Good to meet you all, great site, need some help

[Hitman717]

Hi everyone.....I have worked in radio for 30 years and am trying to put together a home studio that gives me the same capabilities as the production studio at work. I am doing strictly voice over messages onto a music bed. Here's the question....at work we obviously have a mixing console to fade up the music and fade it out where necessary. We are fully computerized there as I am at home. Do I need a mixer to do this with an audio interface or can I do it in the recording software. Having trouble translating what is so easily done at work to home. Probably should tell you I have a PC with Edirol FA-66 interface....several software programs including Audacity and Sequel. I am also planning, at some point, to do some vocal and guitar recording once I get everything set up. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[magno]

You could do this with a mixer, but you probably don't want to.
Alternatively what you want to do is control your fade in or whatever after you've recorded your voice over.
You can do this with your mouse within audacity using faders.
You can also do tons of other things like drawing volume curves and using automation.
If you really want to use faders get a control surface.

[Hitman717]

Thanks for the help....much appreciated......what kind of control surface are you referring to......?

[jsd1982]

Forgive me, but it seems what you're looking to do is the simple effect of ducking by side-chaining, if I have my terminology correct.

The effect is to attenuate (reduce the volume) of one track based on the apparent loudness of another track, in this case a background music track being attenuated according to a voice over track.

I know this can be done easily and automatically using Cakewalk Sonar 7. In fact, there is even a demonstration video that comes with that shows you how to do exactly this. The Sonar team refers to it as 'side-chaining'. Just add a sonitus:fx Gate plug-in to the music track's effects bin, and add an FX Send from the voice track to the side-chain input of that gate plug-in instance (you'll see it clearly labeled in the output menu). Adjust the gate plug-in's properties to taste.

For other DAW software I'm not sure how it's done or if it can be, but the concept is fairly simple so there's no reason it could not be rigged up somehow.

Or... you could always manually attenuate the music track by painstakingly drawing out a volume envelope that approximates what you want.

Hope this helps!