Using The Limiter On Vocals

  • Thread starter Thread starter Doctor Varney
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GONZO-X said:
why not nail your take, with the limiting for color AND level, while you're actually doing it?
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Because when you try to be the performer, engineer and producer all at once it's easy to screw one or all of them up.

And using a limiter for color on a $60 mic seems a little pointless. And if he's using a $60 mic he probably can't afford a limiter with nicer properties than a decent plugin.
 
And it's worth stressing that this guy is doing audio books, not a musical style. The concept of "colouring" a mic with a limiter is fairly foreign when dealing with the spoken word. If a limiter is used in the recording process it tends to be there only to protect from accidental overloads (and therefore, hopefully, never/rarely triggered) rather than to change the sound.
 
Bobbsy said:
And it's worth stressing that this guy is doing audio books, not a musical style. The concept of "colouring" a mic with a limiter is fairly foreign when dealing with the spoken word. If a limiter is used in the recording process it tends to be there only to protect from accidental overloads (and therefore, hopefully, never/rarely triggered) rather than to change the sound.
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sometimes, especially when doing audio books, color is important.
 
We'll have to agree to disagree then. When I'm recording spoken word (and, boringly, I used to do a lot of that for my living) the colour added by driving a mic into a limiter was the last thing I wanted. I wanted clarity with a hint of warmth. Time enough for compression and limiting later.

To each their own.
 
An interesting conflict of opinions here! One which I welcome. I'm obviously not well versed on the subject, but looking at the Fruity Limiter and the other one, 'Maximus', I get the impression these are pretty complex and fully fledged as plugins go. I have an outboard limiter in the form of FX on my physical mixing console but that's rather hit and miss for me. The Fruity stuff does seem to include colouration and there's obviously much more to this piece of kit than I could pretend to understand

I take onboard Bobbsy's comments about obvious gating but I've recently found that applying the gate after the recording is nowhere near as noticable as when I place it on the input.

I think what I need to know is whether to normalise those WAV recordings from the audio logger or to apply compression gain afterwards to bring them up to +0dB, then drop the insert volume down to -14dB for some overhead in the mix.

One significant thing I've learned here is that if I apply compresion to the WAV using the audio logger's tools (one shot, no going back) I can SEE visually what the waveform is doing. When I apply it in the signal chain, then I have to rely more on my ears, despite the FL limiter's visual graph. RAMI is right when he says listen rather than look. I know this is not ideal but I might as well be honest about my present listening abilities.

That said, the time is approaching where I'll have more space in my little studio for mic placement options and implementing some form of 'sand bagging' against the computer noise. So by the time I get a new mic, Ill already have either a small booth built or at least a room divider.

Anyway, I'm definitely overthinking it now. So I'm taking a break right now and coming back to it with fresh ears after the weekend.
 
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Waves has a cool vocal rider plugin thats worth checking out, it's a free demo.
 
I don't need a vocal rider. That's for riding vocals in a musical mix. My work is spoken word only. I'm happy recording automation in real time, where needed. I believe in using the 'human touch' as computers can just make us lazy.
 
If you are ok recording automation and don't want to be lazy then why are you asking about using a limiter? Actually riding a fader is used for both music and dialog. As stated before just trying to keep coloration from processing to a minimum.
 
Pahtcub said:
If you are ok recording automation and don't want to be lazy then why are you asking about using a limiter?
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Because it's a completely different thing. The closest thing to limiting you can do manually is to redraw each peak, and that would take a huge amount of time.
 
Pahtcub said:
If you are ok recording automation and don't want to be lazy then why are you asking about using a limiter? Actually riding a fader is used for both music and dialog. As stated before just trying to keep coloration from processing to a minimum.
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See Bouldersoundguy's reply. Sums it up perfectly.

I guess my question is more about how to use a limiter effectively. I've been using a lot of guesswork and wish to improve my knowledge.

Perhaps more specifically - whether to use a limiter algorithm on the initial waveform or to limit the signal in a live mix, that will be eventually bounced, leaving the original .WAV files unprocessed.

Also, I'm not sure how manually riding a fader mimics the attack and release in milliseconds, as provided by a limiter.

You're right about riding the dialogue but I tend to use it over wider areas, over a slower period of time. I do value your input, so thank you.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
Because it's a completely different thing. The closest thing to limiting you can do manually is to redraw each peak, and that would take a huge amount of time.
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You know I was actually doing that at one time, don't you? :D
 
Wikipedia is not your friend unless you cross reference with a couple of other online sources.
I've always wanted a colouring audio book. But where do I add the crayon?
 
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