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How to remove plosives (p-pops) from vocals in REAPER

By StudioRescue Editorial

Published August 6, 2026 · Updated August 6, 2026

Plosives are one of the most common ways a good home take gets ruined. The performance is fine, the tone is fine, and then a single “p” lands like a punch and drags a low boom across the word. It is distracting on its own and it gets worse the moment a mix sits under it.

The good news is that a plosive is a narrow, local problem. Most of what you hear is a short blast of low-frequency energy, and low frequencies are easy to remove in a spot without touching the rest of the voice. Here is what causes pops, how to fix them in REAPER with stock plugins, and how to stop them happening in the first place.

What a plosive actually is

Plosives are consonant sounds made by briefly stopping airflow and then releasing it. When you say p or b, a puff of air leaves your mouth. If that puff reaches the microphone, it slams the diaphragm and the mic records a sudden low-frequency bump, often with a bit of distortion on top. They happen most on p and b, and to a lesser degree on t, d, and k.

Two things make home recordings especially prone to them:

• Singing or speaking close to the mic. The intimate, up-close sound most people want also puts your mouth right in the path of every puff of air.
• No pop filter, or the wrong angle. Without a screen to break up the air, or when you aim straight down the barrel of the mic, plosives go in at full strength.

Because a plosive is mostly a low-frequency event, filtering out those lows removes most of the audible pop. That is the whole idea behind every fix below.

First decide: fix the pop, or the whole track

There are two ways to attack this, and picking the right one saves you from thinning out a perfectly good voice.

• Spot fix (best for a few clear pops). You isolate each pop and treat only that slice. The rest of the vocal is untouched, so it keeps all of its natural low end.
• Track-wide filter (best for lots of mild pops). You put one gentle high-pass on the whole vocal. It is fast, but push it too far and the voice loses body along with the pops.

For most home takes with a handful of obvious pops, the spot fix wins. Start there.

The clean fix, step by step in REAPER

This is the classic REAPER approach: isolate the pop as its own item, then high-pass just that item using item FX. It leaves the rest of the take completely alone.

The even simpler fix: dip the volume

If a pop is short and mostly a level spike rather than a boom, you may not need EQ at all. Draw a volume envelope on the item, or use the item’s volume handle, and pull the level down for just the length of the pop. A quick dip of a few dB, faded in and out, often makes a plosive disappear without changing the tone of the word around it.

This is worth trying first on gentle pops because it is fast and completely reversible. Reach for the high-pass method when a volume dip alone still leaves an audible thump.

Prevention beats repair

Every pop you stop at the source is one you never have to edit. Before the next take:

• Use a pop filter or a foam windscreen. A simple screen a few inches in front of the mic breaks up the air blast and stops most plosives before they are recorded.
• Aim slightly off-axis. Sing or speak just past the edge of the mic rather than straight into it, so the puff of air travels across the diaphragm instead of into it.
• Back off a little. A few extra inches of distance gives the air room to lose energy before it reaches the mic, and it also reduces the close-up boom.
• Add a gentle high-pass while tracking. A light filter around 80 Hz on the way in shaves rumble and softens mild pops without committing to anything drastic.

If you are still setting up your recording chain, our walkthrough on how to record vocals in REAPER step by step covers mic input, levels, and monitoring so you capture a cleaner take from the start.

Using a track-wide high-pass, and its limits

When a take has many small pops, one high-pass on the whole vocal is the practical choice. Add ReaEQ to the track, set band 1 to high-pass, and start around 80–120 Hz. Keep it conservative. Push it much past 120 Hz and you start removing chest and warmth along with the pops, and the voice goes thin.

Think of a track-wide filter as light insurance for the small stuff, and keep spot-fixing the few bad pops by hand. If clearing low end also has you chasing a general lack of clarity, that is a broader tone issue, and our guide on why home vocals sound muddy in REAPER covers where the low-mid buildup usually hides.

What this will not fix

Filtering a plosive is reliable, but it has real limits.

• It will not repair a pop so strong that it overloaded the mic or preamp. That is clipping, not just a low-frequency bump, and no EQ move rebuilds audio that distorted on the way in. The honest fix is a better take. See how to fix clipped and distorted audio in REAPER for how much you can actually recover.
• It cannot add back low end that was never captured or that you cut too hard. If a spot-fixed word sounds thin next to the others, ease the high-pass down or shorten the treated slice.
• It will not touch harsh “s” sounds. Sibilance is a high-frequency problem, not a plosive, and it needs de-essing instead. See how to de-ess vocals in REAPER.