Help a newbie with Reaper

What software are you using and what pugins, most pugins have gain adjust, and by using a send you can use the virtual mixer (like cubase) to send more or less signal. The dry wet adjust changes the amount of the effect, (wet is the effect amount).

 

Sometimes I have two tracks, one dry, one wet. If you only want a little reverb, then turn down the volume of the wet track.

 

Reverb is usually sent to an (aux or buss) send.

Basically what you'd do is have your vocal track (for example) nicely eq'd, compressed etc but without reverb. Set your level with the channel fader. Now, for the reverb, you would set up an aux send. There will be a way in Reaper to send some of the signal of the vocal (in this case) to another channel, where reverb can be added. You would set up the aux send channel so that it would have reverb on it, usually set to 100% wet (ie only reverb, no dry signal).

The benefit to setting up reverb on an aux send, rather than just doing within each channel (which you can do - but if you do that fiddle with the wet/dry balance to get the amount of verb you want to hear), is that you can use that same reverb aux send channel for however many tracks you want to put reverb on. The aux send gain fader sets the overall reverb level, and the level of the sends from the various tracks affect how much reverb they have. So, that one reverb could have vocal, guitar, drums, kazoo, whatever being fed into it. It is lighter on system resources.

Hope that was somewhat clear.

There's also a Reaper forum out there. There's some good stuff on it.

Cheers,
Geoff

 

Also, fiddle with things like room size, length of reverb, and the type of reverb. Halls are typically bigger than rooms, for example.

Some reverb programs have a dozen or more parameters that you can tweak and fiddle with. And they're all a bit different or use different terminology for essentially the same thing. But you'll usually see type of reverb, room size (sometimes just one control that affects both) length of the reverb (decay time sometimes), predelay (length of time before the initial reflections - which are more delay like - are heard) and/or length of time before the reverb starts, often high and low eq (and/or diffusion - how hard/bright is the reverb) etc etc.

Cheers,
Geoff

 

Reverb VSTs have wet/dry mix or wet and dry volume controls. REAPER VSTs also have a mix control in the upper right hand corner.

Fran