The Best Reaper Plugins for a Modern Metal Mix

So you use Reaper. Smart move. It’s a beast of a DAW—lightweight, endlessly customizable, and ridiculously affordable. But you know as well as I do that a DAW is just the canvas. To create the polished, punishingly heavy mixes that modern metal demands, you need the right set of paints.

The standards for production are higher than ever. That local band demo needs to slam just as hard as the latest Architects record. This means your mixes need precision, clarity, and aggression, especially when you’re wrestling with 8-string guitars tuned to oblivion, blast beats hitting 250 BPM, and layers of synths and samples.

The good news? Reaper is more than capable of handling it. With a combination of its surprisingly powerful stock plugins and a few key third-party additions, you can build a mixing template that rivals any Pro Tools rig. Here are the best Reaper plugins to get you there.

Don’t Sleep on Reaper’s Stock Plugins (JSFX)

Before you go dropping hundreds of dollars on fancy new toys, make sure you’ve maxed out the potential of what you already have. Reaper’s stock ReaPlugs are legendary for being CPU-friendly and surgically precise. They might not have the sexiest user interfaces, but they get the job done.

ReaEQ: Your Surgical Swiss Army Knife

This is arguably the most valuable tool that comes with Reaper. ReaEQ is a clean, transparent, and unlimited-band parametric equalizer. Forget broad strokes; its strength lies in precision. Modern metal mixes are dense as hell, and creating space requires surgical cuts, not massive boosts.

How to Use It for Metal:

• Tame Guitar Fizz: High-gain guitars, especially those from amp sims, often have a harsh, fizzy top end. Use ReaEQ with a narrow band (a high Q setting) to hunt down those nasty frequencies, usually somewhere between 6kHz and 10kHz, and cut them out. You can clean up the harshness without gutting the aggressive bite.
• Create Kick/Bass Symbiosis: This is a classic battleground. Use ReaEQ to carve out a specific frequency pocket for the kick beater to punch through the bass guitar. A narrow cut on the bass track right where the kick’s attack lives (say, around 3-5kHz) can make all the difference.
• High-Pass Everything: Modern metal clarity comes from aggressive low-end management. Slap ReaEQ on every track that isn’t kick or bass (guitars, vocals, cymbals, synths) and high-pass it to remove unnecessary low-end rumble that just eats up headroom.

Learning to master surgical EQ is a fundamental skill. If you want to see exactly how the pros find and fix these problem frequencies on real tracks, our hub page on EQing metal guitars is a great place to start.

ReaComp: The Unsung Hero of Dynamics

Don’t let the simple GUI fool you. ReaComp is a seriously flexible compressor that can do everything from gentle glue to aggressive pumping. Its sidechaining capabilities are incredibly easy to set up and are essential for modern metal.

How to Use It for Metal:

• Classic Kick/Bass Sidechain: The easiest way to make your kick drum cut through is to make the bass guitar duck out of the way for a millisecond. Put ReaComp on your bass track, send the kick drum to auxiliary channels 3/4 on the bass track, and set ReaComp’s detector input to “Auxiliary L+R”. Now the bass will compress every time the kick hits, gluing your low end together.
• Parallel Drum Slam: Create a new track and send your entire drum bus to it. Crush this parallel track with ReaComp using a super fast attack, fast release, and a high ratio (10:1 or higher). Then, blend that crushed signal back in underneath your main drum bus. This adds massive weight and excitement without destroying the natural drum transients.
• Tame Wild Palm Mutes: High-gain DI guitars can have wildly dynamic palm mutes. Use ReaComp with a fast attack and the “pre-comp” setting to catch those peaks before they overload everything that comes after it in the chain.

This barely scratches the surface of what’s possible with dynamics. For a deeper dive, check out our guide to metal compression secrets.

ReaGate: Cleaner Tracks, Tighter Mixes

Clean tracks are the foundation of a clean mix. In a genre defined by high-gain distortion and fast transients, a good gate is non-negotiable. ReaGate is simple, effective, and gives you all the control you need.

How to Use It for Metal:

• Tighten Up Guitar Chugs: Put ReaGate on your rhythm guitar DI tracks before the amp sim. Set the threshold so the gate only opens for the intentional notes, cutting off the noise and string hiss between chugs. This is the secret to that machine-gun tight, percussive djent sound.
• Clean Up Tom Mics: Mic bleed is a nightmare, especially from cymbals into tom mics. Use ReaGate on your tom tracks to ensure they only open up when the tom is actually hit. Use the sidechain filter to help the gate focus on the fundamental frequency of the tom hit, preventing false triggers from snare or cymbal hits.

Essential Third-Party Plugins for a Pro Metal Sound

While Reaper’s stock tools are killer, a few third-party plugins have become industry standards for a reason. They offer workflows and features that can seriously speed up your process and elevate your mixes to a professional level.

EQs That Go Beyond Stock

FabFilter Pro-Q 3

There’s a reason you see this one in almost every pro producer’s session. It’s the gold standard for a reason. Its visual analyzer is brilliant for finding frequency clashes in a crowded mix. But its secret weapon is Dynamic EQ. Got some low-mid “woof” on your palm mutes that only appears on the chugs? Instead of cutting that frequency out of the whole performance, use a dynamic band to dip it out only when it gets too loud. It’s a total game-changer for cleaning up guitars and bass in low-tuned metal.

oeksound Soothe2

If Pro-Q 3 is your scalpel, Soothe2 is your smart-bomb. This plugin automatically identifies harsh resonant frequencies and turns them down in real-time. Got cymbals that sound like crashing trash can lids? A vocal with piercing sibilance? Guitar fizz that ReaEQ can’t quite tame? Slap Soothe2 on it, dial it in, and listen to the harshness melt away without sacrificing the good stuff. It is absolutely indispensable for achieving that “expensive,” polished sound.

Dynamics and Saturation

FabFilter Pro-MB

Multi-band compression is key for controlling the chaos of modern metal. A low-tuned 8-string guitar has the fundamental of a bass guitar but the midrange of a rhythm guitar. With Pro-MB, you can clamp down on the sub-bass below 100Hz to keep it tight and consistent, while leaving the aggressive mids and highs completely untouched. It’s like having several compressors working on different parts of a single instrument.

Soundtoys Decapitator

Sometimes “clean” isn’t what you need. You need vibe, grit, and attitude. Decapitator is the king of saturation. Use it to add harmonic richness and aggression to a sterile bass DI, help a screaming vocal cut through the mix, or add some analog-style warmth to your master bus. The “Punish” button is your best friend for creating extreme parallel distortion effects.

Virtual Instruments & Amp Sims: The Modern Metal Workflow

Drum Libraries (GetGood Drums, Superior Drummer 3)

Let’s be real: heavily edited and sample-replaced drums are the sound of modern metal. In many cases, the drums are fully programmed. Tools like GetGood Drums (check out their Modern & Massive or P PIV Matt Halpern kits) and Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 3 are the standard. They provide incredibly detailed, perfectly captured drum sounds that are basically “mix-ready” out of the box, giving you that inhumanly tight and punchy foundation your mix needs.

Neural DSP Archetypes

The days of needing a cranked tube amp and a perfectly treated room to get a pro guitar tone are over. Neural DSP has completely changed the game. Whether it’s the percussive clarity of the Archetype: Plini, the crushing gain of the Archetype: Gojira, or the versatility of the Tone King Imperial MKII, these plugins deliver tones that sit perfectly in a dense mix with minimal fuss. They’re not just “good for plugins”; they’re just good, period.

Killer Free Reaper Plugins You Need to Download

Building a great plugin arsenal doesn’t have to break the bank. The community around Reaper is amazing, and there are some seriously high-quality freebies out there that punch way above their weight class.

• Tokyo Dawn Labs (TDR): Download the TDR Nova and Kotelnikov plugins right now. Nova is a fantastic parallel dynamic EQ (a free alternative for many Pro-Q 3 tasks), and Kotelnikov is a transparent and musical mastering compressor that works wonders on a mix bus.
• Ignite Amps Emissary / NadIR: Before Neural DSP took over, this was the go-to free combo for metal guitar tones. The Emissary is a killer high-gain amp head plugin, and NadIR is a dual impulse response loader. It still holds up and is a great way to get a solid tone for zero dollars.
• MeldaProduction MFreeFXBundle: This is a ridiculous collection of over 30 free plugins. You get analyzers, compressors, EQs, reverbs, delays—pretty much everything you need to get started. The user interfaces can be a bit busy, but the quality is undeniable.

Putting It All Together: From Tools to Technique

Having the best plugins is a great start. But it’s just that—a start.

The real magic happens when you know how and why to use them. Knowing the exact frequency to cut in a scooped guitar tone, how to set the attack and release on a compressor for a snare drum, or how to blend a distorted bass DI with a clean sub track—that’s what separates an amateur mix from a professional release.

Imagine watching producers like Will Putney, Andrew Wade, or Billy Decker use these exact tools in a real-world session, explaining every single move they make.

That’s what Nail The Mix is.

We give you the actual multi-tracks from massive bands like Lamb of God, Gojira, and Bring Me The Horizon, and then you get to watch the original producer mix the song from scratch. You see them dial in FabFilter plugins, replace drums with GetGood Drums, and wrestle with those low-tuned guitars in real time.

If you’re ready to move beyond just collecting plugins and start mastering the techniques that create professional metal mixes, check out our full catalog of Nail The Mix sessions. It’s the ultimate deep-dive into the art of metal production.