For sound designers, source is paramount. Finding,
generating, recording great source is the difference between a successful
design and not.
There are a lot of cool plugins out there which help you generate interesting source and most come at a cost. This makes them accessible to those who can afford to invest in them. Namely people already in work or people who for whatever reason have enough expendable income to afford them.
But there are techniques available in Reaper which help you generate interesting source quickly and without any extra cost. One of those techniques is harnessing the power of automation and subprojects in Reaper. This is what I’m going to show you today.
Pick some starting source
We’re going to start with some source I recorded of paper being manipulated because it can generate a lot of interesting transients and movement which are great for sci-fi sound design source.
You can use any source you like, the more constant the source the more predictable the outcome of this technique will be.
The main use case for this technique is creating more abstract sound design that will stand on its own for something like UI, Sci-Fi weapon design or as a sweetener layer with more grounded material.
I’m working on a re-design of some gameplay footage captured from the “Warframe” franchise. It’s a good mix of grounded action with high concept Sci-Fi VFX, so a perfect fit for this type of source material.
Subprojects
Ok so you might be thinking “What’s a subproject? Why a subproject?”
A subproject is a reaper project file that is placed inside of another Reaper project as a media item.
I mainly use sub projects for this process because it allows us to manipulate the master rate of the project by utilizing the automation lanes. This gives us the best possible sounding pitch manipulation (sans time stretch artefacts) and means we can also use automation items as a means of generating automations quickly with minimal amounts of work.
How to create a sub project?
There are two ways of creating subprojects inside Reaper.
Subproject from the track level
You can right click on the track and choose “Move tracks to new subproject”
This is useful when you’ve been applying FX on the track level already and you want to have a rendered version of those FX in your master project. It is in affect a soft bounce but as it’s a subproject you can go into the subproject and change whatever you want. Depending on your settings, those changes will be rendered back into the master project at a time of your choosing. The default behaviour is when you hit save in the subproject.
Subproject from media item level
You can right click on any number of media items, select “move items to subprojects” and it will combine those items into a subproject and place the rendered media item back into the master project where the old items were.
You would use this option if you wanted to avoid taking any track processing down into the subproject.
In my use case I used the track based one as I was already processing the source material using a combination of FX and I chose to use this technique in order to get more interesting movement out of the source I was creating.
I currently don’t own something like Tonstrum Traveller which is something you might use to get movement in a similar way out of a source but this technique can produce similar results.
Automation items
An automation item is an object type that lives exclusively in the automation lanes in Reaper.
The main use case for them is to create items which can be copied around the project into different automation lanes, either on the same track or different tracks.
The other handy feature of these items is that they have some useful LFO options for generating automations quickly.
How do I create automation items?
The main method I use is to hold down the ALT key, then click and drag on an node free part of an automation lane and it will create a bounding box from where your mouse click starts to where your mouse click ends.
If some automation already exists under the area where the mouse operation happened, then it will be captured inside this bounding box. This is very useful for duplicating custom drawn automations around your project.
Enabling LFO shapes for automations
If you right-click on the item you’ve just created, you can choose to edit the properties.
This will bring up a new window:
In this picture the LFO shape is set to Saw which you can see is how it’s set up in the pic from my project. But it’ll be set to none on a fresh item.
You’ve got a limited set of shapes but alongside the other parameters you can set up the automation to behave how you want it to.
By default, the saw shape is set up in the opposite direction to what I need to create a pitch ramp down. By moving the amplitude parameter to the negative values, it starts to reverse the shape, and I start to get the ramp down shape I was looking for, which will generate more transient like information and more of that sci-fi “pew pew” I want. Have a play with all the other settings to see what they do, it’s pretty obvious when you start changing things.
Now it’s just left for me to back out of the subproject and into the master project to enjoy my newly modulated source.
Summary
That demonstrates some of the benefits of using sub projects alongside automation items. We can also use this workflow to create sausage files which help when creating variations for video games or linear.
There are a lot of cool plugins out there which help you generate interesting source and most come at a cost. This makes them accessible to those who can afford to invest in them. Namely people already in work or people who for whatever reason have enough expendable income to afford them.
But there are techniques available in Reaper which help you generate interesting source quickly and without any extra cost. One of those techniques is harnessing the power of automation and subprojects in Reaper. This is what I’m going to show you today.
Pick some starting source
We’re going to start with some source I recorded of paper being manipulated because it can generate a lot of interesting transients and movement which are great for sci-fi sound design source.
You can use any source you like, the more constant the source the more predictable the outcome of this technique will be.
The main use case for this technique is creating more abstract sound design that will stand on its own for something like UI, Sci-Fi weapon design or as a sweetener layer with more grounded material.
I’m working on a re-design of some gameplay footage captured from the “Warframe” franchise. It’s a good mix of grounded action with high concept Sci-Fi VFX, so a perfect fit for this type of source material.
Subprojects
Ok so you might be thinking “What’s a subproject? Why a subproject?”
A subproject is a reaper project file that is placed inside of another Reaper project as a media item.
I mainly use sub projects for this process because it allows us to manipulate the master rate of the project by utilizing the automation lanes. This gives us the best possible sounding pitch manipulation (sans time stretch artefacts) and means we can also use automation items as a means of generating automations quickly with minimal amounts of work.
How to create a sub project?
There are two ways of creating subprojects inside Reaper.
Subproject from the track level
You can right click on the track and choose “Move tracks to new subproject”
This is useful when you’ve been applying FX on the track level already and you want to have a rendered version of those FX in your master project. It is in affect a soft bounce but as it’s a subproject you can go into the subproject and change whatever you want. Depending on your settings, those changes will be rendered back into the master project at a time of your choosing. The default behaviour is when you hit save in the subproject.
Subproject from media item level
You can right click on any number of media items, select “move items to subprojects” and it will combine those items into a subproject and place the rendered media item back into the master project where the old items were.
You would use this option if you wanted to avoid taking any track processing down into the subproject.
In my use case I used the track based one as I was already processing the source material using a combination of FX and I chose to use this technique in order to get more interesting movement out of the source I was creating.
I currently don’t own something like Tonstrum Traveller which is something you might use to get movement in a similar way out of a source but this technique can produce similar results.
Automation items
An automation item is an object type that lives exclusively in the automation lanes in Reaper.
The main use case for them is to create items which can be copied around the project into different automation lanes, either on the same track or different tracks.
The other handy feature of these items is that they have some useful LFO options for generating automations quickly.
How do I create automation items?
The main method I use is to hold down the ALT key, then click and drag on an node free part of an automation lane and it will create a bounding box from where your mouse click starts to where your mouse click ends.
If some automation already exists under the area where the mouse operation happened, then it will be captured inside this bounding box. This is very useful for duplicating custom drawn automations around your project.
Enabling LFO shapes for automations
If you right-click on the item you’ve just created, you can choose to edit the properties.
This will bring up a new window:
In this picture the LFO shape is set to Saw which you can see is how it’s set up in the pic from my project. But it’ll be set to none on a fresh item.
You’ve got a limited set of shapes but alongside the other parameters you can set up the automation to behave how you want it to.
By default, the saw shape is set up in the opposite direction to what I need to create a pitch ramp down. By moving the amplitude parameter to the negative values, it starts to reverse the shape, and I start to get the ramp down shape I was looking for, which will generate more transient like information and more of that sci-fi “pew pew” I want. Have a play with all the other settings to see what they do, it’s pretty obvious when you start changing things.
Now it’s just left for me to back out of the subproject and into the master project to enjoy my newly modulated source.
Summary
That demonstrates some of the benefits of using sub projects alongside automation items. We can also use this workflow to create sausage files which help when creating variations for video games or linear.
Hopefully you find this useful and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me on any of my socials or through the website and I’ll do my best to answer.
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