Hi,
I am new to mixing. I can't seem to fix this problem. Suggestions needed.
When mixing vocals with compression, the louder parts gets tamed by the compressor and buries in the mix. Also when using a vocals rider at the end of the chain, it does the same and it also makes the quiter parts more aggressive. So, is the answer manual automation?

 

it's most likely your threshold setting & release setting with the compressor.

All compressors have a sweet spot and that where you want your vocal level to be at.

 

Use Multiband Compression for Vocals

 

Get your compressor settings right. You can easily compress vocals with a single-band compressor. I use The Glue for that all the time.

 

Some vocal riders actually write automation to the track, which you can then manipulate afterwards for finetuning. But as everyone else said, you should work on getting your rider and compressor parameters as good as you can before doing that.

 

Well, actually you should automate your tracks manually right before mixing (thats done by most assistants in the pro world, except the musicians where so good they wouldnt need to). The key is to automate the tracks to make them consistent and steady in the premixing stage. Hence, you can use compression to shape your sound, give it more impact (slow attack) or more decay/sustain/ambience. After you're done with mixing you can make your song more vivid by automating volumes of your stems (drums/vocals/gtrs/..,etc), more vocal volume/distortion in the chorus for an in your face sound, ...
To summarize, I automate 2 times. Right before mixing (more consistency) and right after to make it more vivid and give it some excitement.
Take your time, thats why pros have their assistants.

 

Chop your vocal into parts and manually gain each clip in your DAW

 

parallel compression perhaps ?...

 

Hey Abhi,maybe this could help a bit
http://blog.fixyourmix.com/2012/a-r...planation-of-vocal-compression-for-beginners/

 

a nice thing to do first, is to read "Mastering Audio - The Art and The Science" by Bob Katz...
there's some pdf running on torrents

 

The beauty of automation is that you can automate the level going INTO the compressor, the threshold, the ratio, etc etc.