand either way that was if that was to correct what I was hearing that's great but when I go to then bounce or render or finish the track that will be on there and if I forget to take that off then that will actually affect negatively the way that that's presented to anybody else and that's not ideal so what you can do now is if I just get rid of that if we go to view monitoring effects I can have anything in the monitor effects and now I've clicked something you see in the top right now there's a green monitor effects button so I could have less low mid more high mids and that will only affect what comes out of the speakers and out of the headphones it won't affect when you hit render or bounce it will not be on there by default because it's a monitoring thing the routing is actually after the master output which is really useful because then I can affect what I'm hearing so that I've got a more balanced mix but it won't affect what I send to other people also if it turns out that you need to turn off that monitoring effect just to make sure that you're not going crazy where it says monitoring effect there's a tiny little standby switch if we click that goes red and the monitoring effects are then bypassed until you turn that back on which means that you can check that things are right or say you've been listening on headphones on a laptop you just want to check how mix sounds on laptop speakers for example pull out the headphones turn off the monitoring effects so that anything that was affecting the headphones doesn't also affect the laptop speakers I mean it's probably not the best way to check your mix but it's it's something I've seen people do just for a sanity Jack it means that you've got a much more level balanced way of doing things if it's not specific to your exact monitoring environment and so that concludes this tutorial about routing there is a little more that we're going to do but we're going to wait until after the next episode which is about external effects because we're going to talk about third party effects instruments because you can now as well as all the stuff we've shown you in Reaper we're going to start bringing in outside influences outside manufacturers own sounds and wonderful things that I use on a day to day basis and really use Reaper as a vehicle for so then we're going to talk about routing specifically for things like a full virtual drum kit where if you want each separate drum to come out of its own channel that's routing but we're going to actually talk about external effects themselves then talk about that routing so there's a lot to go on I hope this has been really useful for you're not just kind of an aimless ramble so stick around for the rest of the series and everything else that we do because we do gear reviews we do comparisons of other gear so stick around for all that kind of stuff I'm Adam Steele this is hot pole studios thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next tutorial goodbye thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this feel free to check out our other videos as you can find here or check out our Facebook and Twitter or our patreon page which helps us to make more videos like this thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Hop Pole Studios

Views: 75,953

Keywords: reaper, tutorial, sidechain, gate, compressor, buss, folder

Id: yNemQmAmzq4

Length: 41min 4sec (2464 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019