removing space between vocal lines

Hmmm...I must admit I'm not at all sure I understand your post correctly. As there needs to be the same space between vocal clips anyway (as they follow the music), when you bounce to clips the total clip length is the same in any case...? Are you talking about slip editing the end of a vocal clip to reach the beginning of the next vocal clip??
 
Anyway...what is the purpose of this method of yours? What do you achieve?
 

Joey, if you're asking:
1.  if it's a waste of time
2.  to trim the part of the track where there are no vocals
3.  to reduce any possible unwanted noise that might become part of the sound floor of your track,
 
that really depends on what your background noise is/might be. I've had tracks where I trimmed as you described after hearing noise I felt was too imposing when I listened back. Other times where I just left it as is.
 
But I'd say I do trim it most of the time. As an experiment, I gave 2 versions of the same vocal track — one with the non-vocal space trimmed out and one with the quiet room left in — to a very experienced mixing engineer to compare, and he said he didn't think it would make any difference in the mix.
 
But he did say this as well: if the song would have been a very quiet, single guitar with vocal, that trimming might actually be worse depending on what kind of ambiance was ultimately desired, as the sound floor if trimmed out, might sound "on and off" and odd.

I used to do that, trim the clips to remove all dead space, but in my mind, whatever background noise is present (which should be fairly minimal if it was recorded properly) can actually add to the "feel" of a recording.
The descent from background noise to digital silence may not be appropriate in a lot of cases and can sound fake and also slightly disconcerting.
 
For these reasons, I'm a fan of using volume automation to reduce the levels of the audio between clips so that you retain some element of the background noise but at a low enough level to not detract from the overall sound of the track.
 
Obviously this has to be considered carefully on a case by case basis - I would employ a different strategy for high gain guitar work than for vocals, for example.

If the purpose is just to remove a threshold of background noise during the gaps, rather than spend time editing and creating multiple clips why not just insert a gate? The build-in Sonitus/Cakewalk ones will do the job.  If you want to lay the vox out so you can move individual phrases around or copy them, then editing in the way you describe makes good sense to me.

Visually it makes sense to split into smaller clips, not just for vocals but all instruments.  You can get an overall feel for what is happening in a song very easily just by looking at it.
 
As far as the audio is concerned it's easier just to add automation,  I tend to automate the clip gain rather than output volume to ensure no noise is fed to pre-fader FX...

Didn't we do that to save on processing. Though there is silence between vocal lines (or any phrases) the silence gets the FX you have on the track. The computers are lots beefier than they used to be and I don't think it's as important as it used to be. I still do it to clean it up visually like Karen said. I get to know where I am by the various patterns of clips.

Bristol_Jonesey
The descent from background noise to digital silence may not be appropriate in a lot of cases and can sound fake and also slightly disconcerting.

 
I have some remastered (to CD) Philips Beethoven Late String Quartets where they attempted to remove the background noise/hiss while they were at it.  The result is dead silence between notes, then a blast of noise with each note.  Sounds pretty bad, especially with headphones.  It would have been much better just to leave the noise as our brains can filter it out.
 

bitflipper
I used to do it that way, too: chop the track into phrase-clips and use slip-edits to trim them. I did that because it's what I'd always wanted to be able to do with tape, but it was impractical until computers came along. I did a lot of things in the early days of DAW-based recording just because I could.
 
Sometimes, though, the transition from low-level background noise to total silence was detectable in the final mix, and I didn't like the effect. Sometimes, you'd even inadvertently lose something important, like the singer taking in a breath.
 
So for the past 5 years or so I've saved myself the trouble of splitting clips and instead used gain envelopes. It's always non-destructive. It's less time-consuming. It allows you to preserve as much or as little ambiance as you want, and to tweak the rate at which the levels transition to and from "silence". 

+1 for all that. I sometimes work with a singer-songwriter and minimal instrumentation, so the change from silence to ambience can be noticeable and sound unnatural. Gain automation usually sounds smoother to me.

Having no experience with gain envelope automation, but now very interested, for the OP and the rest of us, are there any tips you can give us about best ways to do that, for example with vocals?

• Are you applying to an entire track or multiple tracks simultaneously?
• What things do you pay attention when you determine the best curve?
• What do you listen for that helps you to know you've gone too far?

chamlin
Having no experience with gain envelope automation, but now very interested, for the OP and the rest of us, are there any tips you can give us about best ways to do that, for example with vocals?

• Are you applying to an entire track or multiple tracks simultaneously?
• What things do you pay attention when you determine the best curve?
• What do you listen for that helps you to know you've gone too far?

I very rarely bother with Clip Gain but instead use Track Volume envelopes.
I work on one track at a time and the curve is really all about context - adjust it until it sounds right.
Sometimes the prettiest of curves doesn't give the most musical of results.
The morals is - use your ears, not your eyes.

If I can hear my dogs in between vocal phrases, I cut.  I have never automated gain in this scenario though. I am definitely going to give that a shot.
 
Sincerely,
Guy with no recording booth

It's a really tough topic and what applies to one, doesn't to someone else, and varies between what type of music your creating, and even the end result, how it's mastered.
 
I've found with some songs I've gone overboard on silencing the background, it's changed the whole feel, and not for the better. Other tracks are woeful with background noise left in. But in general, I manually do all the vocal tracks. Complete silence where required such as a lead break, and usually somewhere between 6 and 18db down between vocal lines, splitting and fading in and out if necessary. I always leave traces of everything that's related to 'vocal' noise. I've tried automation, but get much better results going painstakingly slow between each vocal line. Takes ages but it pays off. I tend to use automation on guitars and gates on the bass, but the more work I do, the better I get at the recording stage, getting rid of most unwanted stuff before it hits the disk.
 
Ears before eyes as someone else said. Same with Melodyne. Very easy to group notes, bars, or entire clips, for processing. But you cannot beat manually listening to, and modifying accordingly, each and every note.
 
Depends on how much time you have I guess, and what level you are prepared to settle for.
 
regards

So in your case there's a good argument for not doing too much with the vocal track(s).
 
Be careful though, the more mush you DO leave intact is going to build up, so if there's mush on your vocals, rhythm guitars, bass, drums you run the risk of accumulating an awful lot of unwanted frequencies.
 
This is where a clear idea of how you want the final product to sound comes into play.