PSPaudioware Levelizer

We’ve seen gain riders before, but this one from PSP attempts to offer the user a little more control than most.

PSP’s Levelizer is an automatic gain‑riding processor that supports all the common plug‑in standards for Mac and Windows, including AAX, and is protected via iLok. The OG of this concept is Quiet Arts’ Wave Rider, but there are plenty of other competitors including Waves’ Vocal Rider, TBProAudio’s DynaRide, Hornet’s Autogain Pro and Melda’s MAutoVolume. Vocal Rider is optimised primarily for use with vocal recordings, of course, but Levelizer caters for all sorts of sources, and offers quite a few parameters that allow the user to tailor the levelling to achieve the best result.

More Than Compression

Lots of people seem to be confused about the precise difference between a level gain‑riding plug‑in and a compressor — after all, both do aim to regulate the signal level! But there are significant differences...

In essence, the aim of gain‑riding plug‑ins is to adjust the level of a source in much the same way as engineers used to have to do manually using console faders, before automation became common (though they’re capable of far faster reaction times!). The engineers made those fader moves not just in reaction to the source they were ‘riding’, but also to whatever else was going on in the mix.

Also worth noting is that, like human engineers, gain riders can turn the signal up (like an expander), not just down (like a typical compressor). And that’s important, because the general aim isn’t really to control wayward peaks, but rather to achieve a more consistent perceived level while preserving the natural dynamics, without significantly affecting the short‑term dynamic characteristics of the original performance.

The difference between this approach and compression can most obviously heard when processing vocals. Heavy compression can certainly keep a vocal sitting at the front of a mix, but it can also emphasise breaths, room ambience and mouth noises, in an undesirable way.

This isn’t to say that gain riders are inherently better than compressors, though. They do different jobs. In fact, gain riders are often used in conjunction with compressors, since this can produce a smoother, more natural result than compression alone, while still allowing the compressor to impart its own sonic character. For example, you night first use a gain rider to take care of broader volume variations, and feed the resulting signal into a compressor, whose job is to tame transient peaks, or to otherwise manipulate the shorter‑term dynamics. In many respects, the outcome is similar to applying compression after extensive clip gain work or manual volume automation has already smoothed out undesirable variations in the performance levels.

On The...