Feb 26, 2025
This is the second of three posts sharing some of my productivity tips for the Reaper DAW. Check out the first.
I find Reaper is at its best when you get into using shortcuts. The powerful action system helps to make keyboard shortcuts in Reaper immensely useful. See tip #5 for another example of this.
A couple of the shortcuts I use the most revolve around managing plugins on tracks, as I mentioned in tip #2. Here's a couple more:
I've set up Shift+F as a shortcut for the action View: Show FX browser window. This way, I can quickly add a plugin to the active track using only the keyboard: Shift+F brings up the plugin search, I type in part of the name and hit return to insert the effect.
I also use ⌘+1 through to ⌘+9 for the action Track: Open/close UI for FX #1 on last touched track so that I can quickly open a specific plugin in the chain on the active track to make adjustments.
Rather than zooming with the mousewheel, try setting up keyboard shortcuts for horizontal and vertical zoom. I have w and e set up for horizontal zoom out and in respectively. And Shift+W/Shift+E for vertical zoom. That way, I can have one hand on the keyboard in a natural position while using the mouse with my other hand.
The action system in Reaper is made all the more powerful using the macro or custom action feature. If you find yourself doing something frequently that requires a couple or more steps, see if you can't speed up your workflow by creating a custom action chaining those actions. Here are two of my most used custom actions.
I often group tracks into folders, most often if I have a guitar recorded with multiple microphones. I usually want the tracks inside the folder to only send to their parent track so that I can treat the multi-miked recording as a single sound. I've set up a quick action for this that I've called Send only to Parent (folder track) and mapped to Cmd+Shift+Control+G. This custom action runs these commands:
SWS/S&M: Remove sends from selected tracks
SWS: Enable master/parent send on selected track(s)
Those actions require the SWS/S&M Extension.
Another custom action that I use a lot is called Reduce breaths. Depending on the vocal style, I sometimes want to mostly remove or heavily reduce breaths in between singing on a vocal track. This custom action contains the following:
Item: Split items at time selection or razor edit
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
The Nudge item volume down action works 1dB at a time, so this action will be more or less aggressive depending on how many of those actions you insert. I have this mapped to Control+R, so when I Control-drag across an item to create a razor edit area in between singing I can hit Control+R to quickly reduce the volume inside that area.