Glenn Fricker is one of YouTube’s most well known audio engineers and educators, with millions and millions of views on his recording and mixing tutorials. Glenn has been professionally recording since 1997, and in 2004 he won “Album of The Year” in Unrestrained Magazine. Over the last 20 years, Glenn has worked with artists from all over the world in a variety of genres, from death metal to pop punk.
Currently residing in his second self-built studio, Glenn places an emphasis on human performance and live drums. He tends to reject modern recording crutches like pitch correction, over-mastering, and time alignment. His unique approach, personality, and skills have garnered him a worldwide following of over three hundred thousand!
In this lesson, Glenn shows you how to load plugins in Reaper!
Plugins are the effects you’ll use to change the sound of any given instrument.
Tools like EQ, compression, reverb, and delay are some of the most common plugins that are all over mixes. Reaper makes it incredibly simple to load plugins onto tracks and even save plugin chains for future recall.
In the mixer window, find the Track Insert FX section located at the top of each channel. All you have to do is click where you’d like to load a plugin, and Reaper will open a dialogue box with all of the plugins on your system. Here, plugins are organized by format (VST, AU, etc.), developer, and category.
Reaper’s plugin loader also lets you search for any plugin by typing its name into the bar at the bottom of the window. This is one of the quickest ways to load an effect without searching through multiple folders.
You can also add plugins to a track from the edit window by clicking on the FX button to the far right of every track. This feature opens a box displaying your current effects chain with the ability to add or remove more plugins as needed.
Saving Effects Chains in Reaper
Let’s say you’re working on an album or a project with consistent recordings from track to track. You’ve really dialed in the snare sound on the first song, and you’d like to recreate it on the next one. Effects chains let you recall the exact plugin set-up for any track across any session.
You can save effects chains by opening up the FX window and highlighting the plugins you have loaded. Now you can right-click and choose “Save selected FX as chain.”
On a new track, open the FX window once more and right-click in the plugin region. Here you’ll find “Load FX chain” which lets you copy your exact settings onto a new track!
