Okay, so how about that Mastering Tutorial for Reaper?
On at least 2 occasions, I mentioned the need for two things: 1) A tutorial for Reaper SPECIFICALLY for using it as a mastering platform and 2) A tutorial for ReaXComp. Has these been provided and I just missed the boat? I'm guessing no.
There are some threads I looked at when searching for "Mastering" as a topic that seemed to amount to not much more than a bunch of guys sharing what chain they use, but that's about it. Reaper has a Mastering Chain that I have used in the past. But I haven't seen where it's helped me get up to the quality of Pro-mastered, Radio-Ready audio.
There's also the fact that I have noticed a lot of the plugins people recommend here tend to bang levels in the red automatically, and are a bit pain to try and wrestle down to a decent level. ReaXComp is a good example. Everytime I load it, the meters on both sides are a bright red at 1st, and I always set the Master bus to -4 or lower if needed.
There are tons of tutorials on Youtube that are titled "Master with free VST plugins" and I've always found the results to be less than desirable. Those often recommended Variety of Sound plugins are a great example. Start piling those babies up high enough (like the videos say to do) and say "Goodbye song, hello exaggerated dynamics" (and STILL not as loud a a Pro can do!) BootEQmkII is the only one I found worth a damn - I can sweeten up a harsh sounding harmonica a bit, for example. But, I digress.
So how about it, Reaper? I'm a loyal user with a paid licence. You say I can master on this platform. What's the steps I need to take to get my tracks up to sounding like the Big Boys? When might we expect someone to come forth - even a blog post offsite or a Youtube video would help - with the keys to this mystery?
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