Reaper Sub Projects Mixing Template

I recently moved from Ableton Live to Reaper. That meant I had to migrate most of the stuff I'd developed in Ableton to Reaper in some form or another. One of the features I instantly fell in love with in Reaper is the ability to embed another project (a Sub Project) as a media item in a parent project.

The Parent Project

So here is a screenshot of my parent project.

My Reaper Mixing Template

You can see I've got the usual colour coded tracks of all my instruments. I'm using Folders to group/bus my stem tracks. Folders are handy in that you can collapse them when you're not using them, both on the mixer and track console.

So here is the nifty bit - while I am just starting out writing the song, all I need to do is insert another Reaper project for say, the drums. Take a look closely at the media item on the drum track - it's another Reaper project.

The top level tracks are Reaper projects

Reaper will render a proxy WAV file from the Master output of the child project, and insert it into my project. This allows me to quickly whip together a draft drum track using my favorite drum setup, while hiding all the complexity from the parent template. If I double-click the drum media item, it will open up the Reaper project for me to edit.

The Child Project - Drums

The Drum Sub Project

After double-clicking the media item, the drum sub project opens up in another tab. At the left most track is my top folder/drum bus, my drum MIDIs, and then my drum bus mix faders. These are separated from the black tracks shown to the right of those which are my stem tracks (all leveled appropriately at stem volumes). This allows me to play around with my mix volumes, while keeping an eye on the 0dB volumes of the stems. The next three tracks are my different drum synths. In the screenshot above, you can see that I've muted the second and third synth, as they are CPU heavy and for the purposes of quickly putting down drums, not required.

Draft Drum Tracks

So let's say, I'm writing a new song, I've got some ideas for drums. Using my simplest drum synth (MT Power Drum Kit 2), I lay down some drums tracks and give it a quick rough mix.

One caveat of using sub projects is, every time you switch tabs (or save the file - choose in your preferences), the master bus is going to be rendered. If your project is too CPU heavy, this gets tiring very quickly. So disabling heavy CPU plugins, rendering to stems, etc. you can speed up that render process dramatically.

Once I switch tabs, the output is rendered, and appears updated back in the parent project, where it can be heard as part of the mix.

Quality Drum Tracks

Fast forward to when I'm happy with my drums and I want to render high quality stems for my parent project.

One of my drum synths (SMDrums)

Once I enable the two other drum synths (SMDrums and TMKD), I need to render these output as they are very CPU heavy.

My rendered drum stems

In the screenshot above, I've rendered my drum stems to WAV files and added them to the project. I'm then able to mute everything else reducing my CPU usage to almost 0% when playing. While rendering I can ensure that no clipping occurs, and adjust the stem tracks accordingly.

Switching back to the parent project

Now that I have drum stems, the mix faders to the left are no longer as important, because I'll be adding my drum stems into the parent project after this. But I want a quick render when I switch tabs, so by having just stems enabled and all my plugins disabled, I can get great rendering speeds.

Mixing Stems in the Parent

Drum Stems in the Parent

So once I'm back in the parent project, and I'm finalising the drums, I can insert those rendered stems into my parent project - as shown above. I'll need to mute the sub project media item, but I'll leave it there in case I need to go back and modify some stuff. With the stems present I can start to process each drum steam and mix into the drum bus folder. If I was happy with the mix settings in the child project, I could quickly copy them over.

The rest of the tracks use a similar setup. I'll go into how I do my bass and guitars in other blog posts. If you want more info about the drum setup, feel free to contact me and I can do another blog post answering your questions.