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Thursday, November 2, 2017

Reaper Foley

Back in my day

After completing a course entitled "Computer-assisted sound design" in 1999, I landed my first job in the video games industry as an Audio engineer, joining the ranks of Strategy First, a Montreal-based video games company most well-known as the creators of the Disciples series.

Back in those days, our weapon of choice was Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge and as most of our peers, we used sound effects library from Sound Ideas. It was actually my job at one point to store all of those CD's onto the hard drives of our custom-built server. I also had to tag all sound effects to facilitate our work. I wish that job upon no living soul.

In those days, if you wanted to get decent audio from your PC games, a proper sound card was required. The ubiquity of today's on-board,  96khz surround sound chips was but a dream. As such, the end result of our work was often compressed to hell and ridiculously downsampled. One also needs to keep in mind that VST plugins were still extremely pricey and often required system specifications which forced studios to shell out an insane amount of money just to obtain something equivalent to today's cheapest android device.

Fast-forward to November 2017...

I have to keep my mind occupied whilst my life undergoes its umpteenth reboot. I need to find something new to learn, ideally something that would not require additional monetary investment. "I know!" exclaims the balding wreck of a man that I had become, "I will record sound effects around the house and build my own SFX library! For fun!"

I will skip the details of the actual operation in order to focus on my technically-focused journey using Reaper as my Digital Audio Workstation in the context of sound effects extraction. Maybe you'll learn something!

Fear DAW Reaper

I've been using Reaper for over 4 years, mostly as a way to try out new VST plugins and compose little ditties. While I have done some voice recording from time to time, I've mostly used it so far for its MIDI capabilities, rendering the final Master mix to audio files; nothing too fancy. With that in mind, let us embark on a wonderful journey of discovery and wonder!

Disclaimer
This in no way reflects the "right way" to do things.
This is merely the path I've cleared for myself in order
to achieve what I consider to be acceptable results.
Fairly warned, be thee.


Step One : Track Templates

In less-than-ideal recording environments, such as a busy, creaky house, it's always useful to have some sort of noise reduction plugin or system to minimize unwanted ambiant noise. I use the standard one that comes with Native Instruments' Guitar Rig 5 and will avoid boring you with the details of its settings : to each his own. I will however take the opportunity to talk about track templates.

Let's say you always use the same FX chain when you record a microphone input. Instead of going through the manual labor of creating a new track, setting up the inputs, adding the FX and tweaking them just right every single time, you can simply save that track as a template!

Right-click on the track header and choose "Save tracks as track template..."

My use of templates is pretty bare-bones but you could choose to include envelopes and even track items (midi or audio) in your templates. For complex Midi mappings, this can literally save you hours of work.

Next time you want to add this track template to a project, you will simply need to right-click in the empty area of the TCP (Track Control Panel, see docs) and click "insert track from template", selecting the desired template from the contextual menu.

Want to save even more time? Create a template project where all of your tracks are already set up! To do so, select "Project templates" from the File menu and "Save project as template".

Step Two : Bounce

Once my recording track is set up, I can hit record and go nuts hitting, swinging and banging various things against one another. When I am finished, I drag the recorded audio clip to a new track.

Simply drag the take into empty space below the existing tracks and a new track will be created for you. I then name that track, Mute it and move on to my next recording session.

Plenty of tracks to go around!


Step Three : Editing

Now comes the fun™ part!

While it would be possible to work on the sample directly inside of this project, I prefer to isolate each track in a new project before getting dirty. To do so, I simply right-clicked on the track header and choose "Move tracks to new subproject". As you can see in the image below, this creates a new tab (just beneath the File, Edit, etc. menu) containing just the chosen track or tracks.

Note : There is probably a quick way to reimport the subproject into the main project but it was not necessary for my purposes here thus I have not pushed my investigation in the matter.


From this point, the process is relatively simple. Play the track back and split the take before and after any sample you want to isolate.
To do so, you can press S to split the take in half at the precise point where the playback cursor is at that time. Another way of doing so would be to Split at previous zero crossing by pressing Alt + z.


The isolated take will be highlighted, allowing you to copy, paste and move it around as you please. My preference is to move it to a new track, just below the original.

From this point on, several techniques may be applied, several paths can be taken. Here are just a few highlights from my own process.

Cleanup on aisle 10

This step is the one where you can be the most creative. Should the audio signal be normalized? What do you cut? How long do you make your fade ins and fade outs? Do you modify envelopes, apply VST FX to the track?

That really depends on the desired result. I chose to keep it simple as my goal is simple extraction : I want a relatively clean sample that I might use for sound effects creation, music or whatever else. Adding effects might be overkill at this point.

In most cases, I normalize everything. The result will often reveal "hidden" irregularities in the sound that might have slipped under the radar at lower volumes. Sometimes, these cannot be helped and the sample will find itself buried in the Recycle bin but most times, it can be saved with creative EQ and Spectral Edits. Speaking of which...

Spectral Edits

As far as I know, this is a feature that debuted in Reaper 5.50. What a feature, though!!!!

Disclaimer
!Work on a copy, not the original!
This is completely different than usual audio manipulation.
It requires trial and error.
It may also lead to a severe addiction to spectral editing.

Spectrogram - unmodified Take
Right-click any take and choose Spectral Edits -> Show spectrogram. You should see something similar to the above picture.
If you feel adventurous, you can once again summon Spectral Edits and Add Spectral Edit to Item.

Spectrogram - Spectral Edit of the same take as above
I will not go into the details of how to use spectral edits; I will instead direct you towards ReaperBlog's video, which will make it instantly clear.



If you are using Reaper in any capacity, do yourself a favor and follow ReaperBlog on your social platform of choice : it is thanks to his insights and hard work that my love of audio has resurfaced.

Rendering

Once our take has been modified to our liking, we need to render the result to a file.
Select Render... from the File menu or press Ctrl + Alt + r and render it in the format and location that you need.

Just make sure to select the appropriate options to render just the selected take.
Remember that if your sounds were recorded with a standard microphone and you haven't added stereo effects to the file, you might as well render it to Mono.


Action(s)!

Any audio professional will tell you : "It's all about the shortcuts". 

If you want to be efficient and work fast, there is no way around it : you have to memorize the keys assigned to each function that your software can perform. Menus are nice and all but over the course of editing, you will lose hours if every task you accomplish involves pulling down a menu and selecting an option.

Most of what Reaper can do will not be available from the get-go as a button on the interface. Every action that can be made in Reaper can however be found under the aptly named Action list, accessible by pressing ? on your keyboard.


From this list, search for what you want to do and learn the associated shortcut. If there is no shortcut assigned, you can easily create one. If you must have these actions mapped to an interface button, you can customize toolbars easily from this deceptively simple window as well by clicking Menu Editor....

As an example, for this project, I used the normalize action extensively (defaults to Ctrl + Shift + n) and Zoom to selection (defaults to -).

I had to create a shortcut of my own as well, Loop points: Set loop points to items, which allows you to easily single out the currently selected take and bring the playback cursor to the precise start of said take. No more haphazard clicking or dragging to get almost to the right place : mathematical precision!

Zooming and navigation shortcuts are also amazing time savers : I suggest learning the ones linked to actions that you find yourself using the most, whether its zooming, scrolling or rendering.

Once you start using actions, creating your own shortcuts and toolbars, Reaper becomes yours and you can start seeing how incredibly powerful this amazing piece of software can be after a few customization efforts.

Conclusion

As the cherry on top of my personal project, I chose to pack up the useful samples thusly created and release them on itch.io.


Happy Reapin'!

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