That said, we find that it also works well with vocals that contain low to moderate background noise, such as a recording through a lavaliere, a recording on location or in well-controlled live music scenario.
Vocal Rider works flawlessly with vocals recording in a quiet studio environment with little to no background noise. Vocal Rider includes more variables specifically suited to vocal recording, that raise and lower the gain smoothly while preventing the noise floor from creeping up when the person stops speaking. By comparison, traditional compressors use simple binary logic to either raise or lower gain when the signal level exceeds a user-defined threshold. As a result, it doesn’t raise the gain during the natural pauses between words and sentences. Even better, it automatically resets to a neutral position when the incoming signal drops below a predetermined threshold. The algorithm detects patterns for average loudness over time, and cleverly increases and decreases audio levels only as needed. The Waves Vocal Rider plug-in mimics someone moving fader moving gently up and down to compensate for changes in audio level. Its simple interface makes it easy to use and fits in with our ethos for creating great audio in the shortest amount of time.
We typically don’t recommend third-party plug-ins, but this particular plug-in is a workhorse and performs excellently for spoken and sung vocals. One of our favorite tools for vocal postproduction is the Waves Vocal Rider plug-in.