Reaper: Setting up Auxiliary and Sub-Mix buses

okay let's go over how this would be implemented in Reaper we have our tracks here and this is our master bus I'm just going to move the master bus over to the right side of the mixer this way it's the same as the award-winning diagrams I drew so here are my tracks now I need to set up some buses so in Reaper one thing that's unique about Reaper is there are no classes for tracks in other words the track can hold MIDI it can hold audio it can be used as a sub mix bus it can be used as an auxilary bus so all I'm going to do is add a track which is command T so here's our track let's call it something sub mix bus okay now let's give it a color so we can pick it out so remember with the sub mix bus there's only one path to the master and everything runs through the sub mix bus okay so let's just hit play and see what's going on now we haven't routed anything to this bus yet so what we should see our levels over here on our tracks and then because the tracks by default are routed to the master bus you should see some levels over here - okay so that's good now we need to set up the routing for these tracks - this bus now in Reaper you just click on this button here this is input output IO for this sub mix track up here you've got a bunch of inputs and outputs you've got sends where the this sub mixes bus is going to be sent you've got audio Hardware outputs if you wanted to I'll put it to Hardware output on your interface for example the output that's routed to your second pair of speakers you've got MIDI Hardware output and then you've got receives now receives is what we want because the sub mix bus is going to receive from these other tracks so click on this you'll see here our tracks right here one two three originally named one two and three so let's add one one two three all these these tracks over here are now all routed to the sub mixbus so let's close this now if we hit play again what we should see is levels over here levels now in the sub mix bus and again levels in the master bus let's hit play okay that's good now just as another test let's mute the sub mix bus and since in theory everything's being routed through it we shouldn't hear anything okay so what's going on we're still hearing something so what is happening is these guys are still being routed over here to the master so this is one thing that's kind of unique about Reaper for example if you do this in Sam platoon and this is a sub mix bus class track it's kind of its own thing you set this up and you route these tracks over here they're no longer connected to the master bus but in Reaper you have to stop the routing that's going directly from these tracks to the master and it's really easy now you hit alt and this little button here says master send right so it's pretty self-explanatory hit alt click on them okay now let's try this again okay we have levels on the tracks sub mix bus master now let's meet this okay so it's working everything is actually being routed through our sub mix bus if you don't want to click on the master turn off the sends to the master here you can also do it in Reapers routing matrix its alt R and here are your tracks here's the master output and if you click this box you'll turned off you'll turn off the send from each of these tracks to the master output and you can see them on the interface as I click on these buttons you see them well maybe maybe you can maybe you can't I don't know but they are turning on and off so this is another way to quickly access all the routing that's going on in your in your DAW but this is just as fast doing it here on the interface okay I mentioned that this is typically used for drum tracks what you would do here is you would route everything over to the sub mix it would get summed up here and then it would get processed in Reaper this this says FX you just click on this button right here and these are the FX that are on the track right now you can see that there's a re EQ which is Reapers EQ here it is it's not active this box isn't ticked but you can see it's up here right with the effects it's just in gold which means again it's not active so let's add something let's add a compressor up here are all the plugins on my system it's too much to look through so down here I've created a favorites folder these are the plugins that I use about 90% of the time so here's the recom that's double-click on that so it's shown up here so notice this is the order of processing EQ first then compressor are you queues not on what our compressor is you can see it's ticked and you can see it's white over here that's how you would set that up and then I would just bring this is my threshold and you can see as I bring this further down I'm compressing more and more over here let's get out of here so let's do on an auxilary bus now we don't really have to change a whole lot here because a track and Reaper like I said before it doesn't belong to a class so this can really be anything so we don't have to delete this and add another track that's a bus and we've already set up our routing here so this is already this is good to go what we do need to do is make sure that these guys over here are all sending to the master because remember with an auxilary bus you're going to get a direct signal from the track and then another signal over here from the auxiliary boss so there's two paths to the master just for demonstration purposes let's change this color and let's call it an augs bus and the master sends there they're already active so we don't have to change that okay we probably don't want to run a compressor on here the typical use for this is reverb so let's hit our effects button I'm just going to deactivate our compressor here I'll leave it here just in case I change my mind later and let's add a reverb this is the stock reverb that comes with Reaper okay now you notice that there's a wet and dry control because we're already getting a dry signal over here I think it's easier to manage if we have no dry signal here and then when we're dealing with this auxilary bus we're just dealing with a wet signal so and I'm going to set it to 0 DB instead of negative 3 that's just my own personal preference close it and let's take a listen okay so you can hear the reverb on there now and to manage the reverb for all these channels all I would have to do is use the fader I could also mute them and limp in fact let me do that just so you can hear the difference here one thing that's cool about the way Reaper is set up you can click on this input output and this is one location where you can centrally manage all the auxilary sin levels in other words these three faders are controlling the amount of reverb on these three tracks over here some DAWs aren't set up like this and what you have to do is you have to go into these individual channel strips find the auxilary send and then you have to change the level for example here it is in Reaper so when some does you'd have to open this dialog up change the level go to the next one change this level go to the next one so that's a lot more work the other thing is these tracks are all together but let's say you had a huge session with 50 tracks well this might be track number one this might be track number 15 this might be track number 50 so then you'd have to scroll all around change these auxilary sends so this is really this is really nice it's one place where you can change the sends you can pan them or you can delete them alternatively you could open the routing matrix alt R and you can turn off the routing and you can watch it turn off over here on the tracks you can turn off the routing to the master buss you can see that these are now becoming an active or the auxilary bus over here and you'll you can watch these over as I as I click so now that routing is disappeared there and I'll turn it back on okay

Channel: Chris Porro

Views: 42,648

Keywords: Reaper, Auxiliary, Sub-Mix, buses, routing

Id: _-oA-B1YzEE

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 17 2012