Cubase: DIY Vocal Rider

In case you don’t see the point of riding vocal levels, the basic concept is this: even if you compress a vocal heavily, its subjective level will nonetheless appear somewhat inconsistent because the backing track will mask the vocal more the louder it gets, and the amount of masking will change rapidly from moment to moment; a loud drum hit will mask the vocal more than a quieter acoustic-guitar strum, perhaps. Because of this, a lot of effort goes into the micro-automation of vocal levels in professional productions, and if you want to compete on that level, you can’t afford to ignore the issue.

Right, let’s get onto the specifics. First of all, right-click in the Track List and select Add Group Channel Track. To start with, you’ll want two stereo ones, so adjust the pop-up dialogue box accordingly. Label these two LeadVocal and BackingTrack, and then reassign all the tracks in your song, with the exception of your lead vocal, to the latter group channel track. You can save time by doing this in bulk: highlight a series of tracks and then hold down the Shift key while you select the required destination from the Inspector’s top pane. To feed the LeadVocal group channel, select it from the lead-vocal track’s Sends menu, switching on the send and Control-clicking its little fader to set it to unity gain (0.0dB).

As with a lot of mixing techniques, there’s a fair bit you can do to refine the settings to achieve the best results. Indeed, the Waves plug-in has a number of variable parameters as well, for this very reason. First of all, you’ll almost certainly find that the additional vocal signal from the Expander track makes your overall lead-vocal level appear too high. This is simply dealt with using your lead-vocal track’s fader, as you’d normally do — no need to tamper with any of the LeadVocal or BackingTrack group channel settings. The Vocal Rider plug-in’s output level fader serves a similar purpose.

So far, we’ve primarily been offering Waves the sincerest form of flattery. However, because we’ve built our setup from first principles, we actually have some additional processing potential here: we can EQ the feed to the Expander’s side-chain input. Why would we want to do this? Well, if you think about it, the low frequencies of a bass sound are unlikely to mask a vocal as much as an electric guitar with lots of energy in the very 1-5kHz range that’s most important to vocal intelligibility, which means that EQ’ing the Expander’s detector signal to reduce low frequencies and increase the 1-5kHz range can help improve the subjective musicality of the automatic level-riding. I’m guessing that Waves are already doing something akin to this within the code of Vocal Rider, but they don’t give any control over it either way, whereas we can have full control of such an EQ if we refine our existing setup a little.