Good gate, compressor, and limiter settings

[BiazedUnfidelz]

For hip-hop vocals. I've been experimenting for a while, and just when I think I've found a good setting, it'll end up sounding crappy. I'm mainly concerned with the gate and limiter. I know my way around a compressor but don't have much experience gating/limiting. And please don't come with the whole "I can't tell you good settings cuz vocals change from track to track" deal. I've been recording vocals for a while, so I know this. Just some tips is what I'm looking for. But I digress. Any advice would be appreciated. Peace.

[Greg B]

I just did some gate experimentation, and found you can circle the globe about three times with settings without repeating a gates performance. Luckily, I didn't need absolute silence, so I went for the -6db to drop it out of the audible mix. Find your threshold first. My "breakthrough" was finding the right attack time so the gate never banged/clicked on. Then I found the appropriate delay or decay (crap, can't think!) to hold the gate open through an average phrase or musical decay.

It ended up being VERY helpful! And this was the Digi gate.

[albee1952]

Personally, I never use a gate plugin. I would rather automate the level or cut out the background noise and put short fades on each end of the remaining audio. Once that is all done, I consolidate the track. This works great on tom tracks, bass and guitar tracks as well as vocal tracks to get rid of headphone bleed and the singer that keeps bumping the mic stand. Compressors-for vocals I generally set at 4:1 and adjust threshold for 4-6db of reduction. Which compressor plugin you use will make as much difference as the settings. My personal fav is the Bomb Factory BF76. I will likely add a bit of high EQ after the compressor. For that, I love the Bomb Factory Pultec EQ set to 10K and +3 or 4. If I need to de-ess, I do it before the compressor with Waves de-esser.