In this video Will Irace (Spblat) goes through his setup and customizations in REAPER that he uses for recording voiceover.

He’s pretty new to REAPER so he does fumble and get stuck a few times but it’s always cool to see different workflows. See below for some solutions to these problems.

Solutions to Will’s trouble (including the stuff he didn’t notice):

  • 4:15 the files go offline when he clicks away from REAPER. Preferences> Media> “Set media items offline when application is not active” disabled.
  • 30:45 he sorts the action list by shortcut and scrolls and scrolls and scrolls to find something, but if he could have simply pressed the “find shortcut…” button and pressed the key.
  • 34:00 he starts overdubbing and gets into the mess that is Takes in REAPER. Auto-Crossfade should be off to avoid the large fades when adjusting take edges. If he showed only the active take rather than multiple, a lot of the little confusing things can be avoided.
  • 35:55 he drags the item edges and you can see the overdubbed item begin to loop. Preferences> Project> Media item Defaults> “Loop source for recorded items” disabled.
  • 36:30 he drags the items to the left and there’s a small audio item on top that shouldn’t be there. Options: “Trim content behind media items when editing” Enabled.
  • 37:00 – 38:25 he is looking for a way to hide the empty take lane. That’s in Options> Take Lane Behavior> “Display Empty Take Lanes”. He could also disable “Show All Takes In Lanes”, also in the options menu. He could also select the takes he wants to keep and use the “Crop to active take” action.
  • 42:30 he drags to resize Waves Debreath and the controls no longer respond to the mouse. This is a bug with some Waves VST plugins which they will deny responsibility for… but let’s not get off on a tangent. The AU version may not have this bug, but the first thing I’d try is going to Preferences> Plug-ins> Automatically resize FX Windows: Up and down (check both). This usually solves FX GUI problems
  • Will likes to use the Track Controls feature (at 44:40 and a few other times) so a workflow improvement would be to assign an action for that, “FX: Show/hide track control for last touched FX parameter”. Tweak a knob, bring focus to main REAPER window by clicking anywhere else and hit the keyboard shortcut. I use the = key for this.
  • 55:35 he begins his final timing adjustment edits making a split, moving the edge, and dragging over. This is very slow. The “Trim Items left of cursor” action assigned to the A key saves me hours each week.
  • 1:02:35 he uses a pre-fx volume envelope to fade the music in and out. For something this simple just use item fades, it’s much faster and the waveform updates with that too.

All in all Will has some great workflow ideas to learn from. Remember to backup your REAPER config before making major changes to your setup.


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5 responses to “REAPER Setup for Voiceover with Will Irace”

  1. Will Irace (@spblat) Avatar

    Thank you so much for the post and for your very informative comments. I love this tool and you’re making me better at using it.

  2. Jim Avatar
    Jim

    I think he should have used a little de-esser, IMO.

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