In Summary

When it comes to natural-sounding level control, the humble fader is where it’s at. Here we entrust our levels to one of the industry’s first automatic level rider tools as we revisit WaveRider Tg’s intelligent level control for any DAW.

Going Deeper

Level Rides - Why We Still Need Them

Riding the fader is one of the oldest mixing techniques that engineers can employ. In the beginning it was often used to regulate levels while recording to tape. This way engineers could get consistent mix levels right from the start, as well as keep signals in the sweet spot near the top a long way from noise and little way from saturation. In the digital age noise and distortion might be vanishingly low, but the need to keep a level’s amount of swing under control is still there. In the mix this is still vital to get sources that ‘sit’ just where they need to be.

Unlike automatic gain control (AGC) circuits, aka compressors, this method of ‘manual compression’ is different for three reasons. Firstly it is nowhere near as fast as a compressor’s action, meaning it can be less aggressive and more musical. Secondly, rides can be up or down, unlike most downward compressors that ignore signals below a threshold. Thirdly, its action is helped by a human ear to detect what needs to happen rather than being governed by pure amplitude.

Another Way: Using Quiet Art WaveRider Tg

WaveRider Tg is a tool that listens and reacts just like a human engineer to ride track levels. Sitting upstream of the DAW’s own level fader, it monitors and adjusts its output to raise or lower levels in a similar way to the traditional hand-on-fader method. In the video we use it to tame a jumpy lead vocal that could do with a little helping hand both upwards and downwards to help it sit in the mix. Despite having Quiet Art’s own Defaulter available as well, we show how WaveRider Tg might be the only tool you need even without clip gain normalisation tweaks upstream.

Compressors are sometimes presented as a way to control level; after all, that’s what they were invented for. Using compressors in this way has one obvious disadvantage: not surprisingly using a compressor makes things sound ‘compressed’, but WaveRider Tg far less so.

Although there is no regular compressor used in our example above, the way WaveRider Tg works means that it can be used upstream of any compressor, unlike DAW fader automation without extra routing. If you feel like you spend too much time tweaking levels, WaveRider Tg might be just the thing you need.

WaveRider: A Second Opinion From Chris Testa

The original WaveRider actually came before competing products from the big boys and girls came along to lay claim to the virtues of transparent gain riding. As we approach the 15th anniversary of WaveRider, it continues to feature in many people’s workflows today. Here, Grammy Award-winning re-recording mixer and dialogue editor Chris Testa shares his thoughts on the original WaveRider, how he uses it, and how it continues to aid his workflow for audio post.

Over to you Chris:

I’ve been using WaveRider for years now. I did a test a few years ago between WaveRider and Waves Vocal Rider and WaveRider was just that much more accurate for me. It allowed me to have more accurate control of how it was reading the incoming dialogue. I have ProTools HUI settings set for WaveRider 1-16. I have a WaveRider folder. That folder sits on the top of my session so HUI will see all the tracks instantly. I have 16 tracks each with just one WaveRider plug in on it set to the appropriate channel number with my settings on them.

The WaveRider process only happens after all the dialogue is thoroughly cleaned up and levelled with Nugen VisLM. Then all tracks are dragged up to the WaveRider tracks and run down in real time to really dial in and level out the loudness. It works really well if the dialogue going into it is pretty well prepared. Every now and then there is a version of PT or the Mac OS which will trip it up a bit and you might have to zoom into the volume automation and nudge it back a bit.

Overall it’s a great tool. I think a lot of people might look at it as a tool to speed things up but I really don’t look at it like that. I think it’s best used to take some dialogue that is already pretty dialled in and just get it that much closer.

In the end I don’t think any of the vocal riding plug in’s replace taking your time and doing it manually but it can be a helpful tool that can work on it’s own and add to what you’ve already done.