- Hello. I'm Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com.
In this mini series,
I'm looking at great plugins from Waves Audio.
One of my favorites for riding vocals is called Vocal Rider.
(upbeat music)
Okay. Before we get into it, if you like this video
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from me all about audio production.
Here I've got a recorded voice.
And as you can see, there are already some loud parts
around here and around here for certain.
And then there are quieter parts around here, here, here
and at the end.
Now wouldn't it be great if we could even that all out.
So it was a consistent volume.
Well, yes, you're gonna say,
"Mike that is what compression is designed for right?"
Well, yes of course compression can do it
but it changes the shape of your overall audio.
With Vocal Rider what it will do
is it will ride a fade up and down to even out your voice.
Let me first of all switch this Vocal Rider off
and play you the raw voice.
So you can hear what I'm talking about.
- [Mike recording] Hello, I Mike
and sometimes I'm really loud
and sometimes I'm quite quiet
but it doesn't matter how loud or quiet I get
because Vocal Rider has me covered.
- Okay, you can hear how it's going up and down in volume.
And that can be unpleasant to the listener.
Particularly if it's a podcast, then you want even levels.
If they're listening in earphones or in the gym
lots of background noise,
having a level voice can really help.
And that's where switching on Vocal Rider
will even things out.
- [Mike recording] Hello, I'm Mike.
And sometimes I'm really loud
and sometimes I'm quite quiet but-
- So when the quite's bits coming in
the fader is going up and when the loud bits are coming in
the fader is going down.
It's not compressing the audio.
It's simply changing the volume
for the loud and quiet parts.
And it it's doing it as quickly or as slowly as you'd like.
Let me actually switch on the preview window
and move this over to the side
so you can see what's going on with the audio here.
Now you can see it's leveled much of this here
much more than it was in the before view up at the top
but it hasn't quite caught the beginning.
And that's because it's on the slow setting.
I advise if you're working with speech
particularly speech that has a loud part at the start like,
"Hello," which can be really loud
before you get into the normal kind of speech.
Switch on fast and it should catch.
Yeah and it did catch that peak at the start
which is really good.
So that's really it.
I mean, it's just a great plugin.
It works by itself pretty much.
You can turn up the output gain at the end.
You can choose the range of volume that you're working with.
So you can obviously go for,
you can move it down further
to really squash down those peaks if you wish.
You can work with lower level volume as well.
So you're working on across the whole range.
It's better to have a tight range really
or just play around with the presets
until you get something you like.
Like for instance for this clip,
I found that the low rider seem to work pretty well
in leveling things out.
But obviously have a play yourself
default settings work quite well.
But of course, do bear in mind
that you want the fast to be on.
You can also change the sensitivity for vocals or for music.
Yes, that's right.
Vocal Rider also works on music.
If you wanna ride the levels of a track
if it's all over the place
at one moment it's loud, one moment it's quiet.
You can do all of that kind of stuff as well.
I might turn the sensitivity up on these vocals
just a little bit more and bring this down
so we can really get a nicely leveled out voice here.
And that actually looks pretty good.
I might go ahead and apply that
and get a nicely leveled out voice.
It's much better than it was before.
Certainly looking a lot more even
and Vocal Rider can do that for you.
If you'd like to get a 10% discount
on this plugin or any plugin
definitely go ahead and use my link
@mrc.fm/waves that is mrc.fm/waves
And if you have any feedback on
how you are leveling out vocals,
let me know in the comments down below.
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