Many times I prayed but my prayers weren't answered right away.

Kind of great trick that save energy to find out 'what should I do with my mix' situation! Thank you, brother!!

Man this is great!! Funny thing I started using this technique last month not even knowing its actually a technique.. Lol.. I'm confident now!! Thanks bro!!!!

I love the sound of this song. The texture in the piano is really awesome too.

This video was so helpful! I never really considered front-end automation - was doing it the other way around. This made so much sense. Thanks for the great tips!

MAAAAAAN 🙌🏾 sigh of happiness!! I’m mixing my first song and I’ve been searching for a good video. Thank you 🙏🏾 🤘🏾

You really have a gift for teaching. Thank you for this clear explanation of compression

Excellent tip! This was a nice vocal track for your demo.

I was about to make a comment "what about using Waves Vocal rider" and then You mentioned using Waves Vocal Rider so... It's all good now :D I'm a happy person

Great bro! your videos are 10/10! I'm learning a lot with your content! Keep it up!

Very good trick, I use it all the time!

Great video Rob. Simple thing to do but so effective. Sometimes we fall into the trap of using the compressor to do the heavy lifting when all we needed was some selective clip gain or automation before the compressor. Automate a gain plugin at the head of the effects chain might be the way I'll use this trick. This will leave the vocal treatment all on one channel and keep the volume fader for final automation when getting near the end of the mix. Thx.

You are teaching me so much.. I am using all your knowledge on this new song I am finishing Can't wait to complete the journey..Thank you so much!!! Great person you are..Wish i could get you to master my tracks and song but will continue and learn...Kitty Terry

this is so helpful, thank you!!

Brilliant video- so helpful- thanks so much for your time :)

Great news Rob now I Think I finally understand. Thanks very much! I have that Vocal Rider too (and many other Waves-plugins). Makes me very confused when Waves says in the manual that Vocal rider should be the last pluging, but that makes no sense. Of course it shall be the first plugins as you said to write the automation-line, and after that comes compression and other plugins. There is also a 3:d way to write automation similar to clipgain and that´s done by moving the fader up and down, I-ve tried but it´s a bit difficult.

AAH THANK U SO GOOD SO CLEAR V HELPFUL

You’re a GOD! Thank you for this. Now I know I don’t have to buy Vocal Rider. I’ll just do it the old fashioned way THANKS!

Hey man, this is a really cool video, thanks for posting, I will share it and let people know. Keep up the great work mate.

Very helpful video. Thanks a lot!

Well done tutorial. Thank you.

I will always use automation after now. Thanks for very nice video.

Good stuff.

I learned a lot. Thanx!!!

4th revision... I feel you bro. This is why I'm at this video tbh, haha

I use this technique all the time.

Great video as always, Rob! Can't find the cheat sheet link, though! Thanks for your videos they are helping me a LOT and I've gotten back into mixing thanks to you. I had a bit of a low self esteem thing going on in my home setup workflow, but thanks to you I feel a lot more confident! Keep doing what you're doing

Great video thanks. There seems to be a debate about the vocal rider, whether it should be used before or after compression, or both. And both arguments makes total sense to a newbie to mixing like me. I guess I’ll try both techniques and just see what sounds best

Okay, this really opened my eyes. I've been pulling my hair out over my vocal performances being slightly uneven in volume, and compression/limiters could never fully rectify it, yet this is so simple I cannot believe I hadn't thought about manually automating the volume! Great job on the video, and great tip!

Thanks again for another great video. What do you think of Melodyne, do you use it. Or have you ever used it.

Would love to hear about how using TWO compressors might change your strategy.

This is the only video that does what I was thinking of, automation before compression, but I need it in GarageBand! Is adding a Gain before the compressor and then doing an automation on that, the same as what you are doing here? Automation before compression?

I made a vocal recording recently and the dynamics are HUGE and that's how i found this video - i just couldn't get the compressor to work. But how do i know how much dynamics to remove with clip gain automation?

You can do clip gain in Logic. I prefer it that way because when you automate the tracks you can’t control the volume by the fader once you put automation on the track.

Awesome Rob! It sounds more natural to my ears if i set the plugin to only reduce loudest peaks gain (range set -6db to 0db). If i allow the quietest parts to go up (maintaining the default -6db +6db range), maybe it doesn't sound as good. What do you recon? Combined with Waves mv2 (upward compressor), i get very consistent and transparent results!

I am considering buy vocal rider...after watching this...I know what to get...thanks

Also, who is the artist? I'm interested in buying the music.

Would it make sense to do your gain stage, eq, then volume automation first, then once you’re happy with how it’s sounding, bounce that down and then you can keep it to a single track again? Make sense or am I forgetting any factors that would still require access to those initial steps?

Do you have a video for gating breaths out of vocals? I use waves deBreather but it still has breaths in my vocals and I’m totally lost 🤦🏾‍♂️🙆🏾‍♂️ I don’t want to cut out the breaths because the vocals won’t sound right

Really excellent video. Do you know if there is an automation effect in Audacity?

Instead of automating the volume and then sending the voice to an aux track, couldn't I just put a gain plugin at the start of my chain and automate it ?

If you want your vocals to be even and forward in the mix, like you hear on commercial recordings, use two compressors in series. That’s a standard trick. I’ve never seen anyone automate the levels before compression. That’s what compressors/limiters are for.

In another video you talked about gain automation on the vocals. In this video you are talking about volume automation those are 2 completely different things right? Which one is better?

What if the vocal track is drowned by the instruments, no matter the amount of gain that you add to it? Maxing out the gain knob (+24dB) makes the track clip, and I wanna keep it in the ballpark (rms -18dBFS). I solve this with make up gain from the compressor that I put afterwards. It does the trick. So the standalone gain knob shown in the video may sometimes just not be enough to get a level for the vocals that can sit well at the forefront of the mix.

Would automating the input gain on the compressor on your vocal chain do the same thing as your technique here?

What is the difference between routing the vox track to separate aux track then put compression on it, and setting the compression plugin to “post-fader” mode?

adjusting the clip gain of the vocal so that all of the phrases are a similar level works on this too?

If you have an i-5 CPU at 1.4Khz & 1600Mhz RAM you will need to slow the song tempo down to 50% in order to achieve this same level of automation detail. It is a sloppy mess if your CPU and RAM are slow.

Rob, I've been looking for this answer and can't get a plain, straightforward answer: If my wave form goes outside of the track, do I lose that bit of the signal?

This might be a really Noob question but... Once I have automated the volume how can I bring the entire volume up or down during the rest of the mix? Thanks

Do you think that a combination of techniques might not be advisable? Specifically, parallel compression can, to a degree, address the disappearing vocal problem. I'm wondering if a vocal would sound overly processed if these techniques are combined.

I have logic but I dont have waves vocal rider, how to I get it ?? 😭Its not an option under audio units

this seems to be quite a time-consuming work without that much of an effect in the end mix if you do it throughout the entire vocal track and not only on some "extreme" peaks or lows. On the other hand, I am quite happy with the stock compressor, using the various presets, rather than tweaking the settings manually. Quite often I use "studio vocal" preset which seems to work well for me.

My compressor isn’t responding to the automation via the side chain

My jaw physically dropped at 8:39

Cool. I prefer clipgain but itz only available in ProTools or Cubase I think. 10 years ago when I didn't know all about dis stuff I mixed a whole album without any compressors or EQ cuts 2 clean up. I just chopped up da vocals in many pieces and balanced the waveforms. I neva had heard about transients, pre-delay or how much reverb 2 apply bringing something in2 da background and just experimented. I didn't even know how 2 master and had no idea dat there could b videos about it so I thought a stereo enhancer, a puncher and a multiband compressor in Wavelab 4 will do. No Limiter on da whole album: scili.bandcamp.com/releases

Ima be honest I do automation but why automate vocals

You can also compress the vocals first and then apply automation. Afterwards, apply basic automation to the vocal bus.

You didn't explain compression properly. And I didn't hear any change that it made to the vocal. Even your vocal rider settings were not noticiable.😡

man you speak too fast hahaha

this looks like way too much and why would you add gain, shouldnt u only reduce gain because compression will bring those things up with makeup