Useful Reaper Custom Actions

Reaper comes with a tool called “Actions” these are all the possible things you can do in Reaper. For example if you wanted to split an item at the cursor, there is an action for that. In Reaper you can actually chain actions together to create advanced functionality. Here are some of my custom actions which have helped me out.

I have previously covered how to create custom actions so if you need a refresher, the link opens in a new tab, and you can jump right back here!

A side note, you will ideally have the SWS extension pack installed into Reaper to make use of all the actions and the installation is covered in the guide above.

16th Normalisation Tool

This is one of my favourite effects I’ve designed and it is all done within the custom actions menu. I did an in-depth article on it explaining how it all works, but in essence, it slices up the audio into 16th notes and normalises each slice individually.

Of course, you can set it up to normalise in slices of any note division – I also have 32nd notes and 64th notes versions too!

Here is a sound demo of it below, showing how it is quite a crude form of “compressing” your sound in a rhythmic and glitchy way.

Each repeat in the sound file moves to a smaller note interval, where you will see the “compression” increases, but so does the abrasiveness of the resulting sound.

All Tracks Random Colour

This is a really simple one which can be further edited to how you like. Colour coding your tracks is a really helpful way to make your project more efficient. You can easily jump to a part you want if it is well colour coded.

It is also a good time to point out that the search bar is a great way to find actions, but only if you use the right spelling. American English uses many different variations such as “color” and “normalization”, I’m based in Scotland so I use the correct spelling. This is why it is worth including both versions in the title so people can search for it.

You will notice that there is also a third action in this custom chain. This is a great one because it means that all tracks in a folder automatically become the colour of their parent track.

If you have a drum folder, you would ideally want everything in it to be the same colour and so even though you set everything to a random colour, this will then make everything fit to the parent.

Shuffler

This action is really cool as it shuffles your audio in slices. This means that you can chop up a beat or lick and be able to get new ideas.

I quite like doing this with MIDI as well if I run out of inspiration.

Audio Glitcher

This is a cool one which also demonstrates that you can chain your pre-made custom action chains within other ones. You should note that this does require the custom action it calls upon.

This glitcher is very similar to the shuffler above. The difference being it also has the normalisation action on it as well. This works great for short snippets of audio where you want to include a glitch effect.

Because it is random, you can just keep retriggering it until you like what you hear.

Harmonise

This is obviously quite a crude one and will never replace a dedicated pitch plugin with formant control (or even recording a harmonised take), but it does work well with a few things.

It is great for MIDI lines which need a harmony and it is great for a quick reference – hit this action and you can immediately hear whether a perfect fifth harmonisation fits into the mix.

Please note that a perfect fifth is seven semitones (I promise I didn’t make a mistake).

Insert Region from Selected Items and Move On

This action may seem like a bit of a strange one and it is one which requires a certain workflow style. It really ties into Reaper’s other fantastic tool the Region Render Matrix, where you can set regions in a project and render them individually.

I use this action a lot when I am editing podcasts and video because it allows me to render the best snippets.

You could create a dummy track in your song and create items called “Intro”, “Verse”, “Chorus”, etc and make the items the exact length and position of those sections. Then you could just set the regions to the dummy items and have regions for each section of your song.

This would allow you to render each section individually, as well as colour code the regions for accurate mapping.

Seen here is a video project I was working on where I was picking out the best minute-long snippets to be published on social media. This is one great example of the power or regions since I could then just go into the region render matrix and render each region separately. Using wildcards, I was also able to name each render with the name of the region, and so the process was largely automated.

This custom action also has another huge application – processing samples. If you have many clips of audio that you want to work on and export separately, then this tool is great as you can set each region to a sample or loop and the rendering process is much easier.

Split 1 Minute Ahead

While this doesn’t offer much for music production, if you are working on audio projects, it can be really helpful.

I often work on audio or video for social media which needs to be under a minute long. This action means that I choose a start point and it splits the item 1 minute from there. This means that I now have a point that I can trim from, knowing that I won’t go over the limit.