Manual gain riding vs. compression on vocals

[aquataur]

This thread is not strictly about plug-ins, in fact it is all about not using plug-ins, at least not compressors. But fret not, we will come to that eventually...

The guitar slingers amongst us surely will remember Craig Anderton´s book about making stomp-boxes. Well, nowadays he takes an interest in the more mundane subject of DAWs. Obviously he works for Presonus these days.

I recently stumbled over his blog at Presonus where he writes an article: Why I Don’t Use Compressors Anymore”. The article is well worth reading.
I occasionally thought about this, and he brought it to the point : “I certainly don’t need to control the levels of the PA installations at the 1936 Berlin Olympics”.

Originally compressors were made to prevent the signal from overloading the communication lines. Such performances were live, and overloads were absolutely to be avoided. The story is being told that if a classical piece was to be aired, the sound engineer would sit there with a copy of the score and read along, and when a crescendo was imminent, he was pulling down the fader.

Yet all manual gain riding fails, when things are unplanable and peaks come unexpected, in which case compressors and limiters are inevitable. But let´s face it, compressors are not really the best tool for stuff like vocals, as much as I admire them technically. Yes, they can make the vocal take more even in loudness so that they can be used in a mix at all, but this does not come without penalty. We have gotten used to the side-effects they introduce, like a prisoner gets used to a ball-and-chain after a while. And after all, no real alternative seems to exist.

But this does not need to be so for a finished recording. Once the track is in the box, there is no excuse for manual gain riding. We have all the time to iron out the valleys and peaks by hand - except if the DAW does not provide a practical facility for this to start with.

Studio One seemingly does:Get Better Vocals with Gain Envelopes

Unfortunately, Mixcraft only has rudimentary editing features of that kind. Although one could use a gain animation envelope, it is impossible to know how much you need to drag the envelope, since the tracks´ waveform stays static.

Fortunately, there exist external editors.
I tried the ubiquitous Audacity, but even although the latest version is a bit tidier, it is not well suited to perform the required task.
Wavosaur was a bit more comfortable despite the distracting GUI, but it produced audible jumps and clicks.

I finally landed with Ocenaudio , and this works really great.

You can highlight a phrase and raise or lower its gain to your like. The waveform will follow, which gives you the necessary visual feedback. Zooming and transport are intuitive, the gain control appears automatically in the right place, and there is a useful meter that can be turned on. The program can be incorporated seamlessly into Mixcraft. Note that it refuses to start playback when Mixcraft claims the audio device for itself.

I had a voice track that was all over the place volume-wise and ended up with a very nice sounding track that has no audible volume jumps and is very consistent. It sounds very realistic and does not have any of the artifacts the compressors would have introduced potentially. Besides that, the time needed to perform that operation was surprisingly short.

Cudos again Craig. You are my hero. Listen to his songs, they utilize the method described here and other “compressor-less” techniques for drums and bass.

Compressors have their place, no doubt, but this may be an alternative for vocals you definitely should try. At least it is a worthwhile addition to your bag of tricks.

Have fun.