Normalizing & Vocal Intelligibility...

[xeojax]

Hey!

I had a question regarding vocal normalizing, and i'd like to find out if people are doing this as well, or if there are other techniques folks are using to achieve a similar effect (besides extensive compression/limiting)...

as part of the mix prep stage i decided last night to try and smooth out a lead vocal track by using the digidesign normalization plugin... however, instead of normalizing the entire track, i cut each individual phrase, and normalized it "region by region"... the vocals were recorded at a decent level, however the reason for the normalization was to create a really intelligible vocal, that was extremely consistant and smooth... (i set the normalization to peak at -6db)

the result seemed to work rather well... kinda surprising actually. I still compressed the vocals heavily, but was focuing more on compression character rather than trying to use it to make everything extremely even... I was curious to see if anyone out there has rejected this technique for a specific reason, or if this is something that people do fairly often...

Thanks!!!
Paul

[uncle duncan]

I do that with volume automation, and then compress. That way you can tweak sections - like dip breaths if they don't line up because of a punch in, bump up the last couple of words in a line, which often times are weak, or catch S's and P pops.

[xeojax]

thanks for the reply! yeah, that seems like a good way to do it... so you're doing the automation, then bussing it into another track with the compression? or do you print the automation before compressing?

Thanks!
Paul