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You can see roughly what it should look like in the drop‑down Send menu here. 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. and it turns out that it is! So here's how you do it. 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. 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. 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. Notice that the external side‑chain input (the orange button at the top) is activated.
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Here's you can see some suggested settings for Expander at the centre of this month's setup. 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.