Waves' ground‑breaking Vocal Rider plug‑in takes the pain out of vocal level‑automation, but if your budget can't stretch, you can get part of the way there using nothing more than Cubase 5's built-in processors. Here's you can see some suggested settings for Expander at the centre of this month's setup. Notice that the external side‑chain input (the orange button at the top) is activated.

TBProAudio DynaRide v1.0.0 Incl Cracked and Keygen-R2R. Cinematic Studio Brass KONTAKT. DynaRide is an advanced gain rider plug-in with multiple detector programs and switchable pre-delay. On top of it DynaRide can enhance the output signal by limiting the riding process to specific audio signals like speech, vocal and bass.

I was intrigued to hear about the launch of Waves' Vocal Rider vocal-level automation plug‑in, because vocal micro‑automation is a regular part of my normal mixing process; particularly intrigued, in fact, because I'd already implemented a similar scheme using Cockos Reaper's dynamic parameter modulation. So when I noticed the plug‑in's price‑tag, my low‑fat cinammon frappucino almost spurted out of my nose! I'm sure that Waves' boffins have put some very whizzy technology under Vocal Rider's bonnet, but there's just something in me that rebels against parting with the cost of curry for 12 in return for something that simply adjusts gain, especially when I'm already pretty happy with my home‑brew alternative. If you're wondering what the hell any of this has to do with Cubase, well, I'm also a Cubase user and, spurred on by memories of frappucino catastrophe, I recently began wondering if it would be possible to implement a similar automatic vocal‑riding scheme in Cubase too. And it turns out that it is! So here's how you do it.

In order to get the lead‑vocal Expander to respond to the backing track, you need to send to the plug‑in's side‑chain input. You can see roughly what it should look like in the drop‑down Send menu here.

In case you don't see the point of riding vocal levels, the basic concept is this: even if you compress a vocal heavily, its subjective level will nonetheless appear somewhat inconsistent because the backing track will mask the vocal more the louder it gets, and the amount of masking will change rapidly from moment to moment; a loud drum hit will mask the vocal more than a quieter acoustic‑guitar strum, perhaps. Because of this, a lot of effort goes into the micro‑automation of vocal levels in professional productions, and if you want to compete on that level, you can't afford to ignore the issue. However, there is a way to take the sting out of this frequently tedious job, and that is to set up some processing that monitors the level of the backing track and then applies corresponding gain changes to the vocal track to compensate for the masking effects. In Cubase, the trick to managing this is to send signal from your lead‑vocal channel to a Group Channel with the VST3‑format Expander plug‑in inserted, and then configure that plug‑in to respond (via its side‑chain) to the level of the backing track. Once this is operational, you can mix in the expanded vocal signal alongside the unexpanded one to achieve the desired degree of automatic gain‑riding. When that loud drum hit comes along, the expander responds to it by letting more of the lead vocal through, thereby boosting the overall level of the vocal in the mix for that instant and defeating some of the drum's masking effect.

The final, refined setup: group channels for lead‑vocal and backing‑track signals, and another to enable equalisation of the lead‑vocal Expander's side‑chain signal. Right, let's get onto the specifics. First of all, right‑click in the Track List and select Add Group Channel Track. To start with, you'll want two stereo ones, so adjust the pop‑up dialogue box accordingly. Upnp test tool. Label these two LeadVocal and BackingTrack, and then reassign all the tracks in your song, with the exception of your lead vocal, to the latter group channel track. You can save time by doing this in bulk: highlight a series of tracks and then hold down the Shift key while you select the required destination from the Inspector's top pane. To feed the LeadVocal group channel, select it from the lead‑vocal track's Sends menu, switching on the send and Control‑clicking its little fader to set it to unity gain (0.0dB).