How to Use Reaper Automation and Envelopes

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 how to use automation in Reaper and how to create envelopes in Reaper.
Reaper Automation and Reaper Envelopes
Reaper Automation and Envelopes allow you to change parameters over time, and it's an essential part of mixing and processing audio. Once you understand how it works, it really opens up the door to a ton of creativity and flexibility.
There are two primary ways that you can use automation in Reaper. One is to record your actions in real time, and when you do, an envelope will be created. Then when you play your project back, whatever perimeter you have adjusted follows the shape of that Reaper envelope.
The other way is to create Reaper envelopes manually, and I am going to show you both methods.
How to Record Automation in Reaper

On my drum track I'm going to right-click on the trim button, and go all the way down to the bottom and set the Reaper automation mode to Write. The important thing to know about the Write mode is that it's always writing, whether you’re playing back your project or not.

Even though my project is not playing, if I make an adjustment to the volume, an envelope for the volume is created and whatever value I set the volume fader to is stored in it. If I play back my project, it's going to record the values in real time.
If I want to hear the automation that I just recorded, I need to change the mode, because if I play it it's going to rewrite all of that automation.

There are two modes that can read, one is Read and the other is Trim/Read.
Read

If I set it Read, the fader matches the envelope exactly.
Trim/Read

But if I set it to Trim/Read, the fader doesn't move at all. The advantage of the Trim/Read mode is that the fader now acts as a trim volume control, which is kind of like an additional volume that sits above the volume envelope, so I can make an adjustment to the volume relative to this volume envelope. In other words, the track is still going to follow the envelope and it's going to adjust the volume, but if I wanted to turn everything in this track up or down, just a little bit, or even by a lot, I could do that with this fader. If I set it to Read mode, I can't make any adjustments to this fader, that's the difference.
By default, all of the tracks in Reaper are set to Trim/Read.
Recording Modes - Latch
In Latch mode, it starts recording changes once you've made an adjustment to a parameter and then it will keep recording the current position until you stop playback. It doesn't start recording until you make an adjustment, and then once you do, it holds that adjustment until you stop playback.

You'll also notice that there’s an extra point created. I think this happens in all of the record modes, essentially what it's doing is storing the previous value, which in this case was zero decibels.
Recording Modes – Touch
Touch mode is similar to Latch mode except that it stops recording changes when you stop adjusting the parameter. As soon as you stop touching the control that you are automating, it stops recording those changes, and they snap back to wherever it was before you started recording automation.
The nice thing about Touch mode and Latch mode is that you don't necessarily need to set those back to Read mode.
If you play it again, it won’t rewrite the automation over what’s recorded, the only mode that does that is Write mode. At any point in time, I can start recording new automation for the volume.
Reaper Automation and Parameters

Reaper automation works with any parameter. I showed you volume, but it works with any parameter, including effects. I'm going to insert ReaEQ here and set it back to Latch mode. Basically, any parameter that you adjust when you have Latch, Touch, or Write enabled will record automation.
How to Create Reaper Envelopes Manually
If you click on the Trim button, you get a pop up which gives you access to all of the envelopes that are currently available for this track.

I have Volume, Pan, Width, Volume (Pre-FX), Pan (Pre-FX), Width (Pre-FX), and Trim Volume.

With Trim Volume, you can create an envelope but you can't arm it for recording. You can automate the trim volume, but you can't arm it for recording and make those adjustments in real time, which is not a big deal.
I also have Mute, and I have envelopes that go to the Send of my Reverb Return.
Say I wanted to make an adjustment to the volume. I can enable that here, or there's a keyboard shortcut which is V, and now, I can create an envelope manually.

Once this is visible I can use my mouse, and if I hold Shift + Click, I can create points - it will create a new point wherever I have my mouse positioned, and it will hold the value of the last point that I created for the rest of the project.
If you have snapping enabled, all of these points are snapped to the grid.

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Freehand Draw a Reaper Envelope

If you hold Ctrl and you click and drag, this will allow you to freehand draw an envelope, and this ignores snapping.

If we zoom in, you can see that there are all these points created in between the grid lines, because this ignores snapping.
Something to note, when you create a freehand envelope, it creates an additional point to the right just like the automation record modes do, which goes back to the default value.

At first, you may think this is annoying, but honestly, I love this feature, because when I'm editing vocals and I want to duck the vocal for a breath sound, what I can do is find the breath in the waveform and hold Ctrl and click and drag and just pull down the volume.
It's really easy to do and very quick. In fact, this is the fastest way that I know about for editing out breath noises. For editing vocals, dialogue, or VO, this is a really fast way to clean that up.

Let's say you create a shape like this, and you want to move it to the right, but you don't want to move it up and down at all. What I would do is turn off snapping, and then zoom in so that I can precisely move it, and then with the four points selected, click and drag it to try and move it right, it's actually quite difficult to move in just the horizontal axis.

Instead, if you click on one of the points and then hold Ctrl+Shift while you’re still holding down the left-click button, that will lock the movement to the first axis that you move. It will move horizontally, but not vertically.
Similarly, if I click it and hold it and then press Shift+Ctrl, this will lock to the vertical axis, which is very handy to know.
Let's say, you have a couple of points and you want to make a very fine adjustment on them. If you click them and you hold Ctrl+Alt, you can make a really fine adjustment. If you're not holding that, it makes a much bigger adjustment.
Envelope Segment

Another thing you may find useful is creating an envelope segment. Let's say you have two points like this. If you hold Shift+Alt and then drag in between the two points, it will create a volume segment, which is this kind of square shape. You can do something similar in a time selection.
If I hold down Ctrl, and then I right-click and drag to make a time selection, if I hold Shift+Ctrl, that will create an envelope segment within the time selection. This saves you a little bit of time, because you don't have to create those first two points manually, all you need to do is Ctrl, right-click and drag and then hold Shift+Ctrl and you can duck the audio.
You might have noticed that the shape between the points is linear. In other words, it's a straight line between them, but that's something that you can change.

If you hold Alt and you click and drag on the envelope between two points you can make this nice and curvy.

Alternatively, you can select a group of points, right-click on them, and then you can set the shape for selected points, and you have all these options. You can set it to square, slow start/end, fast start, fast end and Bezier.
You can get those exactly as curvy or as square as you want, and everything in between. There are a lot more options here for you to explore. If you select points and you right-click on them, you can invert them, you can reset them to zero and a lot more. I'll leave that for you to explore.
More Useful Options

Over on the left side you’ll see a knob. If you click and drag this, it will adjust the scaling vertically of all of your points if you don't have any selected. If you select some of your points, it will adjust only those points, which is a handy way to make an adjustment really quickly.

There's also a bypass button. Let's say you’re experimenting with some automation and you want to go back and forth and hear what it sounds like, you can bypass it here, and now the track will ignore the automation. You can just re-enable it to bring it back.

There's a drop-down here that gives you a few useful options. You can hide your envelope, you can move your envelope to the media lane, which moves it right on top of your media item. Generally, I don't like to do that because it's very easy to accidentally grab your media item when you meant to grab one of the envelope points. You can lock your media item to get around that, but it's not something that I found that helpful to do.
There's also an option to clear the envelope. If you click Yes, it will remove the envelope completely and delete the points. If you click No, it'll just delete the points and reset it back to its default state.

There's a lot more that you can do with automation and envelopes. You can copy and paste points on the same track, you can copy envelopes from one track to another track, or just copy the points from one track to another track.
Make sure to check out the Reaper manual if you want to dive into the weeds and find out everything there is to know about automation and envelopes. For now, you're ready to move on to the next lesson, where you’ll learn about folders and grouping.
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.