Your Reaper FAQs Answered: A Metal Producer’s Guide

Nail The Mix Staff

So, you’ve chosen Reaper as your weapon of choice for producing modern metal. Solid decision. It’s insanely powerful, ridiculously customizable, and doesn’t cost a fortune. But let’s be honest, that deep customizability can feel like staring into the abyss. You know it can do what you want, but figuring out how can grind your creativity to a halt.

You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. Forget generic tutorials. This is a no-BS guide focused on the stuff that actually matters for making heavy music that sounds polished, professional, and crushes a listener's skull—the way modern metal demands.

Here are the answers to your most pressing Reaper FAQs.

How Do I Set Up Reaper for Optimal Metal Mixing?

A good mix starts way before you touch a fader. Setting up your project correctly saves hours of headaches and lets you get to the creative stuff faster.

Project Settings That Matter

Before you even import audio, dial in your project settings (File > Project Settings).

  • Sample Rate: Set this to 48kHz. It’s the standard for video and a great professional sweet spot for audio-only projects, offering a slight edge in processing over 44.1kHz without hogging system resources.
  • Bit Depth: Use 24-bit for recording. This gives you way more dynamic range headroom than 16-bit, meaning you don’t have to slam your preamps to get a healthy signal, preserving your transients.
  • Project Saving: Under the "Project" tab, set a "Path to save media files." This keeps all your audio files neatly organized in a subfolder within your project directory. Trust us, your future self will thank you when you’re not hunting for a missing snare sample.

Building a Killer Metal Template

Every metal track has similar core elements. Building a template with these elements pre-loaded and routed is the single biggest workflow hack you can implement.

  1. Create Your Core Tracks: Lay out tracks for everything you’ll need. Use Reaper’s folder track feature to group them logically:
    • DRUMS (Folder)
      • Kick In, Kick Out, Snare Top, Snare Bot, Toms, Overheads, Rooms, etc.
    • BASS (Folder)
      • Bass DI, Bass Amp
    • RHY GTR (Folder)
      • GTR L1, GTR R1, GTR L2, GTR R2 (for the classic quad-track setup)
    • LEAD GTR (Folder)
    • VOCALS (Folder)
  2. Pre-Load Your Go-To Plugins:
    • On your drum tracks, load a gate like ReaGate on the shells.
    • On your guitar tracks, load your favorite amp sim. Whether it’s a Neural DSP suite or a free VST with a good IR loader like Ignite Amps Emissary, have it ready to go.
    • Create a MIDI track with your drum sampler of choice loaded up (GetGood Drums, Superior Drummer 3, etc.).
  3. Set Up Basic Routing:
    • Route all tracks inside the DRUMS folder to the main folder track. Now you have a single "DRUM BUS" fader.
    • Do the same for your RHY GTR, BASS, and VOCALS folders.
    • Create dedicated reverb and delay busses on separate tracks and use sends from your vocals and lead guitars to feed them.

Save this as a project template (File > Project Templates > Save project as template…). Now, every time you start a new song, all this foundational work is already done.

What are the Best Reaper Actions for Editing Drums?

Modern metal production demands inhumanly tight drums. Even the best drummers need a little editing help to achieve that polished, punchy sound. Reaper, especially with a key free extension, is an absolute monster for this.

You NEED the SWS/S&M Extension

If you haven’t already, stop what you’re doing and download the SWS/S&M Extension for Reaper. It’s a free package of hundreds of new actions and workflow enhancements. It’s not optional; it’s essential for turning Reaper into a pro-level editing machine.

The Ultimate Drum Editing Workflow

Here’s how to get perfectly gridded drums that still feel human:

  1. Group Your Drum Items: Select all your recorded drum tracks and group them (press 'G'). This ensures that any edit you make to one track (like the snare) is mirrored across all the others, maintaining phase coherency.
  2. Dynamic Split: Select the item you want to use as your guide (usually kick or snare). Open Dynamic Split (press 'D'). Set the threshold so it only detects the main transient hits. Under "When gate opens," select "Split item." This will slice your audio at every single transient.
  3. Quantize to the Grid: Open the Action List (press '?'). Find the SWS action: "SWS/AW: Quantize item positions to grid…". This will snap the beginning of every slice you just made perfectly to the grid. Dial in the strength to less than 100% if you want to retain a little more of the original human feel.
  4. Heal the Splits: Select all the sliced items and press Cmd+Option+H (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+H (Win) to heal the splits. Now you have a single audio item that's perfectly timed.

This process is the secret behind the hyper-tight drum sound on countless modern metal records.

How Can I Get Brutal Guitar Tones with Stock Plugins?

You don’t need a $3,000 amp head to get a mix-ready guitar tone. While high-end amp sims from brands like Neural DSP are fantastic, you can get surprisingly far with Reaper’s built-in tools and some smart freebies.

Don't Sleep on JS Plugins

Inside your FX browser, you’ll find a folder called "JS." This contains hundreds of simple but effective plugins. The key to a great amp sim tone isn’t the amp itself—it’s the speaker cabinet impulse response (IR).

Find a good free IR loader plugin (like NadIR by Ignite Amps) and load it after a free amp head VST (like the TSE X50 or LePou amp sims). There are thousands of amazing free and paid IRs online from companies like OwnHammer or York Audio. A good IR is the difference between a fizzy mess and a professional, chunky tone.

Surgical EQ with ReaEQ

Once you have a raw tone, Reaper’s stock ReaEQ is all you need to shape it for a dense metal mix. Here’s the formula:

  • High-Pass Filter (HPF): Cut everything below 80-120Hz. This removes unnecessary low-end rumble and makes room for the kick and bass to punch through.
  • Low-Pass Filter (LPF): Cut everything above 8-12kHz. This is where that nasty, fizzy "digital" sound lives. Taming it cleans up your tone dramatically without losing aggression.
  • Mid-Scoop: Find the "honky" or "boxy" frequencies, usually somewhere between 300Hz and 800Hz. Use a wide bell curve to pull this area down by a few dB. This makes space for vocals and the snare crack.

Getting this right is crucial for clarity. If you want to dive deeper into shaping massive guitar tones, check out our complete guide on EQing modern metal guitars for max impact.

How Do I Manage Low-End from 8-String Guitars?

With bands tuning down to F or even lower, managing the low-frequency spectrum is one of the biggest challenges in modern metal. How do you keep the mix from turning into a muddy mess?

The Bass and Guitar Relationship

When a guitar is tuned as low as a bass, you need to be very intentional about giving each instrument its own space.

  1. Carve out Space: High-pass your 8-string guitars more aggressively than you’d think. Start at 100Hz and push it up until the guitars start to sound thin, then back it off a bit. This clears a huge amount of room for the bass guitar’s fundamental tones.
  2. Sidechain Compression: This is a killer trick for clarity. Put ReaComp on your bass track. Go to the "Detector Input" and choose "Auxiliary Input." Now, create a send from your rhythm guitar bus to channels 3/4 of the bass track. Set ReaComp to have a fast attack and fast release. Now, every time the palm-muted guitars hit, they’ll momentarily "duck" the bass volume by a couple of dB, creating a powerful sense of punch and separation. This is a core concept in modern mixing—learn more in our guide to metal compression secrets.

Kick vs. Bass

The other classic low-end battle. Use ReaEQ to create a symbiotic relationship:

  1. Find the fundamental frequency where your kick drum has the most "thump" (often 50-70Hz). Give it a narrow boost of 2-3dB.
  2. On your bass guitar track, use a narrow bell curve to cut that exact same frequency by 2-3dB.
  3. Now, find the fundamental note of the bass guitar line and give that a narrow boost, while cutting that same frequency on the kick drum channel.

They now occupy slightly different pockets in the low-end, leading to a punchier and clearer foundation.

Ready to See The Pros Do It?

Learning these techniques is a huge step forward. But watching a world-class producer implement them in real-time, on a real song, is a different league of learning.

Imagine watching masters like Will Putney, Nolly Getgood, or Jens Bogren pull up the actual multitracks from a legendary metal album and mix it from scratch, explaining every move. That’s exactly what you get with Nail The Mix. You don’t just get the theory; you get a front-row seat to the practice.

If you’re ready to stop guessing and start learning from the best in the business, check out our massive catalog of past Nail The Mix sessions. Your mixes will never be the same.

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