How to Master in REAPER: Turn Your Songs into Masterpieces!

Ever wondered how to make your tracks sound like they were mastered in a high-end studio? Well, today's your lucky day! Jack's back, and he's gonna show you how to master your tracks in REAPER like a total boss.

We're talking about setting up your project, adding some warmth with saturation, tweaking with both corrective and creative EQ, compressing for that tight sound, and finally, limiting to make sure you're loud and clear.

By the end of this video, you'll be mastering like a pro!

Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more helpful tutorials like this one.

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⏱️TIMESTAMPS⏱️
00:00 - Intro
00:30 - Setting Up The Project
01:57 - Saturation
05:44 - Corrective EQ
08:37 - Creative EQ
13:37 - Compression
24:47 - Limiters
30:27 - Final Step
32:22 - Outro

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HELPFUL LINKS

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#reaper #reapertutorial #musicproduction #reaperdaw

[genuinefreewilly]

Good to see more Reaper tutorials on mastering and see other folks workflows.

[chrisrose]

fantastic vocals on that song. Great job.

[RobertNixAlternativeArtist]

Excellent tutorial on using Reaper for mastering.

[AnotherLukeGraham]

Good point of the mastering after you finish your mixing lol i definitely struggle with not wanting to keep making tiny changes lol

[holmesoffice]

Good stuff. I was pleased to see how well the stock plug ins handled my song following your instructions. Thanks!

[SLNTDTH]

Love the content! Will be checking out your other videos

[paulrosebush]

Thanks a bunch for this Reaper tutorial. Note: Learning from your clip I was constantly distracted by your exceptional reference track. Great tune, well done, young man. Subscribed!

[miserychordia]

Great tutorial and an awesome song which in now stuck in my head :-D

[fivebyfivesound]

Great to see a Reaper mastering tutorial. Even though I spent my first full year mixing with all stock Reaper plugins, I wouldn’t have thought to try them in a mastering chain.

Definitely not the same outcome as using more sophisticated tools, but a good starting place for sure.

Some feedback, which echos what others have also mentioned: The saturation and compression applied ends up making the vocals sound pretty aggressively distorted by the time you reached limiting. I assume this was not the attended aesthetic choice? I’d be interested to know if there’s a way to avoid that while still using these tools to achieving the desired end result.

Also, it’s not clear what loudness the record ended up at. So, if you were to remake this video, that would be a key improvement.

Other things it would great to cover would be how to use stock plugins to achieve extended and dynamic width (e.g. stereo widening and mid-side processing). This is something it seems is pretty common to mastering these days.

Thanks for the walkthrough. Looking forward to incorporating elements of your approach into how I think about teaching no/low-cost Reaper post-production in the future 🙏🏽

[jerrybeirnemusic]

wouldn't you put the JS: Loudness Meter Peak at the end to measure LUFs and the like? i always do. very helpful.

[SteppingRazorStudio]

Nice work. Maybe next time talk about the overall target level of the master. Your camera was covering up your master bus, so we couldn't even see what level you were hitting.

[youtubecommentor]

If you would please explain … What did you set the original master level to before importing the .wav file into a new project for mastering purposes?

[nedkelly]

I followed your process for mastering and found that my ears couldn't really pick up any difference in the track except for the limiting that you used as the last plugin. I then went and listened to "Moonlight" on Spotify and was amazed at the spaciousness and clarity of the vocals and drum track. Was the version on Spotify also done using reaper, or did you use some other mastering program?

[cookupcentral]

glad to see a tutorial with a decent song some off these guys scare me sometimes 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[TheFendertak]

first off I will say your song Moonlight is definitely song of the year, super in every little detail, the vocals outstanding!! I am basically a newbie with Reaper, now using 7, I have been singing and playing for years, but now I'm putting hours and hours into recording my own songs playing all the instruments, for now mostly country, easier to start with I think, have a s*** load of plugins, entire waves suite, fab filter and a boutique of universal audio plugins, I have everything but master of none, in regards to mastering I think I was going about it totally wrong in that I would do the mastering on the main track before rendering, so now am I first to render my song to Wav file when I feel I have completed the final editing process and then bring it back into a new project and then perform the final mastering procedure, will I ever get it right..

[Rvs]

Pretty nice vocals, just a small criticism, I would of reduced the breaths about 1-2 db and also find that the "C" when the vocalist is saying the word (call) I find the consonant sound is kind of harsh for my taste. I would use fade in when the consonant comes out that strong. But, that is my taste. Overall its a great song.

[efulmpuy]

I dont know whats going on there😅, i dont hear any changes in every steps. i'm so sorry, may be its cause by my monitor, which is medium grade earbuds😂. But i see the point in each steps. Good explanation by the way. 👍👍