De-Ess Your Vocals Without Even Listening (Reaper Tutorial)

You've heard it a thousand times and seen it in countless Instagram and Facebook comments. "Just use your ears". As much as that is of course very true in all aspects of audio work, that comment can get a little tiresome. Just because the end result will be audio only, that doesn't mean we can't get a little help from our visual tools. Given the fact that most of us don't work in ideal locations all the time maybe using headphones, poorly treated rooms or mixing a song on the go, visual tools can come in really handy to either verify what we are hearing or question it. That is why I love a certain Reaper feature that I will tell you all about right about now.

In pretty much every DAW there's a visual element to audio files. You know the waveform telling you how loud or quiet a part of audio is in a visual representation. Like the picture to the right:

Reaper waveform

It is of course helpful to see when audio will begin playing and to distinguish loud parts from quiet ones. Waveforms are all about displaying volume though and not so much frequency information, which is of course the other big part of audio.

In Reaper we can change this however using something called spectral peaks. And the waveform will look a bit more like this:

Reaper spectral waveform

This spectral type of waveform will help distinguish problematic aspects of your recording in a much better way than your normal peaks display. You can set up your colors the way you want, I have min ranging from purple to blue. So looking at the waveform the blue parts are most likely high frequency information and probably S:es; whereas the purple ones before the big red/yellow peak is probably a plosive. I know from looking at this that I might have to address these three sections, ducking the s:es and probably fading in the plosive. All this from not even hitting the play button once.

To set up spectral peaks in Reaper go to Options > Peaks display mode > Spectral peaks. Reaper will take some time to analyze your peaks and then your good to go. If you want to change how the colors behave or the opacity of the colors, go to the same menu again and chose Peaks Display Settings. You'll get to a window looking like this:

Just drag the color bar to match preferred color with frequency range!

I hope this was helpful!

Number one reaper shorcut for a faster workflow

Finding ways to reduce clicks for repetitive tasks is pretty much always a good idea. My posts are mostly about Reaper and to speed that workflow up but this is true for any DAW out there. Just implementing this mindset when you work in your DAW will give you ways to work faster the next time. For instance if you reach for the scissors tool in logic all the time; you should probably take the time to learn the keyboard shortcut for that to save some mouse clicks down the road.

Going back to reaper the whole idea with the DAW is for you to ask yourself these questions. Reaper is built to be extremely customizable to make the DAW behave the way that fits you and not the other way around. Therefore I usually end up changing keyboard shortcuts so that the ones I use a lot are in comfortable reach, add more shortcuts for stuff I do a lot and make new customized toolbars for different applications.

The thing that has probably made the most impact on my workflow though, is something I implemented very late. Starting and stopping audio is probably the most repetitive yet necessary task we do in audio. You won't get around the need to start play back from different spots in the project. This might however result in a lot of clicks down the road. Think about it. You listen to the verse and you change something click at the beginning of the verse again and press play, move the cursor back to the beginning ... you get the hang of it. Many clicks!

What I've done to reduce this is to set up a couple of shortcuts for playback. My regular space bar which is the normal play/pause behavior. But I also have W, ALT-Space and some keyboard buttons assigned to another action from the SWS library: SWS/BR: Play from mouse cursor position. This enables me to play from wherever my mouse cursor is and then pause with the space bar. This reduces the need to move the play back cursor in on the time ruler. If I want to go back to the beginning of the project I have that action set to keyboard shortcut 1. Hope that helped!

Renaming tracks for a faster mixing workflow

When mixing it's crucial to keep track of different material in your DAW to be able to quickly address problems you notice. The last thing you want is looking through poorly named tracks to do some EQuing or compression, finally realizing that the drum sound you where looking for was named like Audio_0123; totally unrelated to the audio material. To keep track of the material I therefore rename tracks in the preparation process. I have a system for this that I use all the time but this is totally up to you. Just pick something that works and stick to it. There are some ground rules though that could help a lot.

I'm from Sweden and our alphabet contains some characters that isn't in the English alphabet. The problem with this in the digital world is that these can translate to super weird names in a DAW, especially if the files where compressed using a zip/archive software. A letter like Ä can easily become ^£¤^ in the translation which of course isn't what we want. Therefore I stick to English names for everything even though that's not my first language. Long names can also get cluttered in a project. I therefore shorten all names so I can see them without having to expand my tracks. For instance Drums can be renamed to Drm and Guitar can become Gtr. A lot of DAWs also add numbers and other things to the end of the name to keep track of things internally. A track from Pro Tools might have cm.01432 in the end while a Logic file can end with bip.0121. These names might mean stuff in the production phase but not for me while mixing so I strip that away. To exemplify a tack named "Audio Snare drum.bip0321" gets renamed to "DRM_SN". Notice that the name is in all caps to be more easily read.

Now to the more DAW specific part for you Reaper users out there. Keep reading if you're using another DAW though as this function is baked in to many DAW:s. In Pro Tools it's called batch rename but in Reaper there are several scripts doing the same thing. It's essentially a tool to rename many tracks simultaneously. In reaper i use a script called Script: amagalma_gianfini_ReaNamer (track-item-region renaming utility).lua and can be installed through the Reapack repository. I have mine assigned to shortcut N. With this script I can quickly implement the rules stated above to multiple tracks at the same time. I can strip the ends for shorter names, convert names to all caps and add prefixes for instrument groups. I can also use the replace function to replace long names like Snare to SN with the click of a button.

If you're in Reaper try it out yourself, it will make your projects look super clean in no time!