How to Add & Use Effects in Reaper

Reaper is a powerful, flexible and customisable audio application. You can use Reaper for music creation and production, podcasts, voice-over, sound design, audiobooks, live performance, mixing for video, mastering, and much more.
In our free Reaper course, you’ll learn the basics of Reaper with Dave Bode, and in this lesson you'll learn how to add effects in Reaper and how to use them.



How to Add Effects in Reaper
There are lots of ways to use effects in Reaper, but in this lesson, I'm going to focus on some basics:

Applying effects to tracks
How to add effects to individual media items in Reaper
Applying effects to your master track
Using monitor effects

Applying Effects to an Individual Track

If you click on the FX button circled above, Reaper opens up the FX browser, and shows you all the effects that it’s found on your system.

Finding the exact effect that you’re looking for is really easy. There's a filter box where you can search for the name of a specific effect, or you can type in something like ‘comp’ which will find almost every compressor on the system.
It won’t find all of them, because some effects, like RoughRider for example, is a compressor, but because it doesn’t have c-o-m-p in the name you won’t see it in a search for that.

You can also sort the effects over on the left, by the effect type. You can click on VST or VST3 or JS or Cockos, and that'll show you just those effects.

There's a list of categories, and you can click on one of these categories to find some EQs. Just like the filter, this doesn't always find all of those EQ effects because of how the developers of certain effects have labelled them. There may be an effect that is neither labelled in EQ or in the internal code flagged as an EQ, but this will find most of them. If you click on Developers, you can find the effect from a specific developer.
Effects That Come with Reaper

If you click on Cockos, one effect that you're probably going to want to have on every single one of your tracks is an EQ. Reaper comes with a basic but very good EQ called ReaEQ and you can apply this to your track by double clicking on the effects or clicking the Add button.

If I want to add another effect, I can double-click in a blank area underneath the effect right and that'll bring up the FX browser. Alternatively, I can click the Add button, or use the menu underneath FX > Add FX, or use the keyboard shortcut Insert or A.
Another very common effect that you'll find handy to use on most of your tracks is a compressor. I'm going to apply this stock compressor from Reaper called ReaComp, and I'll double-click to insert that effect on this track.

Now I have two basic but very good effects. These two effects are so common, I would recommend that you have them available on pretty much every track, and that's very easy to do.

If you select your effects and then go into the menu you can save chain as default for new tracks. A chain in Reaper is a selection of effects. If I inserted a new track, the FX button would be green, indicating that there are effects already on the track, and they’d be ReaEQ and ReaComp.
Having these two effects as a track default is a pretty good place to start, because if you don't use them, it's not going to affect the audio, it's not going to use up any system resources. When you do need to use them, it's going to save you time because you already have them loaded.
FX Change
Speaking of saving time, one thing that you may find is that over time, you keep reaching for the same effects and you keep setting them up in the same way. There's a great feature in Reaper called FX Change, which allow you to save a group of effects, and it saves their current state.
Let's say that I did a fancy drum EQ and then maybe I set the compressor to something and I think that this is really great to have, and I want to make this available for future projects. What I can do is select both of these effects, come up to the menu, click on FX, and then Save FX Chain.

Then, I can save this as something like Drum Effects, which I've previously done and save it. If I delete those effects and I click on the FX button again and add those, they’ll add back to this track in exactly the same state that I left them in, which is great for saving time in future projects.
Moving Effects From Track to Track

If you want to take all the effects from your drum track and put them on the bass track, all you need to do is just click on the FX button and drag it over to the bass track. The same two effects have are then applied in exactly the same way to the bass track.

Maybe you want to copy one effect over from the bass track to something like the guitar track, like the compressor. You can just click and drag the ReaComp effect and drop it right onto the guitar track. Sometimes you might want to take an effect from one track and move it to another track instead of copying it over. You can do that by holding Alt and clicking and dragging.
If you want to get rid of all the effects on each one of your tracks, you can just Alt+click on the FX button and that'll clear out all of the effects. Putting effects on an individual track or most of your tracks is probably the most common way to use effects in Reaper, but it's not the only way.

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How to Add Effects in Reaper for Individual Media Items
If I wanted to take an item and apply an effect, there are a couple of different ways to do that. One way is you can come up to the View menu and choose FX Browser.

Maybe you want to put something like a JS EQ on there, I'll select this 3-band EQ and drag it over to that item.

Now, if you look at this item, you can see there's a little green button, and that indicates there’s an effect on it. You can get this FX button to show up on all of your media items if you want, in the preferences.

Ctrl+P on the keyboard opens up preferences, and underneath Appearance and then Media, there are a bunch of different options you have for Media item buttons. One of them is called No FX.
If you click on that and then click Apply, you'll see a little FX button that's greyed out show up above all of your media items. When you click on this, it'll open up the FX browser, and then you can just select an effect to apply to that media item.
Just like the effects in the track control panel, if you hold Alt and click on the effects above your media item, that will clear those out. That will get rid of those effects. It's not my preference to have that effects button above each one of my media items, but maybe you'll find that useful for now.
Using Effects on Your Master Track
The master track is the final destination of all your audio tracks. That's where everything gets mixed together and processed before you hear it, and before it gets rendered. Using effects on your master track is a really good idea to make sure that you are not outputting levels that are too high and causing clipping and distortion.

To see the Master Track in the Track Control Panel, you can come up to the menu, click on View and then select Master Track. On the Master Track, just like all the other tracks, there’s an Effects button. If you click on the Effects button, it'll bring up the effects browser.

The first effect that I would recommend putting on your Master Track is called ReaLimit which is a really nice limiter and it'll make sure that no audio gets above a certain limit.

Sometimes that's called a Threshold, in this case it's called a Ceiling, and I like to set this up by putting my Brickwall Ceiling to -1, my Threshold to -1, and I like to check the True peak option too. This will make sure that no audio that gets out of Reaper is higher than -1.
You would think that -1 is somehow robbing me of a little bit of volume, but that's not actually true. If you look at the loudness specifications for things like YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, they all have a spec in them that says loudness and then True peak. There are no loudness recommendations that I know of that have a True peak value that's higher than -1 so by setting up ReaLimit like this, it pretty much covers you for all your delivery platforms.
No matter how loud you get the audio in Reaper it’ll be loud, but it's not going to be distorted, or at least it's not going to be really crunchy distortion because anytime that you use dynamics processing like a limiter or compressor, it does add some distortion but it's so low that you really can't hear it.
Loudness
The other effect that I want to show you is called loudness meter. I'm going to add that to my Master Track as well, and I like to have this as the last effect in the effects list because you don't want to have another effect after this that's altering the frequency or the amplitude of the audio as that would mean that your loudness meter is not giving you an accurate representation of what's going on with your project and with your master track effects.

This is how I usually set this up. I set the peak option to True peak, I turn off short term loudness, and I also turn off loudness range just to make this effect a little bit cleaner.
When I play the track it’ll then give me what I think is some useful information about the loudness of my project.
Monitor Effects
The final thing that I want to show you with effects is called monitor effects. Back in the effects browser I'm selecting a third party effect called Morphit.

Using monitor effects is a way to apply some effects to the thing that you're hearing, but not to the audio that gets rendered by Reaper. Typically, this is used for doing some corrective EQ to something like headphones. In other words, it's only altering the audio that I am monitoring and nothing else.
I wouldn't use this with my studio monitors, but if I'm using headphones this is a really cool option to make sure that the thing that I'm listening to is a lot more accurate. This particular effect, Morphit by ToneBoosters is an effect that will apply a corrective EQ based on measurements that ToneBoosters have done on hundreds of different types of headphones.

You can choose your headphones and apply the effect.
There's a lot more that you can do with effects in Reaper, but that's it for this lesson and hopefully that’s enough for you to start practicing and you're comfortable with how to add effects in Reaper and how to tweak them to suit your project.
About This Page
This page was written by Marie Gardiner from the transcript of a course by David Bode. Dave is an expert on video and audio production. Marie is a writer, author, and photographer. The page was edited by Gonzalo Angulo. Gonzalo is an editor, writer and illustrator.