Warren Huart demonstrates how to use clip gain and volume automation to manually level individual vocal phrases, separating quiet lines, boosting them, and adding fades to smooth the transitions. This phrase-by-phrase approach is positioned as a complement to compression rather than a replacement for it.
Warren draws a useful contrast with console-era mixing, where engineers relied on heavy serial compression and fader riding to keep vocals upfront and present. With clip gain in a DAW, you can achieve that same consistency with more surgical control and without leaning on compression as a coloring tool.
He also brings in the Waves L1 limiter to show how a hard limiter can surface the personality buried in a vocal performance, pulling out breaths and subtle tonal details that compression alone might miss. This works well for modern pop and rock where an always-on, upfront vocal is part of the aesthetic.
A practical warning closes the section: when boosting quiet phrases with clip gain or volume automation, watch for sibilant sounds. Cranking an S sound to lift a phrase means you may have to de-ess it afterward, undoing part of your work. Warren catches exactly this in the session and rolls back the boost, then uses a fade to tame the transient instead.