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Waves Vocal Rider is a gain riding plugin designed to achieve consistent vocal levels quickly, whether you are mixing a pop song, a rap session, backing vocals, voice-over, podcast, or video narration. Rather than heavily compressing to smooth out level differences (at the risk of coloring the voice and reducing dynamics), Vocal Rider makes micro volume adjustments as a sound engineer would with quick and precise fader moves.
The result: a vocal that remains intelligible, present, and stable in the mix without spending hours drawing automation curves. It is especially useful when takes have level variations due to performance, microphone distance, or inconsistent mic technique.
Vocal Rider maintains a user-defined level target and adjusts gain transparently. Since it "raises" or "lowers" the volume instead of aggressively compressing, you more easily preserve fidelity, attack, and nuances of the performance. This is ideal upstream of lighter compression, de-essing, or EQ, to feed the rest of the chain with a more homogeneous signal.
The plugin can level the vocal alone or adapt to the track by analyzing the overall energy of the music via a sidechain input. In practice, you can send a submix of instruments (or a music bus) into Vocal Rider: the vocal level target then evolves with the dynamics of the instrumental. This helps keep the vocal "up front" when the chorus explodes while avoiding an overly loud vocal in quieter verses.
For precision-oriented workflows, Vocal Rider can write an automation track that reproduces its gain variations. You thus get a clean and realistic base, then make your creative tweaks directly in your DAW timeline: emphasizing words, managing breaths, or adjusting a tricky phrase without starting from scratch.
Vocal takes with large level differences are one of the most common pitfalls in mixing. Vocal Rider compensates for these variations by offering up to 12 dB attenuation and up to 12 dB gain, to stabilize the vocal and prevent it from disappearing or standing out too much. It is an excellent safety net, both for home recordings and studio sessions where the artist moves a lot.
On stage or streaming, latency is critical. Vocal Rider operates in real-time with zero latency, making it relevant for live mixing. It can also limit the influence of bleed and spill (instruments picked up by the vocal mic) on the leveling behavior, staying focused on vocal intelligibility even in noisy environments.
