Setting up tracks in Reaper.

The nice thing about using a multi-track DAW such as Reaper for your production is the customization it gives you as the producer. If you are just using software’s such as Goldwave or Sound forge you lack the ability to adjust volume and plugins after the mix is complete. In Reaper you may come back and drop in a completely different VO track and match it up with fx if you need a peace of imaging quick. You can also adjust the volume of your bed or FX when the program director of the station asks you to, without recreating the entire peace from scratch.

Of course the ultimate goal here is to create a peace of imaging, so lets set up a template in Reaper. Open an empty Reaper project.

Create a

Track for VO

Track for FX

Track For Bed

Track for VOTmp

Editing Voiceover

The ultimate goal of editing spoken word is to have it in many ways, sound natural or without notice of where, the edits have been made. Of course producers will hear edits, but the average trained human ear should not.

On the VOTMP track import your Voiceover recording.

Press control+left arrow to verify this item is selected, and then hit w, to go to the start of the project.

Now start playback with space. When you hear the Voiceover start, press control+space to pause playback, then, left arrow until you believe you are at the beginning of the first word of the first script of the voiceover. As you left arrow, you may press space to start/stop playback to verify where the play head is at. When you are finished with the curser move, pressing space should start playing audio as soon as you hit it. This will show you that you are where you need to be.

Press, s, to split the item. Now as you press space, then control+left arrow you should hear the start of the recording, and when you press control+right arrow you should hear the start of the Voiceover. If this is how it works, then you may press space to stop playback, verify that ripple mode is per track by pressing alt+p which should cycle through the ripple modes, and then control+left arrow to verify the first item is selected. Press delete. Now you should only have one item on the track. Now as you hit w to rewind to the beginning of the project, and then space to play, hear the voiceover start at the beginning of the track. From here on out, you will only delete the items you don’t want as you edit.

We are going to take two views at our VO track. We are first going to edit out the takes we don’t want, Which will be less fine editing of course.

Make sure you listen to a couple takes before you make your decision of what you don’t want. When you find a take your for sure your not fond of, pause with control+space, then page up which will take you back a measure and press space to play. If you need to go back another measure do so, but get yourself to the start of the take. Remember that tapping left and right arrows will move you in very small increments which page up and down will move you backwards and forward in larger ones. You want to be close enough that as soon as you hit space to play the portion of the VO you are interested in starts to play back, just as how it was when you cut the beginning of the track. Press control+1 to set a marker at this point. Reaper may forget as you are moving around what item you are on, or you may move from one item to the next without realizing this. Because of this, press control+left arrow to move back an item. Now press 1, to move to the marker you created. Now press, S to split the item at the start point. Did Reaper report 1 item added? if so, you now need to make sure this item is selected to work with. Press space and then control+left or right arrow to move to the start of this item. You will know when it is selected per the audio that is playing back. Now listen to this item until you get to the end of the bad take. You now want to press control+space to pause playback, and again, make sure your curser is right at the end of the bad take. Yes, if there is a bit of silence before the beginning of the next take, you may place the curser right before the next passage of Voiceover. When your curser is set, press s, to split the item at this point. Now we will have the bad item separated. Again press control+left arrow to make sure this item is selected. Press delete to delete the bad item. As you press w to rewind, and space to play and you listen back to the entire audio starting at the beginning the bad audio should be gone. You will also now hear the edits. We want to keep the audio clean as we go so as to not make the fine editing more of a challenge. Use the methods described above to delete any bad edits. You will listen to the remainder of the track and take these steps to clear out the bad takes, keeping only the good.