Waves Vocal Rider

Waves Vocal Rider - Automatic Level Control Plugin | Your Personal Mixing Assistant for Perfectly Balanced Vocal Dynamics

In any piece of popular music, the vocal is undoubtedly the core of emotional delivery and the auditory focus. However, during the mixing process, maintaining a stable and clear vocal level is an extremely time-consuming and tedious task. Traditionally, mixing engineers had to manually draw complex volume automation curves or constantly ride physical faders, which is not only inefficient but also makes it difficult to achieve perfect precision. The creation of Waves Vocal Rider completely changed this workflow. It is a revolutionary automatic vocal level control tool that can save you countless hours of valuable mixing time.

The core concept of this plugin is "automation." It intelligently analyzes the vocal track and automatically adjusts its gain to sit perfectly in the mix. You just need to set a desired target volume range, and Vocal Rider will act like an experienced mixing assistant, riding the fader in real-time with precision to ensure the vocal isn't buried by instruments or doesn't overpower the music. More importantly, it accomplishes all this without using any compression, fully preserving the original dynamics and subtlety of the vocal quality. This avoids the coloration and distortion that traditional compression can introduce, making it an indispensable automatic gain adjustment solution in modern music production.

Key Advantages & Use Cases

Save Precious Mixing Time
Vocal Rider frees you from the tedious and repetitive task of drawing volume automation. It automatically handles tasks that used to take hours of manual adjustment, allowing you to focus on the creative aspects of mixing rather than mechanical operations.

Keep Vocals in Focus Without Sacrificing Quality
Unlike traditional compressors, Vocal Rider controls volume through pure gain riding, without applying any compression to the audio. This means you can achieve a stable vocal level while 100% preserving the original dynamics, clarity, and full fidelity of the vocal performance.

Intelligently Adapts to Music Dynamics
With its powerful sidechain feature, you can feed the instrumental mix into Vocal Rider. The plugin will intelligently adjust the vocal's target level based on the overall dynamics of the music, ensuring it blends perfectly with the backing track in any section of the song.

Seamlessly Integrates with Your Automation Workflow
Vocal Rider not only processes audio in real-time but can also write all its gain adjustments to your DAW's automation track. If you need to make more detailed custom modifications, you can simply fine-tune the generated automation curve, greatly enhancing workflow flexibility.

Corrects Inconsistent Microphone Technique
When faced with drastic volume fluctuations caused by a singer's varying distance from the microphone, Vocal Rider provides a gain adjustment range of up to ±12 dB, effectively smoothing out these inconsistent dynamics and making difficult-to-handle recordings smooth and consistent.

A Zero-Latency Tool for Live Performances
Thanks to its zero-latency design, Vocal Rider is also an ideal choice for live sound. It can stabilize a singer's volume in real-time without adding any audio delay, ensuring the audience hears the clearest and most consistent vocals in any performance environment.

Tech Specs

• Gain Adjustment Range: ±12 dB
• Latency: 0 ms (Zero Latency)
• Main Function: Automatic Vocal Level Riding
• Sidechain: Supported (for music dynamics reference)
• Automation Write: Supported (can write results to DAW automation track)
• Attack: Selectable Fast / Slow modes
• Sample Rate Support: 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192 kHz
• Channels: Mono / Stereo
• Plugin Formats: VST, VST3, AU, AAX Native, AudioSuite