Recording - October 2010 - 60

Now, I can simply record my mix by moving the mixer faders while the song is playing back. REAPER will automatically record all of my fader movements as envelope changes, giving me a super easy way to quickly mix my song down. You can also mix down by drawing envelopes by hand, or by using a hybrid approach of the two, per your tastes.

Adding a reverb bus Once I have my volume envelopes recorded and tweaked, I am nearing the finish line. But wait: I realize that several of my tracks sound rather dry, and I decide I’d like to put them through a little bit of reverb. I could easily put a separate reverb plug-in on each track, but let’s be a 14 little fancier and set up a reverb bus. REAPER has the ability to arbitrarily route audio from any track and to any other track. Further, in REAPER a bus is simply another track, one that happens to have no takes in it. By using this ability, one can create bus and track structures of arbitrary complexity and power. All I need for this song is a simple reverb bus, so I will create a new empty track, name it “Reverb Bus” and assign a reverb plug-in to it (Figure 14). This creates the reverb bus. Now I just need to route the track’s output to this bus. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to set the reverb up as an insert bus, which means I will send the track’s output entirely through the reverb bus. This I can do simply by clicking on the “IO” icon for the tracks I’d like to send through reverb, which pops up the following window (Figure 15). Since we are setting it up as an insert, I simply uncheck the “Master/Parent Send” and use the drop-down menu to “Add new send...” to the reverb bus track I just created. Now everything that comes out of this track will go through the reverb bus track, on its way out to the mains. Render and dither So now I have reached a point where I am happy with my song. The only thing left to do is to render the track to a finished WAV file, something easily done from the File > Render menu,
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which gives me several options (Figure 16). I’m really happy with the song, so I’m going to go ahead and dither the recording down to a 44.1 kHz/16-bit WAV file, as shown. Note the resampling mode; REAPER has some really powerful built-in resampling and dithering algorithms, which to my ears easily rival the best algorithms I’ve heard in some of the muchmore-expensive DAW programs out there. If I choose something like a 512-point sinc algorithm to render my final audio (a topic for another article, sorry), the resampling is going to take several minutes, but for a track intended for a CD release I’m willing to wait for the best possible quality. But wait, there’s more In this example we have only scratched the surface of this program. For example, we haven’t even talked about automating plug-in parameters, using external audio loops, saving and restoring FX chains, track templates, track folders, item FX chains, audio editing, crossfading, take overdubbing, markers, low-level MIDI event editing, the bundled REAPER plug-ins, the incredibly cool streaming and collaboration plug-ins like ReaStream and ReaNINJAM...! Suffice to say that from a pure features standpoint, REAPER measures up very well against even the most expensive high-end DAW products, so well in fact that it successfully lured me away from many years of working

Recording - October 2010

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