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Thats seems very difficult and minutious...
by volume automation, u mean drawing envelopes coarsely in the daw to adjust ranges of words?
Yes. Insert 4 points or more where you need to automate the envelope,it can get a little tedious if you need to do a lot of that but the results are worth it as with enough time you could level the vocal this way without resorting to compression or limiting resulting in a more natural sounding track if that is the goal.I happen to like the sonic signature of various compressors so often i will use those doing very little compression but it adds a nice character to the track in question.
by manual level matching, u mean a more fine adjustment like a syllable, or vowel, consonant, etc?
Yes , by splitting up the problem areas and using volume handles on the items to adjust level appropriately.You don"t need to use a controller,mousing is fine for this.
You do this by riding the faders along the song?
No as riding faders can sound organic but is a lot of cases wont provide minute accuracy,you are able to look at the waveform display and see where there is disparity in the amplitude,you don't need to flatline i.e. smash the vocal until the wave looks like a mastered song from the loudness wars .lol.
Do u use only ears to check, Do you use meters? Do u use plugin for this?
What you want is an average level devoid of any obvious peaking/volume jumps or dips.Meters can help but I usually just use my ears as in this case .No plug ins except for the ones on the sides of my head.
Is TT dynamic range meter useful for this? Yes but see above.
Is there some literature, videos u recommend?
There is so much info available now that it can be overwhelming.So many different approaches and workflows to address a specific issue.Most of the priceless knowledge I have came from being in the trenches doing it day in day out and being around senior more experienced guys than myself in various work environments.For Eg I learned more about properly biasing a Studer 2 inch tape machine in 15 minutes from engineering a session for a legendery engineer/producer , old school, who had worked with most of the classic rock icons including the Stones,Dylan,Clapton,Lennon,Beach Boys,Marley to name a few.I was in house Studio Manager/producer/engineer for this small label in NY at the time and I has set up this old Broadcast Neve board with Automation via an external Mac VCA system to enable recall and tied in a Protools system with 32 I/O as well as two 2 inch Studer tape machines.This guy passed though one day and heard some stuff that I had tracked to tape and was really impressed so he asked me to engineer a session in my room which he was gonna produce.The gear in our room was like a candy shop but all this guy chose to use on this session for outboard was a Drawmer 1960 which i did not particularly like but he loved it and refered to it as his baby.After I finished tracking the musicians to tape he said he was gonna do a quick rough mix and I swear in five minutes with him using that Drawmer 1960 on the 2 buss I could hear a radio ready record coming out the monitors.This guy was like a dinosaur to the digital era and he wanted to get up to speed so he asked me If I would show him the ropes at which I jumped at the opportunity to do as this guy was like a walking encyclopedia on audio engineering and technique.These days there is a lot of info on youtube and the web but you can't trust all of it for accuracy so I will recommend some of the engineers/stuff that I trust.
Seek out any articles by Roger Nichols ,Dave Pensado(especially Pensado's Place) ,Tom & Chris Lord Alge,Michael Brauer, Manny Marroquin,Jon Gass and Bob Katz for starters
Also check out The Mixing Engineers Handbook lots of great info from A list guys
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=c...ed=0CHIQ6AEwBA
And questions are always good as giving answers reinforces what one already knows as well as the person asking learning from it.
I will send you the project to analyze.