That's where I'll automate gain plugins or faders. In the end, you'll typically still use automation to make the vocal sit above the instrumental at all times. That way you can use the compressor for actually shaping the sound instead of leveling out the vocal. The whole idea of this exercise is to get a consistent signal that then feeds into your compressor(s). A lot can be achieved by just finding the words that are maybe more than 1dB too quiet and fixing words or syllables that just jump at you and kill the flow. But that really doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. If I try to get everything perfect, I'd sit there for 5 hours debating if I should raise a syllable by 0.5dB or 0.8dB. The key to beeing fast (at least for me) is to focus on the most obvious problems. I find myself boosting words at the end of sentences/phrases, because artists often don't hold the energy until the end.
I'll go through the entire vocal with the cutting tool in hand, cutting it up into clips and then raising/lowering the individual clip volume. The approach I like most for vocals is not actually automating them but using clip gain instead. Im gonna start working with the cutting and clip gain tools, and see what I can do with it in logic. I find it just doesn't bind to the vocal performance, it sorta just lags and does a good attempt, but I don't want a half assed job, I want flawless execution.Įdit: Woke up to 20 replies in my inbox, thank you r/audioengineering! I appreciate everyones comments and the time they took to write them out. Note: I have used the waves vocal rider and I'm not a fan at all of how it sounds. Does anyone have any tips, strategies, tutorials, or guides that they can share? I tried doing it by hand, but I just ended up spending two very frustrating hours on a very poor sounding chorus and verse, and just called it quits. Some words or syllables come out too loud or some too quite. On topic: What I'm talking about is when you have a dynamic performance, or have several takes, and the volume of the artist you're working with varies. I know thats not a lot of time, but I'm very committed to my career as an artist/producer/engineer, learning the proper techniques, and constantly improving and striving for more. Background: I'm 18 years old, been mixing, mastering, writing, recording, and rapping for 1.5 years.