Waves Vocal Rider

A true timesaver, this plugin adjusts your vocal levels automatically, saving you the need to draw each level change in your DAW or manually ride faders.

Vocals are the focus of almost all popular music, so they need a consistent level that’s never buried in the mix. But automating levels manually is tedious, and using heavy compression to even out the vocal levels ends up coloring your vocal sound. Vocal Rider saves you time by riding gain automatically, while preserving the vocal’s full fidelity. Set a target level for the vocal, and Vocal Rider will take care of the rest. It unobtrusively raises or lowers the vocal’s gain to maintain the target level—just as if you were making fast, precise fader moves.

Keep the Focus on the Voice

Fluctuating vocal levels destroy the focus of a song’s most important element. Vocal Rider not only provides consistent vocal levels, but eliminates the tedious drawing of automation curves, or doing imprecise fader punch-ins.

Adapts Vocals to the Music

Vocal Rider can level the vocal in isolation, or in context with the music’s overall dynamics. Feed a submix of the song’s instruments into Vocal Rider’s sidechain, and the vocal’s target level shifts according to the music’s level.

Automation Made Easy

Vocal Rider can write an automation track that incorporates the automatic gain changes. If you want to make additional edits beyond leveling the vocals, just tweak the automation track.

Compensate for Mic Technique Issues

Poor mic technique is a mixing nightmare, because of the wildly varying vocal levels. Vocal Rider can provide up to 12 dB of attenuation and 12 dB of gain, to make sure the vocal stays consistent.

Better Live Performances

Vocal Rider is ideal for the stage, because it adds no latency. In addition to reacting to level changes in the music, it can even prevent other instruments’ spillover from interfering with the vocal leveling process.