Reverb, Chorus???

[cockridge]

I have Vegas Pro, Sound Forge 4.5, Wavelab 2.0, Cool Edit Pro and Cubase VST. I was wondering what type of effect is used in proffesional recordings just for normal voice? Just simple reverb or what? What program and effect should i use to achieve this?

[BDeetz]

A lot of pro's through it through a compressor first then reverb. I'm sure with all those programs you have several FX plugins for both.

[sTigmuTha]

A little more in depth to the previous reply:

In Sound Forge

For vocals, run a noise gate first. This will take some trial and error, so give yourself some time to figure out that effect. After that, you can either compress the track or you can use the normalize feature. Both do about the same thing by finding the peak value in a track and raising everyting up evenly near that peak, which raises the overall vocal.

Check your meters and make sure that the track does not red line or go over 0db. If it does, reduce the master corepsonding to the overun, i.e. if you are redlining at +1.2, reduce the master fader 1.2

Now you are ready to add the warmth you are looking for. After the previous procedure, you may find that the vocal is just fine the way it is. If you still want to add something, try adding some reverb. Be careful with the amount you add. The more reverb you add, the further back in the mix the vocal will "appear".

[AlChuck]

sTigmuTha,

Normalizing is not the same as compression. It is purely a calculation that raises all the values by a fixed ratio that depends on how far the peak value in the waveform has to be raised to be maxed. Compression sets a threshold, above which louder sounds are set equal to the threshold, and below which lower sounds are brought up in level by some ratio, say 2:1. Both the threshold and the ratio are adjustable; in addition, the attack of the effect -- how quickly it gets applied -- can usually be adjusted and so can the smoothness of the transition ("hard knee" and "soft knee"). So while they are similar in effect, normalizing is nowhere near as adjustable as compression, and hence less useful.

-AlChuck