Some Reaper plugins I like
A quick post about the tools I’ve been using lately to achieve good mixes, quickly.
Even if you don’t always mix your own work, I think it’s good for producers and execs to have technical craft skills, because there are creative and sometimes journalistic decisions being made here too, and knowing a little about mixing can make for better collaborations with audio engineers.
1) Powair
Powair is a LUFS auto-leveler and compressor, and set correctly it grabs the audio you feed it and gets it all to the same perceived loudness level, riding the fader the way an engineer might and carefully applying equal compression to everything.
I use it in two ways:
Firstly, on the vox bus (all script and interview tracks, which at the edit stage Descript has roughly autoleveled via clip gain) with the settings on the left (a gain range of ± 4.0).
And secondly, on clips/actuality tracks with the more aggressive leveling on the right (± 10.0) for audio which varies more widely in loudness (but with a little less compression, as this material is usually pre-compressed):
Powair radically speeds up the levelling/compression part of the mix. It’s not completely perfect but it’s not far off, and it’s a huge time saver. Set it and forget it. Magic.
Another thing that’s great about this is if your EQ plugin is before Powair in the chain, any big changes you make to EQ won’t have a knock-on impact on how compressed or loud the sound is. Powair sorts it all. (The science of perceived loudness measurement in general is also magic.)
2) ReaGate
This is Reaper’s built-in gate, but configured in a very particular way for down-the-line interviews:
Put on both tracks, it gently and gradually mutes the track when the person isn’t talking, and subtly switches it back on for speech, chuckles and hmms, but not for typing, loud breathing or table bumps. The end result doesn’t sound gated at all, but rather like the two tracks have been manually cleaned up in the edit.
Here’s my gate configuration for remote interviews:
3) TDR Nova
TDR Nova is a free dynamic EQ. Put it on the music bus and sidechain the vox bus into it, and it can dynamically duck the frequencies of music that are occupied by speech. This creates room in the mix, so the music can still be lively and punchy without crowding out the speech.
4) Techivation T-De-Esser 2
Reaper’s built-in de-esser is rubbish, but T-De-Esser 2 is free and simple. I add it as the last plugin on the vox bus, after Powair, so that it’s getting fairly consistent esses to calm down. Sibilance annoys me more as I get older and my ears get tired.
5) Reaper’s built-in LUFS meter
Set as the last item on the master after the limiter. I used to use Youlean’s meter, but I like using built-in plugins where I can for simplicity’s sake, and this is perfectly good.
6) Big, heavily EQ’d reverb, using Reaper’s ReaVerb plugin
A big low-pass filter stops the reverb from calling attention to itself. (In the 60s, Abbey Road EQ’d the sends to its physical plate reverbs in a similar way.) Used sparingly and usually mixed quite low when it’s needed.
7) iZotope de-click
On the vox bus, to eliminate mouth noise. Under no circumstances should you enable ‘output clicks only’.
You can hear all of these in this episode about Huw Edwards, which I mixed/sound designed for my old Times comrades in about 3 hours.
If you have a mixing emergency or need someone to train your team in speedy Reaper mixing, get in touch: hello@jshield.co.uk