With the advent of DAWs, the real interaction of fader riding has moved from manipulating a physical fader to drawing in lines in volume automation lanes. Fader riding was used frequently in the early days of music production as it helped engineers to prevent signals from overloading their equipment and remains to this day a useful technique to help us sit tracks in a mix. This interaction can be used to mimic the effects of compression. The term riding the faders describes a technique used by mix engineers who constantly adjust a channel’s gain on a physical fader in a mix. Each of these approaches can be used individually on a lead vocal track, you could also blend several of these together to produce great sounding vocals in your next mix.
In this article, we explore four different ways you can use to process the dynamics of your lead vocals. How then can we process the dynamics of lead vocals outside of traditional approaches that can help us sit vocals purposefully in a mix? Too much compression and a vocal can sound strangled and lifeless, too little compression and a vocal can sound dynamically intermittent or disconnected from a mix. Setting a tasteful amount of compression is more often why many struggles mixing vocals. Those points together illustrate how pressure can start to build up when we mix lead vocal tracks but what can we do to make our lives easier when all we want is to get a great sounding vocal sound? Mixing a lead vocal track is generally one of the last processes that most producers and engineers address in a mix as it’s the cherry on the cake, the feature, the main element that our listening audience’s ear will latch onto, sing along with and most importantly connect with emotionally. CLA’s massive hardware arsenal includes racks and racks of the most coveted compression units in music history.Mixing lead vocal tracks can be a challenge as we often put ourselves under immense pressure to get them balanced tastefully within a mix. His hard-hitting mixes have transformed the radio soundscape, and introduced a new sonic vocabulary along the way. | Tim McGraw | Faith Hill | Tina Turner | Rod Stewart | Celine Dion | Santana | Steve Winwood | James Brown For almost thirty years, Chris has energized the sound of popular music.
Green Day | U2 | Dave Matthews Band | Daughtry | Pink | Leona Lewis | Avril Lavigne | My Chemical Romance | All American Rejects | Nickelback | Rob Thomas | Snow Patrol | Ray LaMontagne | Miley Cyrus | Jonas Bros. About Chris Lord-Alge Grammy®-winner Chris Lord-Alge is the mixing engineer of choice for pop and rock royalty. With a Frequency Response of 30Hz to 15kHz (+/- 1dB) and < 0.5% THD, the original provided up to 40dB of gain limiting. However, many consider its most unique feature to be its program dependent, multi-stage release, which was achieved using a 2-stage photo-electric cell.
(Tubes, however, do, and we made sure to model that distortion.) Additionally, the inspiration for the CLA-2A’s frequency-dependent attack and response speed made it an instant favorite of audio engineers. Unlike many other designs, electro-luminescent circuitry doesn’t add distortion when it modulates the sound. Initially intended for use in broadcast, the original used an electro-luminescent optical attenuator called “T4” for gain reduction. The CLA-2A is modeled on a hand-wired, tube-based compressor originally produced by Teletronix in the early 1960s.