Meh, to each his own. My standard workflow is as I've described it and its my standard because it works for me and gets me results that sound exactly as I want them to as quickly as easily as possible. I didn't say it was the only method, I said it was my method. Trying to argue that one will sound better than the other is like trying to argue that tacos taste better than pizza IMO.

Waves vocal Rider.

For perfection I automate, but when there is a huge time crunch, there's not much better than vocal rider.

Hmmm, Taco pizza sounds good!

JohanSebatianGremlin
Meh, to each his own. My standard workflow is as I've described it and its my standard because it works for me and gets me results that sound exactly as I want them to as quickly as easily as possible. I didn't say it was the only method, I said it was my method. Trying to argue that one will sound better than the other is like trying to argue that tacos taste better than pizza IMO.

There is no argument here.  One sounds better than the other.  Period.  FACT!
 
Read this too:
 
http://therecordingrevolu...ompression-for-vocals/
 
The editing approach sounds the same as the approach used in this article. Getting the compressor to do it alone is not the way to go.
 
Vocal Rider while fast will never be anywhere as accurate as manually doing it.  If you are serious about vocals you just don't do it fast either.  It is about the same as sending a pre mastered track to one of those mastering services on line that does it automatically compared to a skilled mastering engineer making all the right decisions based on the material at hand.  No comparison.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Seems you don't really understand what the word subjective means. Or maybe its that you don't understand what the word fact means.  
 
Either way I can see where this is going so tell ya what, I'll make it easy. You win. Your way is not just the better way. Its the only way and anyone who doesn't use your method exactly as you've described it is an idiot and a moron who has no business making audio recordings for any purpose. Happy now?

I started out using a compressor myself. (like many) And then got into the concept of using two compressors in series. The first one being set for limiting and just jumping on the louder bits followed by a compressor with a much lower ratio for overall conditioning. This is not bad by the way and sort of works OK.
 
I don't know what got me into editing vocals in a more precise way either except that I am keen on VU rms levels being constant on tracks before a mix for most instruments. So I started checking individual tracks for rms levels and making them more consistent.
 
Then that followed onto doing something similar for vocals but now getting in and being more precise and detailed about it.  Immediately I noticed how much nicer the vocals started to sound.  How much less the compressor has to do over the final track.
 
It's like anything I guess, the more time you put into something the better it starts to sound.
 
I don't doubt that something like vocal rider will work too.  But it is still making decisions based on technical considerations such as what peak and rms levels may be at any point.  Like anything it is going to make certain assumptions (and adjustments) that may in the end not be accurate.  Like automatic mastering for example.  Whereas when you get in there and edit to great precision and use your ears instead the result will always be better.
 
Of course this also applies to lower level singing vocals as well as lower level spoken dialogue which is the topic of this thread. There is also another thread about lower level vocals but it is essentially the same thing as we are talking here.

I have done many of these type of projects. Wave Lab is my editor and it makes microscopic editing pretty easy. You can't come even close in Sonar to what a good wave editor does for this type of work.   I've been given horrendous recordings done on Radio Shack cassette recorders of everything from church services to public forums. I've even been given old old reel to reels of granny telling stories. People are willing to pay for these to be put on CD. It's always been a big part of my recording income. 
I too tried the easy ways with plug ins and it never result in the same quality you can achieve with hands on manual editing. 
You need to use both your eyes and your ears to make smooth transitions from sentence to sentence and sometimes word to word. It takes time but like with all software, you get real good at this and it's faster each time. 
 
If there's a nasty noise floor you can try a plug in, but what I do is only bring up the gain of the words, not the silence so you don't really hear it as bad. A bit of overall EQ to the track usually cleans things up. 
A trick I use is take a silent section with the noise and look at it in a spectrograph.  Loop it and play with the EQ to kill offending frequencies. 
 
Anyhow this is a learned skill and you can get great results if you roll your sleeves up and dig in with a good Wave editor. There's just no way a plug in is going to replace what a good technician can achieve manually. 

There are no right or wrong ways.
If you want something that sounds effected, then use effects (compress/limit).
If you want more natural use envelopes.
Then of course, my favorite, a little of each.
 
I use to do a lot of editing voice over work. At the time, late 90's early 00's, I smashed the bageeses out of it cause that's the way I heard it in my head (and on radio). And that's after careful detailed envelope editing:) Nowadays, I'd be a lot lighter. Same with vocals. Different styles/songs dictate different approaches. 
 
In general though, I tend to be surgical on most any part.

All of the above is educational, even with the disagreement. Perhaps because of the disagreement.
 
Thanks, all!

You can try the gate - comp - comp approach.
 
You can do it with the sonitus stuff - 
 
Insert the sonitus gate.  Then you can set the frequency band to only be triggered by the high end of the voice.. so whenever he sheaps the gate opens.  Set it to look ahead 20 ms, with a long decay time..  so it sounds intentional.  This will help pull the noise floor down.
 
Now compress it with something like this    http://forum.cakewalk.com...074655-p3.aspx#3324433