How to Do Routing 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 Dave will show you show you two practical examples of how to do routing in reaper.



How to Do Routing in Reaper
When it comes to a routing in Reaper you have a lot of options for routing audio from one track to another track. That can help you to solve problems, it can help you to process your tracks creatively, and much more. 
How to set up a Reverb Return Track
With reverb, there's nothing inherently wrong with taking a single track and adding your favourite reverb to it. You can get it set up just how you like it, and it works just fine. However, when it comes to using reverb on multiple tracks it's a little bit more efficient to use a reverb return track. Let me show you how that works.

In the Track control panel, I'm going to double-click to create a new track, and name this Reverb Return.

Next, I'm going to click on the effects and get rid of the default effects, and then double click in a blank area to add my Reverb effect.

I'm going to use a very simple stack reverb effect called Reverbit. The idea with a reverb return or any type of effects return track is that I'm going to put an effect on this track, and then I'm going to send audio from other tracks. In other words, I'm going to route the audio from my other tracks to this track, and the only thing that I want to hear on this track is reverb.

As I only want to hear reverb, I pull down the dry mix so that I'm not getting any of the unaffected audio back through this track. If I pulled the wet mix all the way down and left the dry mix at 0 any audio that I send to this track would get louder, and that’s not what I want. I don't want to hear any of the audio that has been unprocessed, I only want to hear the audio that has been processed, so I pull the dry down and leave the wet all the way up.

I'm also going to increase the room size for this effect up to the mid 90s.
Send Audio to track

Next, I need to send audio for any track that I want reverb on to my reverb return track. An easy way to do that is to just click and drag on the route button. As you drag it down you'll see a little cable icon, that's a tip ring sleeve icon.

If you release it, that will create a send from Track 4 to Track 5. Now I have reverb on my keyboard soundtrack.
Multiple Track Reverb
Maybe you want to reverb on multiple tracks. You could drag each one down from the Route button over to the track or you can click the Route button.

Under the Receives drop-down you can add receives from all tracks. Now audio is being sent from each one of my tracks to my reverb return, which means I'll hear reverb on everything, which sounds like a hot mess, so let me show you how I would go about fixing that.
Fixing Reverb

For one, I would take the reverb off the bass. Reverb on bass is not very common and it can sound a bit muddy, I don't really want that. I also want to adjust the level of the send from each one of the other tracks to kind of balance things out.
I probably don't want a ton of reverb on my guitar and then I'll pull it down a little bit from the drums as well, and all of that will sound a lot better.
Another thing that I could do is jump into the effects and pull the wet level down 6 or 7 decibels, which would give me a little bit more granularity in adjusting the sends or the receive volume for each one of the tracks.
With less wet reverb sound, that means that I have a little more resolution in the mix level for each one of the tracks.
How to Set up a Headphone Mix
The second example that I want to show you with routing is how to set up a headphone mix and send that to another output on your system. Just like before, I'm going to start by creating a new track by double-clicking in the track control panel. I'm going to name this track Headphone Mix, and then I'm going to click on the Routing button.

Here, I want to set up the effects return but in this case I want to route audio from the tracks, but I don't want to actually hear the audio that's going to my headphone mix. So what I'm going to do is to uncheck the button Master send channels from/to and that will disable track number 6 from sending audio back to my master track.
If I didn't do this, anything that I sent to this track would just become louder, and that's not what I want to use this track for.

Instead, what I want to do is add a new hardware output. On my particular audio interface, the Motu M4, I have four inputs and four outputs. Outputs 1 and 2 are connected to my studio monitors, but Outputs 3 and 4, I could have connected to something else, like a headphone amplifier.
I'm going to select Outputs 3 and 4, and then add receives from all of my tracks. That means there’s some activity in the meters, but if I solo track 6, I won’t hear anything because I disabled track 6 from sending audio to the master track, and that's exactly what I want. Instead, it's sending audio out on Hardware Outputs 3 and 4.
The advantage of setting up a headphone mix like this on a separate output is that you have independent control of what’s going out to that headphone output. You can also control the levels and the pan independently of what's happening over the track control panel, and what's going out to your main monitors.

For example, whoever is listening to this headphone mix may want a little less bass. Maybe a lot less guitar, because let's imagine that they're a guitar player so maybe they want to hear some of it, but not a lot. They don't want a lot of reverb... and we can dial in the mix for exactly what they need.

It's worth mentioning that you may want to switch the sends over for each one of the sends from Post-Fader (Post-Pan) to (Pre-Fader Post-Effects). By default when you create a send in Reaper, it's Post-Fader. For most things that works just fine but for something like a monitor mix, it probably makes more sense to have this be Pre-Fader (Post-Effects).
That way, if while you are listening back to the project and the person is practising or recording, if you’re making adjustments to the volumes of your tracks, it won’t affect what they hear in the headphones because it’s Pre-Fader.
Pre-Fader (Post-Effects) is really nice because if you have effects on the tracks like compression and EQ, odds are they're going to want to hear what that sounds like as well, so that's probably your best bet. You also have options for Pre-Effects: Pre-Fader, Pre-Pan, and Pre-Effects.
On top of that, you also have options for muting, flipping the phase, collapsing the stereo image down to mono, adjusting the pan, and much more.
There's certainly a lot more that you can do with routing in Reaper, and the only limit really is your imagination.

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.