Setting up Reaper for Voiceover | part 1

what's up everyone welcome back to crownstag voiceover my name is neon glasgow in the following two videos i'm going to show you exactly how i configure reaper for voiceover reaper is one of those fantastic voice-over tools that's really really customizable following my absolute nightmare before christmas where my laptop blew up i thought it might be a good idea to actually show you how i configure my setup but also it will give any new people to reaper or any new voice over artists some really great and quick hacks and tips to make your voice over and your audio absolutely high quality and sent out for the best possible auditions you can do now i'm going to talk you through a couple of settings that i want you to implement i'm going to talk you through compression specifically i'm not going to talk you through eq and noise gates and that's for a very specific reason my sound and and your sound will be completely different and i don't want you to copy what i do so i will give you a couple of quick hacks and in order to do that what you're going to need to do is download a very specific version of reaper which we'll go through in a moment so what i'm going to suggest before we start is you actually sign up for a service like dropbox or google drive someplace online that you can save your demos you can save your auditions somewhere that you can retrieve in the event that like me your laptop blows up i personally use dropbox and i'll put a link to that in the comments down below if you click through that link and sign up it's absolutely free but signing up through that link dropbox will send me a little bit extra memory and you know in voiceover you can use all the memory you can possibly get so assuming that you've now gone and done that you've paused the video welcome back we're now going to go and look at the version of reaper that you want to download now reaper itself costs about 60 dollars and then you own it in perpetuity uh 60 dollars is about 48 pounds if you're you're here in the uk but it's a really worthwhile investment because of the customization ability within reaper now once you've bought reaper you're going to see this download reaper section i do not want you to download this link you'll see here it says december 18th 2020 that's the latest release and actually reaper is very good they'll release one or two updates every month every other month they really keep uh improving what the platform can do but as i say i don't want you to download this version because what they've done in the most recent updates is they've changed what's called dynamic split and dynamic split is one of the quick hacks that i'm going to show you that i promise you is going to save an extraordinary amount of time in your editing so what you want to do is actually scroll down to the bottom here where you see old versions and on old versions you can go back to really any version of reaper that you want as you can see here there's been multiple updates a couple in november but what we want to do is come back to here october 20th and it's this version of dynamic split that we're looking for when you get to that section what you want to do is select your version of reaper i personally use windows 64. as you can see there are versions there for mac and linux as well so once you've chosen your particular setup download that and install now once you've installed it this is going to be the fun bit so i'm going to talk you through everything nice and slowly tell you exactly why we're doing what we're doing so you will definitely be able to keep up and on the off chance you miss anything just rewind the video it will be really clear why we're doing what we're doing so when you first open up reaper depending on your mic setup it's going to ask you to select your audio device now this is a really simple thing to do right out of the gate select yes and then on most windows systems your default wave out is absolutely fine to keep your input device for me it's my pre-sonos which is registered here as audiobox i click ok and that's it done i never need to worry about it my inputs and my outputs go to exactly the same place now as i've said reaper is mainly used for musicians and bands and it's really really customizable but what we're able to do is actually pair back a lot of the settings that are on here as you'll see from the top bar it's got things like beats per minute that just really aren't relevant for what's needed in voiceover so what we're going to start doing is actually removing a lot of these things that you have up here a lot of the predefined settings so let's start by cleaning up this space a little bit by getting rid of all the things that we just don't need as voice over artists so to start let's go to options and then navigate down to where it says snap grid and you're going to want to uncheck enable snapping and then i want you to repeat the process and uncheck where it says show grid there perfect now that's a completely blank slate for us as voice over artists to work with now a couple of other things that we don't really need are things like showing the time signature so what i want you to do is navigate down here right click and go up to where it says show time signature uncheck that and then again right click scroll up to where it says show play rate control and uncheck that great so now what we have is a really clean looking daw for voice over but there's a couple of other things that we're going to start removing that are just not relevant for us as voice over artists so up here what you're going to see is a lot of settings that are pre-defined for musicians for bands and it's really quite complicated you can keep some of these settings but actually they just clutter up the space so what we want to do is right click at the side of the toolbar select toolbar one and there we are a nice clean space that we can edit and customize ourselves so click on edit me and click on retitle or rename and i always rename mine voiceover one nice and simple now we can click on the edit me section and just remove that we're not going to need it going forward now if we go to add and here we're going to see lots of features that you can put into your setup but the one that we really need is ripple so type in ripple into the filter and the one that you want to select is cycle ripple editing and then just hit select and that will add it to your toolbar you see it down there at the bottom the next one that we're going to need is render and the one that you're going to want to select is render project using the most recent settings hit select and again you'll see populate at the bottom there hit save and then you can close now see here those are the two buttons that i use most often now i've highlighted ripple there in green now what that will do when we come to edit later on that will snap together anything that i delete out if you don't select that now during the process it just means that you're going to have to select that every single time that you come to record which we don't want to do let's save ourselves some time and effort so now we're going to set up our new track right click in the space and select insert track see it there nice and simple now there is a lot that we can actually do with this track just as default to set up some of the quick access buttons what we're going to want to do is hit options scroll down to preferences and then under appearance which you'll see halfway down the tab select media now on this page what i like to select is everything under media item buttons except notes i don't tend to put a lot of notes into my recordings that comes a little bit separately and i have a different workflow in that but if notes is something that you want absolutely go ahead and check that hit apply and then okay what we'll do now is arm the track and then record just a little bit of silence what you'll see at the top is some of the quicktime buttons that we've just armed we can lock it mute it or even quickly select the effects tab great right let's get rid of that now okay now we've got that done what i want to highlight to you is the two different tracks that you're going to see down here one in red is the track that we've just armed at the top the other in green is what's called the master track now they both work in tandem as the primary tracks but what we're going to do is actually move them around a little bit now you can actually select your master track from selecting view and master track and that will put it above your track in your voiceover that's not how i like to work but i know some people prefer to see it so we'll just delete that and i'll show you another way that you can do it by selecting floating master mix now that will pop the master mix out and you can cycle it anywhere you like in the daw but my preferred way to have it is in the docker now if you right click and select show in docker that will put it back into the tab now as you can see at the bottom here you can actually select the tab and move it around so i like to have my master mix at the far right hand side you can also move from the left to the right whatever your particular preference is you could also insert your fx browser now your fx browser can be put into the docker or you can move it around again i like to have mine in the docker now if i take my mixer and i move it to the far right where it's highlighted there that means i can snap them together i can then drag the fx browser to a more manageable place and as i don't tend to use fx in my master mix i can take this fx window all the way to the top now as you'll see there are multiple bars moving here and i don't really need those i just need to see my input i don't need to see my rms so if i right click and just select peak only that'll give me a really clean view great things are really coming together now the next thing i'm going to show you is the compression element one of the cool things about reaper is i can go to the fx window in the left hand side and just drag the compression into the tab to the right and that's going to load it directly into that track the other thing you can do is actually just click on the fx button in the track now the default that comes up has a lot to do with eq and dynamics which is not something we're going to need so you can either hit your delete button or you can click on fx and remove fx what we want is what's called recomp and that's this here and we can just drag it right up into the window easy as pie now i'm going to talk you through my particular settings for compression i have to highlight for you that my settings are not going to be the same as your settings do not copy them exactly play about with them but this will give you an approximation of what you can do for you to be able to play about with it yourself so the first thing i do is highlight the ratio and i make that a two to one ratio and then i bring my threshold for my recomp down to about negative 25 and then i alter my wet setting my wet sound which is what happens after the compression i increase my volume by 3 db and that is a fairly good setting for my sound and my booth so as you can see here as i talk into the mic a little bit the red line pops down to roughly about negative 6. that's where you're trying to hit and then i can alter my settings so that when it compresses down beyond that as you can see now down to negative 12 it makes my output sound at negative 24. that's not right you want your output to be between negative 6 db and negative 3 db on most projects that at least i work on so once that's done i want to lock that in so i go to the plus icon save default preferences and i just call this one track one default great now that's saved for all of my initial tracks the next thing i want to show you is actually inserting a secondary track now this is one of the quick hacks that i've been talking about and it's a real time saver now what we want to do is unarmed track one and arm track two track two is going to be our room tone so let's record a bit of dead space and the next thing that you're going to want to do that's going to save you time down the road is create a different fx chain again you can hit delete or right click on it and remove selected fx we want to select recomp again and drag that in but instead of doing our own settings we can go to our presets and hit music comp and what you'll see there is this is a predefined reaper music comp that gives you some much higher ratios but the important bit is the auxiliary input l and r i'll cover this in a later video but having this setting as a preset is really important great okay so we've got that locked in and we can close that window so now we're getting to the good part what you want to do is unarm track two and re-arm track one check that everything works the way that you want it to look that's really looking good for me so what i want to do is go to file project templates save project template and then i select mine as voice over template you can write whatever you want but this is the important step now once you've done that what you want to do is go to options preferences project and see here at the top this is where you want to make that selection that you just made your default so select it lock it in and now every time you open up this will be what your window settings look like so let's demonstrate that now perfect it's exactly what we had before i have my room tone set up i have my track armed and if i close down reaper and open it up it will do exactly the same thing so that's it i hope this has been really helpful for you this is how i set up my reaper as default for all of my recordings it means that i can edit really really quickly it means i can record really really quickly in part two i'm going to show you how to set up some of your saves how to do your backups and most importantly how to edit your recordings super quickly to really maximize your workflow if you've liked this video give it a like and subscribe and i'll see you in part two

Channel: Crown Stag Voice over

Views: 4,505

Rating: 4.9499998 out of 5

Keywords: Reaper for voice over, Voice over tips, booth junkie reaper, business basics for voiceovers setting, crown stag voice over, crownstagvoiceover, how to use reaper, mixing in reaper, reaper daw, reaper daw basics, reaper daw plugins, reaper setup, reaper tips, reaper tutorial, reaper tutorial for beginners, reaper voice, reaper voice actor, reaper voice over, reaper vs adobe audition, setting up reaper for voice over, setting up reaper for voice ver, voice over for beginners

Id: oFagGnob8-4

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheFoostic]

I am curious to know how you will use that separate track of room tone. I used the ReaFir Subtract function before for noise removal, but I found it makes my breaths sound strange, so I don't like to use it too often.

[u/Crownstag_voiceover]

A post for anyone looking to configure Reaper for voice over.

[u/Depressed_Nuggets]

Thank you for this :) I have just started using it myself so this will be really handy!

[u/MaximumColor]

Haven't even read it yet, but thanks! Reaper is what I use, and it can be pretty over-engineered for Voiceover

[u/Only-Yak]

Super helpful. Thanks for making this! Any recommendations on learning how to properly set one's own compression? Subscribed to your channel.