This will be very old news to many of you, but I've just discovered a new appreciation for an old tool that's been sitting here idle for years: Audio Damage's Rough Rider compressor.
I have a tune-in-progress that grew out of a solo jam while evaluating the
excellent Renaxxance nylon guitar library from Indiginus. This Kontakt instrument is a LOT of fun and invites live jamming - at a mere 45 bucks I don't hesitate to recommend it. This coming week there'll be a new version that makes it even better. But Renaxxance isn't the topic of this post. It's about vocal leveling through aggressive compression.
I've always been reluctant to let a compressor take care of leveling out a vocal track on its own. If the raw levels are too wildly varied, it's not possible to apply settings that are appropriate for both loud and quiet bits. Consequently, I do a lot of hand-leveling with gain automation to get the track into the ballpark and then let a compressor (usually Pro-C) do the rest.
This particular vocal track, though, was worse than usual. I'd sung it into a cheap Sennheiser stage mike while playing the guitar part on the keyboard, at times too close to the mike, sometimes off-axis or not even facing the microphone. I wasn't thinking in terms of a potential keeper track, so it was even sloppier than normal. Only later did I decide to try and salvage the vocal.
At first, I tried my usual method: hand-leveling with gain automation, then Pro-C in parallel mode. But this proved unacceptable. The volumes were just all over the place and it was going to take an enormous amount of editing, making me think I'd just have to re-take the vocal.
Enjoying a challenge, I then tried another trick that has worked for me under similar circumstances, Meldaproduction's MAutoVolume. That helped a lot. Here's a picture of a short phrase comparing the original vocal loudness (black line) with the result of applying MAutoVolume (red line):
Then for grins, I started sticking in various compressors just to see if I could possibly do better. Eventually I came to Rough Rider. Here's what that plugin did for the same phrase, after some tweaking (fast attack, medium release):
This is the flattest volume I've ever gotten by plugins alone. Now, I know what you're thinking: this probably sounds like crap. Smashing a track like that must surely make it sound robotic and dull. But in this case, that didn't happen. Noticeable distortion was introduced, but it wasn't unpleasant. The only downside was that the vocal became more sibilant, requiring a de-esser after. Overall, I really liked the in-yer-face crispiness, even though this isn't a rocker, it's a ballad.
I thought this was a pretty awesome result for a free plugin. If you've never tried Rough Rider, grab it
here. Yes, there is a 64-bit version.
(BTW, the screenshots above are from the Loudness tab of the very useful
MMultiAnalyzer analyzer plugin.)