Ducking in a voice-over commercial

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southpaw3473
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2012/06/22 10:27:58 (permalink)

Ducking in a voice-over commercial

Hey all,
I've been asked to put a radio spot together for an upcoming music festival.  I have a music track and the voice track.  What is the best way to duck the music during the voice parts? 

We'll not risk another frontal assault-that rabbit's dynamite!!!

 Tommy Byrnes
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    Mystic38
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    Re:Ducking in a voice-over commercial 2012/06/22 11:04:45 (permalink)
    Have you tried sidechaining with the sonitus gate fx plugin?

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    #2
    southpaw3473
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    Re:Ducking in a voice-over commercial 2012/06/22 11:08:01 (permalink)
    I've been working in the studio non-stop for nearly 72 straight hours and my brain is mush.  I've been trying to set up the sidechain but I can't remember the sequence of steps.  Gate inserted in the music track-output of voice-over to the input of the gate? I'm missing something and I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.  I hate it when I get stupid!

    We'll not risk another frontal assault-that rabbit's dynamite!!!

     Tommy Byrnes
    Sonar Platinum
    Win 10 Pro x64 AMD FX 8350 Eight-Core 4.00GHz/ ASRock 970 Extreme4/ 16 gigs RAM
    UA Apollo Firewire/UA 2 Quad Satellite/ Focusrite OctoPre/Makie Onyx1220i Mixer  
    THANK YOU!!!
    #3
    ProjectM
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    Re:Ducking in a voice-over commercial 2012/06/22 11:15:39 (permalink)
    Sidechaining is one way of doing it. But I have found that it sometimes require more work than it's actually worth.

    When I do commercials, E-learning, documentaries, radio spots and so forth, I always set up the VO track with the neccesary processing (comp, EQ, DeEss - not too heavy on the compression). The music I leave untouched, usually this is already mastered to some degree. Then I add a brickwall limiter to the output and let the VO track and the music track pass through that. I set the limiter to the required volume, usually ~10Db. Your client should tell you how loud it should be.

    Then I manually duck the music track with Write Automation enabled and just run through it, keeping an eye on my monitor and duck it when I see a blob of audio coming up on the VO track. Do a final adjustments and it sounds pretty good. This, I find, is way more accurate than using side chaining and you don't get any surprises or have to fiddle around with adjustments of silly parametres along the way, just the track volume.

    For a 30 second spot I spend 10-15 minutes finishing a mix after everything is recorded and edited. For a 45 minute documentary I usually spend 75 minutes using this technique.


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    #4
    konradh
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    Re:Ducking in a voice-over commercial 2012/06/22 11:50:56 (permalink)
    Sidechaining is cool but it can be weird because you might not want the music popping up every time the speaker pauses for a second.  You can use the compressor's release, but it may not be long enough.  For most commercials, you probably want a donut, right?  That is, loud music, then music drops down for talking, then loud music again.  If so, I agree with ProjectM that fader automation might be easier.

    Then again, if what you need is more complex, you may have to go with the sidechain thing.

    #5
    garrigus
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    Re:Ducking in a voice-over commercial 2012/06/22 13:27:49 (permalink)
    If you decide to use automation, you can use the following technique to easily adjust automation for selected sections of the music...

    * Cakewalk SONAR: Automating Data Selections
    http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/video.asp?ID=6

    Scott

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    #6
    Seth Perlstein [Cakewalk]
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    Re:Ducking in a voice-over commercial 2012/06/22 16:03:04 (permalink)
    Funny you should ask, good sir. We have a CakeTV video which covers this very topic; SONAR: Go Deeper - Sidechaining ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkWeQR4UJf0

    SP

    www.cakewalk.com/caketv
    #7
    Beepster
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    Re:Ducking in a voice-over commercial 2012/06/22 16:05:33 (permalink)
    The Anderton vids have a pretty in depth look at sidechaining as well. I think it is in the second vid (The Next Level).
    #8
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