I do this manually for every snare hit rather than using a gate. You wanna talk about time consuming.

As Bristol sez, there is a good reason to take the time on the lead vocal to fade to silence rather than cut.  Or any lead instrument.  There is noise and there is air cocooning your sound.  Drop it out abruptly  

@

Bristol_Jonesey


Another thing - sometimes with vocals, having them descend down into digital silence removes something from the overall ambience, in effect, you're removing the room from the recording which can sound a bit unnatural. 

Absolutely Jonesey. It kind of depends on the song for me. If the vocals are surrounded with tons of other things, then that ambience is kind of lost, and in that situation I prefer silence. And some of the vocalists I've recorded are not pro singers and do not manage their breathing too well, and that sometimes comes over to much in the mix, so, again, I'll silence those over loud sharp intakes and what have you.

AT


to fade to silence rather than cut

Yep, I do that, but by fading the start and the end of the clip itself.


As always, there's more than one way to skin the proverbial pussy...

The reason I want to split up the one vocal take into clips is so that each bit of vocal can have a fade in and out.  That way, you can:

1) Eliminate unwanted noise ilke my friend tapping his bloody foot between phrases, spill from the headphones, and my kids running round downstairs
2) Control how prominent the breaths and other noises I might want to keep are
3) Keep the CPU usage of my reasonably-specked-but-not-mega PC down as much as possible by using plugins such as noise gates only when I need to

Usually, I manually split up files.  As, er, Synkrotron says, this can be therapeutic and you get to know the take really well.  However, I have limited time with the day job and family so anything to stuff up is welcome.

Thanks to Karl for reminding me of Audio Snap - I will give this a go.

Bye for now,

Mike T

This is why I think you'd be better off doing it manually with an envelope, much like I've done here:

Here's an old studio trick that we all use out this way on the East Coast, for getting rid of unwanted noise, like your friend tapping his foot during recording sessions:

Duct tape him to the wall - making sure no extremities have more room to move than a 100mm throw fader.  Instantly gets rid of noise - AND by making eye contact with the vocalists and head motioning to your duct taped friend, they will instinctively know that they could be next, and will be extra motivated to do well in the session.

Duct tape - it really is a miracle.

Bob bone