Accusonus has a sale on their voice leveler plugin. I d/l’d the demo and this thing is pretty cool. It’s not about automation, but just basically a gain-staging tool, kind of like a gain-riding plugin that does nothing more than smoothing out a track with huge variations in volume. Like that Long Way Home main vocal that was all over the place with dynamic range. I spent a lot of time smoothing out the vocals prior to any compression or automation. I didn’t try it on that track, but I think this little baby would have done it in one step.
Very simple: one knob. You dial it up while watching a graphic waveform display advancing across the screen, until the lower volume waveforms are closer to the higher volume.
It’s not compression. Not automation, per se. Just a leveler. Add compression and automation after. Kind of cool. Simple. Time-saver.
On sale for $9. Normally $59 or something like that.
Okay, so just out of curiosity, here’s my mix for Long Way Home using the Voice Leveler instead of clip gain (identical settings for lead vox, except that I used Voice Leveler instead of all my clip gains). Everything else is the same.
Not bad. This took me probably 45 seconds tops to level the vocals. I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to do the clip gain stuff. It was tedious. I’m impressed.
Again, I still rode the vocals just to keep it on top where I wanted; this is just to level out the vocals. Still using mild compression.
IDK if I’d notice it if I weren’t listening for it, but I do, when focusing on it, “think” I hear mild artifacts at the end of long, held-out words at the end of phrases. Thoughts? Still, overall, I think it’s pretty decent.
Yes. Absolutely not good for that. I tried it on 25 Reasons and it was not good. Well, that vocal track had so much bleed on it. Ridiculous.
But it does have a “breath” option that isolates the distinctive sound of taking a breath before a phrase or word and removes it from what it does. Leaves breaths untouched.
On a well-isolated vocal track, w/o much bleed, it seems to do the trick.
