We use Reaper for mastering at our studio, Pressure Mastering. The ability to create scripts and custom actions saves us huge amounts of time, and we often get questions about using Reaper for lathe cutting.
One key element when using a feedforward cutting system is gain staging. In a feedforward system, you map your cutterhead’s frequency response and account for its mechanical resonances in software, rather than a feedback system which works via coils Ethan the the cutterhead feeding signal back to compensate the signal. Proper gain staging is essential for two reasons, firstly to prevent internal clipping in your EQ plugin, and second, to calibrate your cutting volume so all audio cuts at a consistent level.
In this blog post, we’ll show you a few custom actions that will speed up your workflow and explain why we use them.
Normalisation
We normalise all audio before it goes through our EQ plugin. This brings all audio to the same volume and provides plenty of headroom for your EQ to work with.
However, there’s an important exception, if you’re cutting an LP or EP where the audio has already been mastered, only normalise the first song. For all other songs, select them together and adjust their gain by the same dB amount. This maintains the intended volume relationship from song to song.
To set up a custom action, follow the steps below:
1) Open 'Actions' from the top menu
2) Search 'Item properties: Normalize items (peak/RMS/LUFS)'
3) Select 'Add' and assign it to the key command of your choice, we chose 'N'
As you can see from these images below, we are working on an EP, so we have selected the first song and normalised it by pressing 'N', and the dialogue box opens and we choose -27 LUFS integrated. Next selected all other songs, 'double clicked' to open their group properties and simply adjust the gain by the same amount of the first song, in this case -11.1db. Now all are normalised and calibrated volume.
Track Order
When cutting multiple songs, we like to lay them out in sequence. First, we edit each song so it plays as intended, this is how it will sound on vinyl. Then we use a custom action to automatically arrange each song one after another. For this action you must install the SWS extension pack. See below for the custom action:
1) Open 'Actions' from the top menu
2) Select New action' and then 'New custom action', this enables you to make several steps in a row, assignable to one key command
3) Search and select the actions in the image below, and make sure that they are in this same order.
4) Assign to a key command, we chose 'M' as we call this 'Master Layout'
From here you can simply edit your audio as usual, have the songs laid out on their own tracks, select the first song, hit your key command and keep pressing it until all are laid out with their own regions in order. You need to account for track silence length at the end, this is done when editing your files before starting.
These two steps can significantly speed up your workflow and eliminate several manual tasks. We have other scripts and custom actions that we use, but for now, this is a good way to start. Below is a video showing how quickly all audio is calibrated read to cut. As always, any questions on any of this, just give us a shout!