Mixing in REAPER with stock plugins only

Is REAPER good for mixing? Yes, and you can mix a whole song in it without buying a single plugin. ReaEQ, ReaComp, ReaGate and ReaXcomp look plain next to a $200 channel strip, but they cover every job a mix needs. What you get from paid plugins is mostly workflow, looks and character. You aren’t missing abilities.

We know this fairly well because Mixroadie, the mixing assistant we make, writes its moves with REAPER’s own EQ, compressor and limiter. Nothing in this guide needs anything else.

The four plugins that do most of the work

ReaEQ. It opens with four bands: a low shelf, two bells and a high shelf. Most people want a high-pass filter first, and that isn’t one of the defaults. Click the first band’s type and change it to High Pass. You can add as many bands as you like by right-clicking the graph, which beats stacking several EQ instances.

ReaComp. The threshold starts at the top, so a freshly inserted ReaComp does nothing at all until you pull the threshold down. That sounds obvious, but a lot of “ReaComp doesn’t work” forum threads end there. Pull it down until the gain reduction meter moves on the loud phrases and rests on the quiet ones. ReaComp also has a detector filter. Set its high-pass to around 100 Hz on a bass or a full drum bus and the compressor stops pumping on every kick.

ReaGate. Same detector-filter idea, and for toms it’s the whole trick. A tom mic hears the full kit, so a gate that listens to everything opens on every cymbal crash. Set ReaGate’s detector low-pass to around 200–300 Hz and only the tom’s own hits open it. Also, don’t set the gate to cut bleed off completely. Turning it down 20–40 dB sounds natural. Hard on/off makes the kit flicker.

ReaXcomp. A multiband compressor. You won’t need it on most tracks, but with one band set around 5–9 kHz it works as a de-esser, and on the mix bus it can calm a low end that swells in the chorus.

Add ReaVerbate or ReaVerb on a reverb bus and ReaLimit on the master, and that’s a full mixing kit.

An order that works in REAPER

Mix in roughly the order an engineer works down a channel. Each step then hears the one before it.

1. Clean up. High-pass every track that doesn’t need low end, check the drum mics for polarity (the Ø button on each track), and gate toms if the bleed is bad.
2. Balance. Faders only, no plugins yet. Get the lead vocal and the kick where they belong first, then build around them.
3. EQ. Cuts on resonances, then a cut or two where instruments fight over the same range.
4. Compression. Now, after the EQ, because a compressor reacts to whatever the EQ left in.
5. Buses and space. Reverb send, drum bus, mix bus.

REAPER doesn’t have dedicated bus tracks, and it doesn’t need them. A folder track is a bus: every track inside it plays through the folder’s own FX and fader. Put the kit in a “Drums” folder and you have a drum bus. For reverb, use a normal track and send to it with the Route button.

One detail matters at the balance step. Our measurements of finished mixes put the band about 6.5 LU above the lead vocal in rock, pop and metal, and closer in acoustic music. If you get the vocal wrong here, no EQ later will fix it.

Vocals in REAPER

This is where most home mixes go wrong, so here is the chain in more detail.

High-pass, carefully. 80–100 Hz is typical, but check the lowest note the singer actually sings. A baritone holding a low G sits near 98 Hz, and a high-pass at 120 Hz takes the bottom off that note. When Mixroadie sets a filter, it never goes above the lowest note on the track.

Cut, don’t boost, at first. Sweep ReaEQ for one or two rings in the 200 Hz–1.5 kHz range and cut 2–4 dB. Leave 2–5 kHz alone unless something there really rings. That range is what makes the lyrics understandable. Our vocal EQ cheat sheet goes through each range. For the other instruments, the free mixing cheat sheet has the EQ ranges and compressor starting points for nine of them on one sheet.

Compress for consistency. ReaComp at a moderate ratio, threshold low enough to bite on the loud lines. A lead vocal recorded at home often needs a fair amount, but if you’re doing much more than about 9 dB of gain reduction, the vocal probably needs some level riding by hand first.

De-ess. ReaXcomp with one active band over the esses, or a narrow ReaEQ cut if the esses only stick out a little. Keep it above about 4.5 kHz, or you start dulling the voice itself.

Ride the level. REAPER has two good ways to do this. Use item volume (the handle on top of each item) for phrases that are too quiet, or draw a volume envelope. Do it after the compressor, so you only fix what the compressor left.

Then deal with noise. A vocal mic records the room the whole time. Once compression has brought the quiet parts up, the hiss and headphone bleed between phrases come up too. ReaGate set to turn that down by about 20 dB, with slow attack and release, cleans it up without chopping the ends of words.

Saving it as a template

Once you have a chain you like, save it. Right-click selected tracks and choose Save tracks as track template, or use File ▸ Project templates ▸ Save project as template for a whole session layout with your folders, buses and routing.

Templates save time on routing. They don’t know your next song. A vocal chain built for last month’s singer, with a cut at 380 Hz and a threshold of −18 dB, may be wrong on this month’s take by several dB. Load the template, then check every setting with your ears. Ideally use a meter too.