My Reaper Mixing Notes

This article is a work in progress and will be constantly updated, for me, as I learn new skills!

I use the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) called "Reaper" for mixing and I quite often get a multi-track recording from a Behringer X32/Midas M32 deck (they are virtually the same thing). This post is a dumping ground for all the things I have learnt from the process so that I have a coherent centralised place to keep them and maybe they will also be useful to you.

Raw files

Acquiring

While the X32 has a USB port it will only record a deck-mixed stereo signal to it. However if you have the SD card module added, you can record all 32 channels raw. Format any SD card to FAT32 and pop it in. While the manual talks about 32GB as the limit, I have been using 128GB cards no problem which can record a 5 hour session. Class 4 SD cards are fine for bandwidth.

It records everything into a WAV file, split into 4GB chunks. Drag these directly into a Reaper track, sequentially, and you will now have a single track, multiple items, all with the 32 channels. Run the Rodilab script that will explode the WAV into separate tracks. Next run my "prep" script which will get rid of the unused tracks, add colour, group, pan, all based on rules - change the script according to the rules you need.

Consolidating

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Rough Mix

Faders(volume)

Set all faders to an appropriate level before applying any effects to get a rough mix. You should only add effects to fix problems. With that said, if you already know a heap of problems that happen every time, and you have already solved them before, then add those effects in.

Pan

Not really an effect as such, but definitely think about where you want each track to be situated from left to right. It's a good idea to get tracks off centre, even just by 10%, to create 3D space, unless you specifically want your track to be straight down the middle.

Phase

Maybe some of your mics have a different latency, and maybe the latency will cause phase cancellation or distortion. *Usually not necessary* but if you want the tightest of the tight, then zoom right in on your master track and see how all the tracks are overlapping, specifically on punchy transients. Particularly useful on the drums, if you notice some tracks are offset to each other, you can move tracks in time slightly to line up the signals.

Effects

Delay

My favourite use is a slap back delay but with different timse in the left/right channels, with alow wet level so it is barely noticeable. This will turn a mono signal into a wide stereo signal and is great to place the track into a different 3D space to the rest of the tracks. Use "ReaDelay", set length to say time=80ms (musical=0), pan full left, then add a new tap, set to time=120ms pan full right. Adjust the wet for a good feel. Adjust the times to get the space you like.

Compression

Tame a signal where the dynamics are bigger than you want them to be, squeezes the levels together. Use on almost anything. Set the ratio higher to have less effect, but 4:1 is a good starting point. Move the threshold up - if you aren't exceeding the threshold anywhere, you aren't going into compression, there is no point having it. Set the attack fast if you need to the compressor to respond quickly, set the release slow if you want the compressor to not come off so quickly, sounds more natural. ReaComp is a good go to, don't forget to tick "Auto make-up". Chosing one of the stock presets for your application is a great starting point.

The JS 1175 is an emulated Urei 1176 fast compressor worth looking at, ReaXComp get even more fancy by having multiple frequency bands of compression.

Limiter

When compression isn't enough...use a limiter to prevent clipping on agressive transients. Great on drums and in mastering to Make It Loud without clipping.

EQ

Boost and reduce frequency ranges, surely everyone knows what EQ does. A good way to work out what frequencies you want more or less of is to make a fairly narrow band boost, drag it extremely high, then sweep across the frequency ranges listening for what you like and don't like, and set it accordingly. Some good rules of thumb:

• 20-70 : Rumble/Subbass : Only really dums and bass need this.
• 70-300 : Boomy/Warmth/Muddiness/Fullness : Sometimes there are resonances here, notch them out.
• 300-1.2k : Boxy/Nasal : often worth reducing on some tracks to create space for other tracks.
• 1.2k-5k : Honky/Harsh : can add clarity. Look to remove vocal esses (sibilance) in here.
• 5k-11k : Sparkle/Presence
• 11k+ : Air

Use ReaEQ for basic multiband. ReaFIR set to Dynamic EQ mode can be great to tame harshness in vocals or solo instruments: Set mode to Compressor, set the Compression Ratio fairly low, say 1.5:1 and then set up a profile where the compressor is starting to do stuff on the peaks of the frequency spectrum

Reverberation

Ubiquitous and overused but quite essential. Because we aren't always recording in a warm room or a cathedral, but those sounds are nice, so apply artificial versions of them. Don't overdo it! Argh! Reverb does not make up for a bad recording! A little bit of reverb underneath a vocal or a solo instrument can be quite nice, my favourite as recommended by Kenny Gioia is ReaVerb: set to file, use the "Fat Plate" impulse file from the Lexicon 480L last seen at http://www.housecallfm.com/download.php?f=BGLex480.zip somewhere around -30dB.

A simpler reverb that can be quite effective is ReaVerbate: set the room size to massive - even say 95, and use very sparingly to make a vocal ring. Use side chained or automate the wet mix or manually add it in a separate track.

Gate

If something sits on background noise most of the time and then bursts into life, then gate it - ie, it will be silent unless the gate is exceeded. It will sound unnatural solo'd, but in a mix it will be fine. Drums are good to gate, sometimes even the vocals. Use ReaGate and set the attack/hold/release to something that suites your track, and most importantly set the threshold.

Tuning

Sometimes it's okay to tune up a few vocals here or there, but you can't fix a bad recording. The best way to fix a few vocal notes is to do it manually only with ReaTune: on the Correction tab change the attack time to around 100ms, then on the Manual Correction tab tick "Manual Correction" and then draw blue lines to fix missed pitches. Put your blue line slightly after the point at which the pitch is hit, to make it sound smoother, and finish the line a bit early. Put ReaTune first in your effects chains.

Saturation

This is a quirky little effect, basically distorts the signal based on the way old analogue equipment like tape machines or tube amplifiers would distort when driven hard. Adds harmonics which are "richer, warmer" ie pleasing. I found the free plugin "GSat+" does a good job, load it up and at the top menu press the right arrow to say "Medium" or "Warm", wind the input up until it is going onto saturation for at least part of the range.

Instruments

Drums

The setup I spend a lot of time with has 7 mics. I will always make a track that is a folder (bus) for all the drum tracks and I add a limiter to that to "clean up" those times when the drummer has hit 3 drums full tilt at the same time.

• Gate all drums except the overheads. Set the gate so that only the "fundamental" drum sound comes through, so usually the fastest attack possible and only a hold/release for as long as required, hopefully not before the next hit.
• Put on a limiter rather than a compressor. Drums have a massive impulse on the initial hit which doesn't suit any compressor. Whereas the limiter, with a brickwall ceiling, can bring up the tail but clip the initial impulse without making it sound awful.
• EQ to the drum in question. The full mix will contain everything, let the overheads glue it together. Let each individual mic have an EQ that captures the essence of that drum:
• Kick drum - keep low frequencies only.
• Tom drum2 - keep low frequencies and some mid.
• Snare drum - keep mid frequencies and some highs.
• Overheads - remove the low frequencies and most of the mids, keep only highs. The overhead mics glue the drum kit together through the middle - the low end is dealt with in their own tracks.
• On the snare drum add the free VST "snare buzz". It is fantastic to bring out that snare sound.

Electric Piano

Since it is electric it's already perfect, leave it along. The only thing you might want to do is compress it if you want to squish the dynamics, or adjust the EQ to create some space for another instrument.

Acoustic Guitar

Generally this is already coming in from a pedal, so like the piano you might not need to touch it. However I rarely find an acoustic guitar that has a frequency response I like, so I usually add EQ to remove boominess and boxiness. It's also a good idea to remove everything from around 80Hz and below, acoustic guitars can't hit those frequencies.

Vocals

Ah, the most challenging instrument of all. Compress - if there are really peaky parts, use two compressors, one to scrub the peaks, the other to smooth it out without crushing it.

EQ - varies from person to person, but 120Hz for fullness, 240 for boxiness, 5k for presence, 8k for sibilance, 10k for air. Sweep the mid to find frequencies you like/dislike

Sax

I found that the sax is dynamically unbalanced even between notes. I compress it a lot. Either go for a little bit of reverb, or add some back slap delay if you don't want to muddy it with reverb. EQ this for sure.

Violin/strings

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Electric Guitar

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Fine tuning and Mastering

Envelopes

Right click on a track header, click Envelopes and then choose say Volume or Pan. Now you can drag the fader/pan around as the song progresses. I normally do the 4 click trapezoid to bring a section up or down. You are almost re-producing the song with this - you can say drop a solo instrument right down so it isn't competing with the vocals, and then crank it up during insturmental sections.

Edit

Don't be afraid to split tracks up! You can realign missed tempo notes, or copy sections from another take or verse to punch out bad sections. Overlap all cuts so they seamlessly transition. Normally you can drag around the cross-fades, but if the fade isn't showing, right click the track, select Item Properties, and then type in new values for the fade in and fade out.

Side Chaining

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Mastering

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Rendering

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Handy Functionality

SWS

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Channels

Generally, each track will only have 2 channels shown in the mixer. Even for mono, because FX will often create stereo. If however you have ended up with say 32 (and the track is really wide) you can fix it by clicking on the Route icon, set channels 2.

Scripting

What's happening July 2024

I continued to progress "Don't Dream it's Over" and very nearly recorded a Jawmunji Talks video. I still might, it's worth a discussion.

However this month my local church had an open night, and the kids and I wrote two tunes for it. So a bit of time spent working on that. We had actually written the tunes some time ago, which came down to me putting together chord progressions and writing lyrics...yes, I do them both at the same time...as in, I don't write lyrics and then set it to music - I don't write music and then create lyrics - they are informing each other as I go. I have a vague idea of melody, but once I have a chord progression and words, I give it to my youngest daughter and she immediately comes up with a melody far better than I could do. It must be a singer thing. And she'll normally tweak the words to fit better with her word flow. Finally, once we have that together, we play it a few time for my son, give him the chord structure, and he will improvise something over it on the sax.

I decided to play the double bass for this one, plucked, bluegrass style. I love the sound of the double bass - particularly when bowed, but I'm bad at bowing it so plucked it needed to be. My youngest played keys and sung on the first song, sung and played electric guitar on the second song.

We needed to have done a bit more practise, but the gig went off without a hitch. All three of us had more anxiety than we were expecting, which was weird, we have all played to audiences many times. I think it was because we normally play covers, there must be something about originals that heightens the anxiety. An increase vulnerability perhaps.

Anyway, good fun. My youngest daughter is a born performer, having her front our little trio with a low slung telecaster belting out some lyrics is in her element. My son can wail out soulful expressions on the sax, we were using a new sax pedal which introduced some nice tones. I love the big fat sound I can get from the double bass, we had it mic'd up so it was kickin'. It is still hard to play, and I am still sporting two blisters on my right first two fingers. I did carefully knife them open, splashed with a methylated spirits to keep the bugs away. A long time ago I decided that pricking open blood/fluid blisters is much faster recovery than letting them do their own thing.

All done, back to working on my fingerstyle arrangements!

What's happening June 2024

I finished my arrangement of "It feels like we only go Backwards", I have played it through many times, several people have heard it, vaguely recognised it but couldn't tell me what it was. I count that as a win! It is a good arrangement in that it has a few challenging parts. The bass has a prominent "one and ... three and", so funk style, and I'm not used to playing a bassline like that. It took me a while to get that under my fingers - although I didn't take it too far - in the places where the melody is complex I drop the "ands".

However it is good to push out of your comfort zone with your arrangements - it helps you develop skills that you can then use elsewhere. It's pretty easy for me to play everything in my default style, which is the drum equivalent of kick-hat-snare-hat, which translates to bass note-mid note-mid chord fragment flick-mid note...adding in any melody notes on top as required. If you can get all the variations of bass rhythms locked into your brain to naturally occur then you have a pathway to great sounding arrangements. I have said it before but I'll say it again - Travis picking a song sounds great...for the first song...but not for every song! (I recognise my  hypocrisy here - I play too many songs with a chord flick on beats 2 and 4...Kel Valleau did it for years and then suddenly stopped...maybe I take a leaf out of his book?)

I've also said before that I wish I had played more bass as a kid. With apologies to my classical brothers and sisters, but the bass rhythms you find in classical music don't have the groove of the bass rhythms in rock and pop. It's only been in the last decade or so that I have come to discover the wonders of bass groove and how it glues a song together.

It's all about musical growth.

Speaking of which I turned my attention to a song I have had on my back list for arrangement for a long time, "Don't Dream it's Over" by Crowded House, which is claimed by both Australia and New Zealand as their own. It too has musically challenging parts that don't fit with my default. There are prominent chords and melody accents on "1-ah", as in "1-ee-and-ah", being the 4th sixteenth note in a bar.  This really clashes with my desire to hit the snare on beat 2, one sixteenth beat later. I've found a compromise where I can hit the prominent chord and still feel the off beat 2 and 4 groove.

There's also some great melodic choices - after digging into it I found all sorts of interesting treasures - for instance the chorus "hey now hey now" the chorus are G-A, but the melody is E-B-F#-B, so you end up with unusual chord fingering of the quite haunting chords of G6-A6sus2.

It's all about musical growth.

(I highly recommend oolimo for analysing the chords you are thinking about.)

What's happening May 2024

Earlier this month I recorded a Jawmunji Talks video. I enjoy doing them, I have a lot to talk about. Unfortunately I don't have a good setup for recording them, and I'm not great at them either. Interestingly about the same time I recorded it Rick Beato put out a video talking about his obsession with the perfect look for his talking videos. I could relate to evertything he was saying. My computer is under a staircase, it's pretty tight but I make it work. It doesn't however give me much room to create an ambience. It would be nice to have a big room with the background filled with all my musical stuff, with warm lighting, and a set of cameras and microphones set up permanently so I can just go in and record whenever I felt like talking about something. One day one of my kids might move out and I will repurpose their bedroom into a music studio...

I need to work on my talking videos, I need to articulate more, and possibly plan what I'm going to say if not script it. I like the idea of being able to just talk without scripting, but when I watched that video back I realised that I missed saying some things I wanted to say, and said some things that were unnecessary. This media we are on right now - text - so easy, I can just go back and edit anything! And I do! And sometimes, when I'm a consumer, I prefer text, but sometimes I prefer video, so it's nice to have both.

It was good to dust off OBS Studio, I hadn't used it in a while. It's such a great program for staging AV productions. I had plugged in two logitech C920s, a Zoom H1N as audio input, a knock-off Behringer USB interface, and two display captures. It handled them all live, the USB interface was slightly more laggy than the Zoom H1N, so I had to mute the Zoom when I was playing the guitar (I was using the electric). I be honest I should just play the nylon string guitar through the mic...in fact a dynamic mic for voice and a condensor for the guitar. Mmm, maybe dynamic for the guitar, but I do love a condensor for the guitar, it captures everything, if not a little too much everything. I should look into being able to capture all audio feeds and all video feeds at the same time to do post production on - so all video angles and all audio streams, but I doubt my little laptop could handle that.

Anyway, something to chip away at in the background.

Meanwhile, I've had an obsessive dive into a Tame Impala song I first mentioned I should cover back in 2013. "It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards" has been in my to-do list for a while, it's a nice psychedelic rock song, and Tame Impala is from my home town of Perth Western Australia, I need to have more Perth band songs in my setlist. It won Single of the Year for our local music awards in 2013, it has a nice high melody with a very groovy bassline.

I'm at a stage when the basslines in my arrangements are starting to get a bit more complex, which I am really enjoying. My thumb is starting to know where to go, both in rhythm and note selection, rather than just sitting on the root note for the whole bar.

It does make for playing it quite complicated though. But that is a good thing, it's how you progress!

The song is in F, but I'm just tired of needing a top string A over a bottom string F in arrangements, which it would have a few. So inititally I dropped it back to E, which ends up with the main chord progression of E-B-F#m. The latter two aren't trivial chords for arrangements.

I bashed out the melody and the bassline into Musescore with very little playing the guitar. I wanted "the actual" melody and bassline to be there at the start, after that I can grab the guitar and work out what I'm prepared to tackle and what I won't. There were some great sounds but some unusual fretting, and I've worked out that if I don't keep it simple then the songs won't stay with me, so I dumbed it down ever so slightly.

I came back to it the next day and considered instead of dropping from F to E, going from F to G. This created a much easier chord progression of G-D-C, but I needed to drop the melody down an octave to fit, otherwise it's a high B over a low G, which is slightly easier than a high A over a low F, but then I may as well stick to E.

The lower melody over the higher bass is also easier to put together on your left hand, but you've now compressed the song together in the middle frquency range. It gaves a warmer feel (it's how the Artic Monkeys play their cover of it) but to me it turns it into a lullaby. So I'm wrestling with "do I make it easier to play but more frequency compressed, or harder to play and a wider range? Not to mention that G-D-C is such an overused cowboy chord sound.

I know what Naudo would do :-)

Yamaha G-231 II

This G-231 II Yamaha guitar is quite sentimental to me, my parents gave it to me when I was eleven - I was big enough to upgrade from my 3/4 guitar to a full size guitar. It was not the cheapest guitar for its time, maybe a model or two up from basic - it's got an ebony fretboard and the build quality is not bad - thanks dad.

It's the guitar that made me. The one that I honed my fingerstyle skills on. That by the time I was 15 I was thrashing with a plectrum (you can see the damage on soundboard) - luckily my mum bought me an electric guitar shortly thereafter. It sat around for 10 years mostly unused, occasionally brought out as a reference guitar when I needed to remind myself about nylon string classical guitars. It was lent out a few times - it was with my nephew for a few years while he was learning guitar. It lived at my old holiday house for 10 years, I would play it to the trees when I was there. It sat under my desk at work for years and I would play it in the lunch room for an hour on Fridays.

It actually sounds quite nice. But, it hasn't been great to play for a long time. Two main problems - the neck has slightly caved into the body under string tension, which happens to pretty much any classical guitar by the time it is ten. So it makes the action really high. There's no truss rod to tweak it back a little, but besides, it's the neck-to-body connection that goes out; the truss rod is about neck relief, so it's not reeeally the right approach.

The other issue is that higher up the neck the fret  heights are a bit out of alignment. Possibly an issue stemming from problem 1, it certainly doesn't help, but some fret positions up the neck are buzzy.

I have thought in the past about sawing through the neck from underneath (stopping at the fretboard) and then regluing - essentially creating a little triangle that pulls the neck angle back - to fix the high action. Seems savage, so I haven't done it.

But after my water soaking to get the double bass bridge back to square, I wondered if there was something I could do similar - clamp the guitar up forcing the neck backwards, splashing some water around tp ,ake things pliable...so I asked the internet...and discovered a bloke in Queensland had been doing "Steam Neck Resets". I watched his videos and read some stories of other people who had tried it with success and I was convinced.

I decided to start with the fret grind and recrown. Classical guitar necks are flat, you so only need a flat block of wood and some sandpaper to do the initial grind back. I started with 240 grit, and I drew a black line across each fret with a permanent marker, sand for a bit, see whether all the black lines have been touched, draw the line back, repeat - basically I'm aiming to have a dead flat initial surface. I was suprised to find some grooves worn into the first few frets in the usual places. Nylon rubbing through steel!? That was unexpected. There was some very minor imperfections up where the fretting seemed buzzy, I wasn't convinced.

I spent a little time filing off any sharp fret ends as well, where the neck had shrunk a bit over time leaving some sharps. The file I used was a bit rough, I need to add a fret end file to my list for next time.

I then, still drawing black lines on each fret, ran my fret crowning file across. It worked okay, it's a cheap fret crowning tool, so I wasn't really happy. I will buy a good one for next time. Once I had each fret where there was approximately a thin black line across the top - meaning the original fret grind was still intact, but the rounded crown shape was still there - I moved to the next.

The final step was to hand polish each of the new crowns. I popped on my fretboard protector and worked my way down the frets, with decreasing grades of sandpaper, 400 to 600 to 800 to 1200 to steel wool. But the time I hit the steel wool it was nice'n'shiny. I could see in a few places where I had missed some scratches in earlier sanding, but over all, a nice job.

I had nicked the fretboard in a couple of places with the crowning file and the fret end file, nothing terrible, just a little amateur. I think it makes sense that the first fret grind I ever did was on the guitar that made me the guitarist I am today :-)

After an oiling it looked great. But no time to restring and test it - straight to the steam neck reset, I was very keen to try it out!

1. Make a mark across the frets	2. Block & sand until all marks touched
3. Fret crowning	4. Just a thin line still remains once filed
5. Sand through grits to polish	6. Sit back, admire

I bought a length of aluminium square tube and clamped it hard to the neck in a few places. I was using clamps that had rubber feet so they wouldn't mark the neck. The aluminium was sitting direct on the fretboard, but the frets are nickel-steel so they won't be marked by aluminium.

I then clamped the body to a length of board, with a few towels in between to keep surfaces safe. The goal is to have everything rigid so that when you apply the final clamp at the top it will pull the neck right back at the point when it joins the body. We aren't trying to bend the neck, we are trying to claw back the distortions where it all comes together. If you look carefully, kinda everything is involved - the soundboard, the heel, the sides, the internal ribbing.

I like concept though - put force in the direction you want to go, steam it so the wood and possibly glue becomes a bit pliable again, hold it there until it has dried out, and then when you release it and restring it, it will be back to where it once was. Maybe it won't last, maybe it will go back to where it once was? So what, do it again! - it can be a 5 year maintenance schedule.

Result - I steamed it 3 times over the course of a week, and when I restrung it the action was about 0.25mm lower than before. So my verdict is yes it works, but you need to steam it more over a longer period of time, the consensus seems to be 3 weeks. And note that I really pulled a lot of force on - around 12mm deflection clamping force as measured at the saddle - and that only gave me 0.25mm resulting action decrease. So my lesson there is don't be frightened that you are going to accidentally go to zero action, you probably won't. Ahd then if you did, whip up a new higher saddle - they are easy enough to make.

Sometime I will have another crack at this, but I wanted to get this guitar back to work. After restringing there were improvements in playability, and the buzziness higher up the neck was reduced. Not gone, but more tolerable.

A worthwhile endeavour - for more info on this technique search for "John Miner Neck Steam Reset". Still not "great" to play , but better now.

Jig to hold everything in place	Initial measure at bridge 8.0mm
Fill with rags and lots of steam	This last clamp is particularly important
Cranked to 11.5mm - needed more	Finished with 2.75mm action at 12th fret

In the meantime, I will keep my eye out for an unloved/broken vintage guitar that could do with my attention and I will go through these processes again, but without any pressure of needing to get it back to work.