REAPER is truly an amazing DAW that knows no equal when it comes to extensibility. A while ago, I wrote a blog post where I shared my favorite free extensions that I use daily for my work in game audio. Since this post has been incredibly popular, I wanted to create a dedicated resource on my website that hosts all of the cool extensions and workflow tricks I think will help you supercharge your workflow. This page will be updated regularly, so make sure to bookmark it (Ctrl/Cmd + D)!
Many of the extensions listed will require these following tools installed so make sure to grab these first if you haven't already. Note that ReaImGUI is included in the ReaTeam Extensions repository.
Creation & Ideation
Script by Bird's Things
We're starting off with a juggernaut! This script / plug-in is arguably the most famous on this list and one I think no REAPER user should live without. It's an incredible productivity booster and allows you to play with plug-ins and mangle sounds without every losing any of your happy accidents.
Simply put, Global Sampler records anything and everything you do in REAPER, regardless of whether you hit Play first. It consists of a script that invokes its UI (the waveform view ideally placed at the top of bottom of your window), and a plug-in you can place on your master or listen bus which is responsible for actually sending audio into Global Sampler.
This not only makes resampling a breeze, it also means that you'll never lose any cool and unique sounds that you may get while browsing plug-in presets, tweaking parameters, or just causing mayhem while mashing your MIDI keyboard.
Global Sampler is always recording everythin you do within the DAW. Simply select the desired portion of audio in Global Sampler's interface and drag it wherever you want.
One of the best workflow accelerators for sound design is to commit real-time processing to audio and continue designing your sounds from there. It will prevent spending too much time tweaking parameters on the hunt for that perfect sound and lets you move forward in a more ruthless and effective way. Global Sampler makes this process as low-friction as possible.
Script by LKC Tools
In game audio, creating variations of the sound effects you design is critically important if you want to create a realistic soundscape and avoid players getting tired of your sounds. It's not uncommon to create 10, 20, 30 variations of a sound effect that will be played thousands of times in a game just to avoid any obvious repetition during gameplay.
It can cost a lot of valuable time manually selecting variations of your individual source layers, adjusting pitch offsets, nudging clips around to create slight variances in timing. you get the idea. If you're on a tight deadline, you'll want to streamline this process as much as you can.
LKC Variator is an amazingly clever solution that lets you create variations that maintain the original character of your design blazingly fast, while also allowing you to go completely bonkers whenever you feel stuck and just need a bit of unpredictable mayhem to spark your creativity.
Add low values to pitch, position, length, and fade parameters to create subtle variations of your sound. Use more extreme values or try the aptly named Chernobyl button to create completely nuts and unexpected results whenever you feel stuck. This can produce amazing granular-esque textures, strange robotic noises, and many other happy accidents. For an additional degree of chaos, increasing the value for the File parameter will switch out all of the selected items for other random ones contained in your project's media pool. This could prove interesting in a session dedicated to a specific weapon / character where you just want to throw things at the wall and see what happens.
Script by Lewis Haines
If you're anything like me, the first thing you'll do with any sound recording after importing it into your design session is to pitch & slow it down. However, time spent turning off "Preserve pitch when changing rate" in the properties panel for each item can accumulate quickly. This little script will save you valuable time!
Once you installed it, simply pull up your action list and associate the "MouseWheelItemRate" action with a shortcut that involves your mouse wheel. I personally set it as Alt + Mouse Wheel. This made the most sense to me as Alt + Dragging the edge of a clip will perform regular time stretching, allowing me to quickly invoke both artifacty stretching (with the built-in algorithms), as well as varispeed without having to pull up the Item Properties panel.
Script by Tadej Supukovic
The Rrrreeeeaaaa time stretching algorithm is all kinds of weird and wonderful. Check my little blurb on it below to know and hear why!
Since it's an algorithm that is insanely handy for stretching audio into infinity and turn basically anything into drones, pads, and reverbs, it's not necessarily one you'd set as your default for general purpose time stretching. To activate and control it quickly, this script couldn't be handier!
Script by Aaron Cendan
If you're coming from another DAW like Logic Pro or Cubase, you might find that it's a lot more cumbersome to bounce audio in place in REAPER. This very simple script does exactly what it says on the tin: Bounce whatever you're doing in place, commit it to audio, and preserve (and mute) the original track(s).
Why would you want to? Well, have you ever used a very unpredictable plug-in that does something very different whenever you play back something? Want to process a sound even more but save processing power? Want to time-stretch the results of your processing chain? All of these and more are great reasons to commit real-time processed items to audio.
To get the script, simply import the following repository (which also contains a number of other incredibly useful tools) via ReaPack:
https://acendan.github.io/reascripts/index.xml
To bounce anything in place, simply select an audio or MIDI item, or a time range on a folder track and run the Bounce in place action. Simple as that.
Script by nvk_Tools
AUTODOPPLER may seem like a one-trick-pony extension, but make no mistake, it's incredibly powerful and has some really handy features that make creating awesome passbys and whooshes a breeze! This extension comes with its own Doppler effect plug-in that also includes a handy tremolo feature, but the impressive part is that it can also control 3rd party ones like Waves Doppler, Tonsturm TRAVELER, or Sound Particles Doppler.
It will analyze the selected item and automatically create Doppler curves based on their amplitude. You can then tweak their envelope, shape, and offset to tweak the trajectory of the sound to your liking
From creating transient sweeteners, to turning almost anything into a whoosh, AUTODOPPLER is a surprisingly handy tool that I've been reaching for almost daily since grabbing it.
Script by 80icio
There I was one day, thinking there must be a better way to quantize audio in REAPER than to manually add stretch markers and drag transients onto the grid - yearning for something like ProTool's Beat Detective for example - a workflow that has often been called the gold standard for quantizing multi-miked drums.
And what do you know... There is a FREE script for REAPER that even goes beyond what Beat Detective can do!
Perfect Timing! is an extension that can provide automated audio quantization on single tracks, and phase-locked quantization on groups of tracks - an absolute must if you want to time-correct live drums or other instruments recorded using multiple microphones.
Simply select the items you want to quantize, launch Perfect Timing! and hit Analyze. This will show a preview of where the clips will be sliced. Using the subdivisions dropdown, you can decide the smallest note value the script should be scanning for. For the most natural feel, try quantizing based on longer note values (quarter or eighth notes) first and get more granular if the part needs it.
Leading pad defines how much of a buffer there should be before each transient, allowing you to reduce artifacts that can occur from automatic crossfading post quantization.
Once you've tweaked these settings to your liking, hit Quantize and check out the results. I still can't believe this tool is free!
Workflow Accelerators
Script by nvk.tools
As nice as REAPER's FX browser is, it can get quite clunky when you're anything like me and have a library of hundreds of plug-ins from different manufacturers. Similarly, if you're on Windows, there's no option to easily search all available actions without bringing up the Action List first. Luckily, purveyor of incredible premium scripts, nvk.tools offers an amazing free extension that puts an incredibly powerful search function right into REAPER.
Simply install it and define the shortcut of your choice to launch the search window (CTRL + Space in my case) and search for plug-ins, project files within pre-defined project directories, REAPER-native and 3rd party actions, markers, takes, and much more. You can then drag & drop plug-ins right from the results onto any given track, locate your desired markers, or launch any action you need. Adjustable font size, FX format prioritization, ignoring of duplicates (i.e. only showing the newer format if both VST2 and 3 are available for a given plug-in), synonyms, and more options let you adjust this extension to work exactly how you need it to.
An amazing tool you won't want to live without!
Script by Kusa
On first glance, this script doesn't seem all too different from the Dynamic Split option that ships with vanilla REAPER, but it goes a little further in ways you might find handy for sound design and dialogue editing.
It's a seriously efficient way of trimming off silence at the end of clips, cutting up "sausage files" of sound effects, or cutting out the silent parts of a vocal performance.
Its interface couldn't be simpler. Threshold sets the level below which portions of the item will be cut, and Minimum Duration specifies the shortest possible gap it will allow for, avoiding overly erratic cutting.
Clicking Takes (Peak) will split all resulting clips into separate takes on the same track with their transient peaks precisely aligned. Takes (Start) will align the takes based on their item start point. The peak alignment function specifically comes in handy when working with certain variator scripts (like NVK). Those can automatically cycle through takes for each variation.
Split and Space Items lets you specify by which time interval the resulting items should be split, and simply clicking Split will leave everything in place, simply cutting out the parts that fall below the dB threshold.
Script by Leon Beilmann
When working with small snippets and clips of longer recordings or individual takes from a sausage file it's sometimes hard to remember where you are in the context of the source recording. While alt+dragging to find different or better sections of audio, it can sometimes be frustrating that REAPER won't show where exactly within the waveform your selected item lies.
SlipView changes just that with a simple yet genius solution: Hold down a key of your choice to display the entire source waveform of an item! Now you can make much more informed decision when adjusting snap offsets, trying to select different takes, or iterating on your existing designs!
Script by Kusa
This extension serves an incredibly simple purpose: Turn the currently selected item into a seamless loop. Despite having no further controls, it has an amazingly high success rate when creating seamless loops out of ambience recordings and other assets you'd like to go on forever and only struggles with highly tonal content like engines.
As such, it's a super handy tool to have and certainly a mainstay in my "Game Audio Tools" toolbar.
It can be downloaded as part of the Kusa Scripts repository that features a ton of other useful actions worth exploring!
Script by nvk_Tools
This premium script by nvk_Tools is essentially the be-all-end-all for creating seamless loops. Not only can it create seamless loops from pretty much any continuous sound, it can even create multiple different loops from a single source that can be stringed together in any order, overcoming the problem of longer ambience loops becoming repetitive too quickly.
It also features a handy Shepard tone generator for those endless risers that we love so much for horror and high-intensity thriller moments 👿👿
Of course, being made by nvk, it features the same slick, customizable user interface that scales well to high-DPI displays and integrates with its broader set of premium tools.
Script by Adam Lovatt
NOTE: This script is no longer being maintained. As REAPER is exceptional about maintaining backwards compatibility across the board there shouldn't be a need for concern just now.
Even with the most optimized workflow, macro pads, and custom shortcuts, there are probably still some REAPER features we find ourselves digging through the Action List for. Well, if you have some time to invest in setting it up, Radial Menu 2 is an amazing way of consolidating all your favorite actions in an easily accessible menu system.
With the ability to bring it up at a moment's notice, this menu can host a number of sub menus with customizable colors, fonts, and toggles. An absolute paradise for tinkerers!
Script by Rodrigo Diaz
Color-coding items and tracks is an essential part of keeping your projects organized. While you can create custom color palettes in REAPER, this extension provides one that can be set up and customized incredibly quickly and can offer anywhere between a handful and hundreds of different colors across an RGP picker.
I personally recommend docking this color palette somewhere in your main window to quickly and easily keep things neat and color-coded.
Rendering & Asset Management
Script by LKC Tools
As daunting as it might sound when you're starting out, your workflow will benefit hugely from automating a lot of the very repetitive steps involved in sound design. In fact, REAPER's open-endedness for automation and scripting is precisely one of the many reasons why it has seen a meteoric rise to becoming the industry standard in game audio.
Render Blocks by LKC is a tool that sped up my workflow by an incredible amount because it lets me set up my asset naming and exporting regimes early on in the process and allows me to stay "in the flow" while designing sound effects, resting assured that everything will go in the right place and have the right file name by the time I hit the Render button.
To illustrate how awesome this plug-in is, I'll explain the example pictured in this GIF straight from the LKC website.
Picture this... You're designing attack sound effects for a zombie enemy. You create a folder track named Zombie to house the different kind SFX, and create subfolders named Attack and Hit.
In the process, you design "Attack" and "Hit" sounds for a "Short" attack that can either be "Slimey" or "Crunchy". For organizational purposes, you create a "Short" region to house everything, denoting that both attacks fall into that category; then, you create "Slimey" and "Crunchy" regions within it to make the two attack types easy to find once your project grows.
By selecting everything and running the Render Blocks: Pack command, the selected items intelligently get wrapped into Render Blocks.
Next, by running the AutoName command, it will automatically name the new blocks in the following scheme:
ParentFolder_Subfolder_ParentRegion_ChildRegion
The resulting names will be:
"Zombie_Attack_Short_Slimey" and
"Zombie_Attack_Short_Crunchy"
Finally, when you're done designing for the day or want to export your creations just far, simply invoking the Render Blocks: Render action will export all of the blocks contained within your time selection as audio files according to your current render settings.
I can't emphasize enough how much time this script has saved me. Go ahead and grab it! Note: The free version of Render Blocks lets you export up to 10 blocks at once but doesn't set a limit on how many you can have within your project. The paid versions remove this limitation and offer you a couple more in-depth settings.
The concepts of Render Blocks are expanded even further in LKC's Grim Sync, a full-on REAPER to Wwise integration platform which allows you to directly interact with your Wwise projects from within REAPER. You can even create containers and folder structures right within the DAW to then reflect in your Wwise project automatically. While technically free, the premium version unlocks all its features.
Script by Oded Davidof
Exporting stems from a big session, regardless of whether it's an entire mix for a short film or a musical cue for a game project, can be incredibly tedious. With busses and auxiliary sends to consider, things to mute and un-mute correctly, buss processing to bypass... it leaves a lot of room for error and it's easy to make mistakes that you won't notice until you've fully played back each and every stem after exporting.
Stem Manager is a straight up life-changing REAPER script that puts you in control of rendering all your stems in one go while allowing you to control exactly what does and doesn't get rendered. Its GUI features a matrix that lets you easily create a new stem for export and decide exactly which tracks or folders should be included while also offering comprehensive naming tools to add important denominators like BPM, key, custom suffixes or prefixes, and more.
This extension pairs especially well with SWS, because it allows you to perform specific actions before and after rendering, one of the most important ones being the ability to bypass all master bus FX prior to your bounce.
One important note is that it requires a Render Preset to specify your desired encoding settings, so make sure to first open the Render to File window, specify your desired encoding settings, and save it as a preset before trying to export your stems.
The way it works is through the matrix window shown below. Top to bottom are your tracks, left to right marks the custom stems you can create. By default, the horizontal axis will be empty until you click the + button, creating a new stem in the process. From here, simply click the tracks in the grid that you want to include in said stem. Rinse and repeat until you have everything covered. The way the script will then render everything is by literally soloing the desired tracks and busses for each stem selection, making it incredibly reliable as it doesn't use any proprietary code to perform the actual render process.
Script by LKC Tools
Are you finding yourself implementing your audio assets in Wwise or FMOD and realize you need to make some last-minute changes? ReaOpen is a killer script that allows you to open the REAPER project pertaining to your sound effects (or music tracks) right from your middleware and even your file explorer!
All that's required in your rendering process is checking the "Include project file name in BWF data" option which will provide the information necessary for ReaOpen to be able to locate your project.
After installing the REAPER extension, you'll have to install the native tool for your operating system which makes it available to select as an external editor for Wwise, FMOD, and within other DAWs. Then, with some quick manual setup, you can also add it as an option to your context menu on Windows, allowing you to open the original project for any audio file you exported out of REAPER right from the File Explorer.
If you like creating different (sub)projects for individual sound design elements of your project then this tool is an incredible workflow accelerator if you find yourself needing to make changes on the fly, add some more variations, or tweak your processing chain a little.
TL;DR: ReaOpen allows you to open the original REAPER project at the precise location a sound was exported from straight from your file explorer, middleware, or other DAWs.
Script by Tadej Supukovic
As you grow your personal SFX (or sample) library, accurate metadata and searchable file names become increasingly important. The Universal Category System has been established in a collaborative effort between sound industry professionals to create a set of categories and subcategories that could describe pretty much any sound effect in existence. In its most basic form, it is an intuitive file naming scheme which most popular sound library management apps will recognize automatically, making it much easier to find very specific SFX in your library.
The one caveat, of course, is remembering all the different category and subcategory IDs while naming files. This handy script makes it easy, to properly name your SFX right inside of REAPER!
UCS Toolkit allows you to rename tracks and items using the UCS naming scheme while also supporting the incredibly handy Wildcards feature, letting you pull part of the filename from variables like $item, $region, or $marker. This is handy, for example, if you have already labeled your marker with what you want a sound effect to be called. Just insert $region in the FXName field and it will auto-populate.
By the way, looking for the best free SFX Library Manager App? Check out this article!
Script by Aaron Cendan
When I saw Aaron post about this script, I'm pretty sure I let out an audible gasp. While anything with "renamer" in the title doesn't necessarily sound very exciting, this extension has the potential of completely transforming the way you implement audio asset naming schemes with your team.
No two games are alike, and as such, your audio asset naming scheme needs to be whatever fits the scope and scale of your project best. Every project requires different sets of denominators, categories, and addendums, and The Last Renamer is an incredibly step towards letting your team automate this workflow.
This extension is fundamentally similar to the previously mentioned UCS naming tool but allows for you to build completely custom sets of categories, subcategories, accompanying tooltips, prefixes, suffixes, and more - essentially letting you create your own custom renaming tool that is tailored exactly to your needs. Oh, and as an added bonus, it ALSO functions as a UCS renamer. Mind. Blown.
Setting up your own custom naming scheme involves some very very light scripting in what's called YAML (a human-readable data-serialization scheme in the vein of JSON or XML). Luckily, Aaron's website has a handy guide on how the syntax works!
Within a so-called preset file, you define all your categories, their explanations and tooltips, and so on. Once completed, this file can be deployed to your other audio team members via source control (GitHub, Perforce, Plastic, etc.) to ensure that any changes or additions made will automatically be reflected in everyone's REAPER instance.
Bridging the Implementation Gap
Script by Audiokinetic
If you're anything like me, you will most likely find yourself both creating and implementing the audio for the game projects you're working on. Personally, I always like to get sounds implemented into the game as quickly as possible. I believe there is no better way to find out if a sound works (or doesn't work) in context than playing the actual game.
With ReaWwise, AudioKinetic offers a direct bridge to your Wwise project that lets you create hierarchies and transfer assets directly from your REAPER timeline. As this is a 1st party tool, documentation is, of course, excellent. Check out the video below and click the button to learn more!
Script by Kusa
This one is for those among you who want to practice audio implementation in WWISE and either have exhausted the demo project avenue or just want to reverse engineer the audio systems behind the sound of certain game sequences. Wwhisper essentially enables REAPER to send game calls directly to Wwise as if it was an actual game engine project!
Through markers, regions, and the two included JSFX plug-ins, you can input triggers within REAPER and then have them call audio events and modulate parameters within your Wwise project.
This allows you to do many different things:
- Create sound re-designs of game captures in a systematic way more akin to actual implementation rather than laying them out in your DAW in a linear fashion.
- Practice game audio implementation without a connected game engine.
- Create procedural music compositions in WWISE and lay out triggers and parameter changes in your REAPER timeline.
- Create a test-environment for Wwise projects you're working on. Especially handy when working on a game before the engine project even exists.
- Automate your testing process for assets by simulating gameplay.
- Capture a gameplay sequence in the Wwise profiler and export it to Wwhisper to re-play a sequence indefinitely and tweak as you go.
If you're an intermediate to advanced sound designer looking to get your implementation chops up to speed, this is one of the best ways to do it!
Hidden in Plain Sight
Ever wish that rather than just moving them left and right, you could move your items up and down within a track, too?! I know, it sounds weird, but hear me out. This incredibly out-there feature can come in extremely handy when building complex, multi-layered sound effects where you sometimes want to create a texture out of multiple assets without having to stack them all within groups of separate tracks.
By right-clicking any track and enabling Free Item Positioning, you're now able to freely move items in any direction on a single track. If and where items will crossfade into each other is entirely determined by whether they visually overlap.
By changing the height of individual items with the lower handle that appears in this mode, you can control your layers very precisely and limit or increase the degree of overlap between all individual items on the track. Increasing the height of your track also gives you more space to stack even more items. It's, quite frankly, nuts.
Nudging is an indispensable tool when trying to sync sound effects to picture. Being able to move your play head and items one frame at a time makes this a lot easier than clicking and dragging until you hit the spot. The problem with nudging in REAPER is that it doesn't move the play cursor with the item, thus not letting you get a sense of your sync to video.
By setting up these simple actions, you can nudge backwards and forwards with your play cursor (or play head) following suit, allowing you to sync items to video much more precisely than with REAPER's native nudge feature.
First, press the N key or go to Edit > Nudge/Set Items to open the nudge settings window.
Here, click the last dropdown on the right and select Frames as your unit of time. You can now close the dialogue and open the Action List by pressing "?" or clicking Actions > Show action list.
In the Action List, click New Action and create two new ones according to the settings below. The way to find the two actions necessary for Nudge + and Nudge - are shown below and can be found if the action list shown on the left of the Custom Action window.
Want to turn a song into a giant ambient pad? Turn almost anything into a drone? Create awesome transitions and glitchy Sci-Fi ambiences? These two time stretching algorithms that ship natively with REAPER are insanely useful sound design tools.
While algorithms like Elastique Pro 3 are best for musical applications like correcting timing on drums or aligning vocal stacks, they quickly fall apart when you start to really stretch out clips further than a couple 8th notes. Their intention was to sound musical in a musical context.
What we want to do is discover new sonic flavors within material that we record or source from our libraries and manipulate these sounds to bring virtual worlds to life.
Rrrreeeaaaa is the youngest of REAPER's time stretching algorithms and has been added in 2023. Its main purpose is to completely transform sounds through time compression and expansion in ways that are anything but clean. It's sonically similar to the renowned PaulXStretch plug-in albeit much easier to use. When stretching items to an extreme degree, Rrreeeaaa sounds deliciously lush, verby, and otherworldly in ways that make it incredibly handy for creating weird drones, spooky ambiences, and extract tonal material from not very tonal sources. Since it uses a resynthesis method that goes way over my head, there will never be noticeable choppiness or graininess, no matter how far you stretch your clips.
Rubber Band Library is a far more artifact-rich algorithm but has a ton of flexibility under the Mode dropdown that lets you pick your desired flavor of digital stretching artifacts. It's an amazing algorithm for glitchy textures, weird technology-related sounds, and for times where you want to make something sound like it has been compressed very badly.
The higher the stakes for your project, the more important loudness compliance will be. Especially in projects where you end up creating hundreds and thousands of assets it will make everyone's lives a lot easier if they are all being delivered at consistent, agreed-upon loudness levels. This is crucial at the implementation stage, where you or your technical sound designer / audio programmer shouldn't have to spend extra time adjusting the mix just because an asset has been revised.
REAPER's render statistics are yet another incredible feature that should be the standard everywhere. With each bounce, you can have REAPER create corresponding statistics that include:
- Integrated Loudness / LUFS- I (total dB LUFS value over entire duration)
- Momentary Loudness / LUFS-M (dB LUFS value over .4 seconds, averaged over entire duration)
- Short-Term Loudness / LUFS-S (dB LUFS value over a 3 second period, averaged over entire duration)
When hovering over the waveform, you'll also be able to see momentary and short-term loudness at any given point of the file. And the best thing yet, you can even show your markers and regions, incredibly handy when inspecting a final mix of any piece of longer-form content (think a cinematic or musical cue).
To export stats alongside your file, simply check "save outfile render_stats.html" in the render window. This can also be done in a dry run if you just want to see how your mix is doing at the moment. For that, simply click the "Dry run (no output)" button and you will just receive your handy statistics file.
Who hasn't had this happen? You wrapped up work on an amazing project and are ready to render it out only to find that there's some nasty clipping that pops up unexpectedly or a track you were sure was there was left muted. These things happen to the best of us and luckily, REAPER has made it incredibly easy to find any such issues should they pop up during a render.
Since version 7.24, the render progress window shows project regions and markers and allows you to immediately highlight problem areas right from the waveform view once rendering has completed.
Simply click and drag to select the area you want to take a closer look at, right-click, and select the option to either add a marker or region in the selected area. When hunting for stray peaks, highlight the area in which clipping occurs and select Set project edit cursor to loudest sample position to immediately locate them with your playhead.
We all love our metering plug-ins, room correction, and, of course, Global Sampler... However, adding all these on your master bus can clutter up your FX chain pretty quickly, especially when you're also using various plug-ins for saturation, buss compression, tape emulation, etc.
Worse still, if you're using room correction plug-ins like SoundID Reference, you might end up forgetting to bypass the plug-in before, resulting in a track that has your room correction curve and attenuation applied - sounding very weird as a result.
This is why I think REAPER's dedicated Monitor FX chain is one of its biggest "why doesn't every DAW have this?!" features.
Essentially, it's just a dedicated FX chain that sits after the master bus and receives all audio that is output by the DAW - click included. Plug-ins added here will not be processed during a bounce, which can help speed up the render process slightly, too.
It's a great place to insert your loudness meter, spectrum analyzer, the Global Sampler plug-in, your speaker/room correction suite, or any other tools you don't want affecting your final render.
Top open the signal chain, simply click View > Monitoring FX in the menu bar.
Want a weapon to have both a strong attack transient and a fat sounding tail? Want to distort a sound heavily but still maintain bottom-end and high-end clarity? Parallel processing might be the answer you seek.
To put it simply, parallel processing means to blend a processed signal with the unprocessed version of that very same signal. By far the most common application for this is parallel compression, where you'd mix the dry signal with the compressed one in order to maintain overall punchiness and definition while significantly beefing up your source material.
In the "olden days", this method of processing would have to be achieved by sending your clean signal - pre-fader - to an Auxiliary Bus with the desired effect in its signal chain and using the two tracks' volume faders to control the blend.
In recent years, a lot more plug-ins have started featuring integrated mix knobs to allow this kind of processing without any need for routing. However, this feature is still not commonplace enough and some of the best plug-ins on the market still lack this functionality.
The per-effect mix knob is a feature that is (as far as I'm aware) unique to REAPER and allows you to use any plug-in in parallel with your track's clean signal. Dial in your effect and play with this knob until you achieve your desired blend. It couldn't be easier and it's truly a feature every DAW should have!
FX Containers are somewhat similar to Effect Racks in Ableton Live, allowing you to store entire signal chains within a single container for quick recall and more flexible routing. However, this feature is a little more involved in REAPER and also offers some additional routing functionality for parallel processing.
When adding an FX container, you can give it any number of inputs, theoretically allowing for near infinite parallel processing options within a single FX chain component. In the picture below, you see the track's FX chain window with the Container plug-in selected. This will bring up a second FX chain to the right of the track's FX list, showing all the plug-ins contained within the Container.
These combinations of plug-ins can of course be saved as presets, letting you more easily combine several chains of plug-ins.
60-Second REAPER Tips
Further Reading & Tips
Elevate Your Audio Production with REAPER – Now Available!
Game Audio Explained | An ASFX Guide
We’re Writing a Book!
The Wonderful World of SFX Crowdsourcing
The Best Free REAPER Tools for Game Audio
The Journey behind the Library: Zimbabwe – Dry Season
