This article is divided in two section. The first section explains how to record voice over, and the second section explains how to post process the recording.

1. Recording

Audio Device

You must first setup Reaper for your audio interface:

1. Plug in your audio interface to your computer.
2. Plug in your microphone to the audio interface.
3. Plug in your headphones to the audio interface.
4. Go to Options -> Preferences -> Audio -> Device
5. Select your Audio System from the drop down menu (ALSA in the image below).
6. Select your audio interface for Input device and Output device from the drop down menu (MiniFuse 1 in the image below).
7. Click OK button.

Recording audio

1. Create a new track.
2. Arm the track by clicking on the red circle button of the track.
3. If you are using a condenser microphone, don’t forget to switch on Phantom Power in your audio interface.
4. Check the levels of the track (red level meter vertical bars) and tweek the Gain knob of your audio interface to set the levels of the track bewteen -12.00 dB and -6.00 dB while you do a talking test.
5. When you are ready, click on the record button in the transport section to start the recording and let it to record in silence for several seconds before speaking. This initial seconds will be used later during post processing for noise reduction effects.
6. When you finish your speech, click on the record button again in the transport section to stop the recording.
7. It is also a good practise to disarm the track by clicking again on the red circle button of the track before we start the post processing workflow in the next section.

2. Post Processing

Monitoring

During this example, I’ll be using two different tools to check the levels for the track and for the whole project:

• Loudness Meter Peak is used only to monitor the Track levels. Loudness Meter Peak can be added as an effect to a track, and must be added as the last effect in order to monitor all the effect of the track.

• Dry Run can be used to monitor either a track levels or the whole project levels. You can launch Dry Run by going to File -> Render -> Dry run (no output). In order to monitor the whole project or to monitor only a track, select either Master mix or Selected tracks (stems) respectively from the Source drop down menu. Once you have selected your source, click on the Dry run (no output button at the bottom.

Note that both tools will show different values once you start adding effects to a track if you’ve set up Master mix as source, so it is very important that you are aware wheter you are launching Dry Run for the whole project (Master mix) or for a track (Selected tracks (stems)).

Workflow

This is the order of actions and effects necessary to edit a Voice Over project:

1. Normalization (Action on track)
2. Noise reduction (FXs on track)
3. Compression (FX on track)
4. Equalization (FX on track)
5. Limitation (FX on Master - Optional)

Actions

There is one action to perform in our track before adding any effect: Normalization.

1. Right click on the track -> Item properties… -> Volume/pan -> Click on Normalize button.
2. Under Normalize to: drop down menu, select LUFS-I.
3. Type in -16.00 on the LU text box.
4. If your track is mono, tick the box Adjust mono media an additional -3dB.
5. Click OK button.

6. You can check if the LUFS-I value is right by running File->Render->Dry Run:

For a mono track, the LUFS-I value you should be between -16.00 and -19.00. In the image above is -16.00.

Note that the Peak is clipping at +0.6. You can visualize in the image above:

1. In the Master mix bar on the top.
2. In the red spike on the waveform at aprox. second 12.5.
3. In the Peak column at the bottom.

You want to keep the Peak value lower than -1.00. I’ll fix that later with 1175 Compressor.

Note: If you play the track where the spike is, you will see that the track peak meter and the Master peak meter turn yellow with a fixed red peak level indicator (rectangle on top with a number) next to the volume faders. You can reset the peak meters to normal again by clicking on the peak level indicator on both peak meters.

Effects

These are the Reaper FXs for Voice Over. Add them in your track in the order presented:

1. ReaFIR: EQ and dynamics. This effect is used to silence background noise.

2. ReaGate: Noise Gate. This effect complements ReaFIR and is used to remove any remaining sound below the main subject levels.

3. ReaComp: Compressor. Used to reduce peak levels by decreasing dynamic range. On this project, however, I’ll be using 1175 Compressor instaed of ReaComp.

4. ReaEQ: Multi-band equalizer. Used to increase or decrease the gain of a particular frequency.

ReaFIR and ReaGate are used to silence background noise. Both effects work well in conjuction. ReaFIR is used before ReaGate.

Full list of stock Reaper effects: Click here

1. ReaFIR

1. Change the mode to Substract, the edit Mode to Precise and the FFT Size to 512 or 1024.
2. Play a silence section of the track and then tick the box Automatically build noise profile. The noise profile will be drawn until you untick the box again. After that you can adjust the profile graph up and down by holding the CTRL key while dragging the graph with the mouse.

2. ReaGate

To get the correct ReaGate threshold (in the picture above is -26.2), you must play a few seconds of the lower levels of the track in order to silence those levels. After this you can tweek the threshold slider until the sound dissapears without affecting the main subject levels.

3. 1175 Compressor

1. Play the track and monitor the highest peak levels by using the Loudness Meter Peak effect (add the effect at the end of the effect chain). Alternatively, if your track is very long, you can get the high peak levels by running File->Render->Dry Run.
2. Adjust the Threshold (dB) slider until the Peak Clips of the Loudness Meter Peak effect or the Peak of Dry Run gets aprox. to -1.00. Always be sure that LUFS-I is between -16.00 and -19.00.
3. You can leave the rest of settings to their default values for now.

After ajusting the Threshold (dB) to -1.6 as shown in the image above, this is what the Loudness Meter Peak and Dry Run shows:

[Dry Run]

[Loudness Meter Peak]

4. ReaEQ

The only parameter to change here is the preset. Select stock - Wide male vocal from the drop down menu.

After changing the preset, move the Loudness Meter Peak effect to the end of the effect chain and play the track (or launch Dry Run for the track): the Peak and LUFS-I will change to -1.5 and -16.7 respectively. You can tweek the Gain (dB) value of the 1175 Compressor to +0.5 to compensate:

Now the Peak and LUFS-I go back to -1.0 and -16.2 respectively.

Master Mix Levels (optional)

Optionally you can add the ReaLimit effect to the Master mix levels and set Brickwall ceiling to -1.00 and tick the box True peak. This way, regardless of the individual tracks effects, the whole project will never go above -1.0 dB.

Due to the fact that any effect added to the Master Mix will be added on top of the Track effects, the Master Mix Peak value is now -2.00.

For instance, in this example the Track has a Peak value of -1.00, and I added a ReaLimit effect to the Master Mix with a Brickwall ceiling value of -1.00, hence the Master Peak value will become -2.00.