RAW workflows

Cleaning a vocal cut in a bad room, rescuing a sample drowned in someone else's reverb, and treating only the parts of a take that need it.

Range selection is the workflow

The single thing that separates a good RAW result from a blunt one is that you do not have to treat the whole take. The reverb map shows where the room actually is, and a selected range is the only part that gets processed. Most sessions are three or four small selections, not one big render.

RAW's waveform with two separate ranges selected, each drawn between its own pair of markers.

A vocal cut in a bad room

Capture the take

Hit CAPTURE and play the part through, or drop the WAV straight onto the window.

Render once, wide

Render the whole capture first with nothing selected. You are not committing — you are getting the reverb map filled in so you can see where the problem lives.

Read the map

The lime bands are where the model found reverb. On a home-recorded vocal these usually cluster at the ends of phrases, where the tail rings into the gap, rather than under the words themselves.

Re-render the ranges that matter

Select the bands you actually want treated and hit RE-RENDER. The rest of the take keeps its natural body.

Back REDUCTION off

Take it down from full until the vocal stops sounding boxed-in-a-vacuum. On a close-mic'd take you are usually not at 1.0.

Fix what the removal exposed

Turn the FX section on. HARSH first if the top has gone glassy, then AIR to put back the brightness the reverb removal took with it, then MUD only if the low-mids have become boxy.

Drag it out

DRAG OUT to your DAW, or EXPORT WAV. What you hear with FX on is what gets written.

RAW mid-render: the button on the right reads CLEANING, the drag chip beneath it is disabled and reads RENDER FIRST - THEN DRAG, the step marker at the bottom sits on 2 RENDER, and the status line reads that only the selected ranges are being rendered.

A sample drowned in someone else's reverb

Drop the file in

Drag the WAV onto the window. There is nothing to record.

Select the phrase, not the file

Loops and one-shots rarely need a full-file render. Select the section you are actually flipping.

Push REDUCTION further than you would on a vocal

A sample is going to sit under drums and be processed further; a small amount of leftover room that would be fine on a lead vocal will smear once it is pitched and layered. This is the case where full removal is often correct.

Use the delta chip to check

The delta plays what you are removing. If you can hear the sample's own tone in the delta rather than just room, you have gone past the reverb and into the source.

RAW's range and monitoring buttons: CLEAR 1 RANGE, CLEAN and REVERB ONLY.

When the map looks empty

The analysis runs when the transport stops. If your DAW is still rolling, the map has nothing to show yet — stop playback and it fills.

An empty map after a completed render on stopped transport means something else: the model did not find significant reverb. That happens on already-dry sources, and it is a real answer, not a failure.

Working non-destructively

Nothing RAW writes overwrites anything. Every render lands as its own file in ~/Music/Nolvra/RAW Renders, so trying three different reduction settings gives you three files to compare rather than one you have to redo.

The CLEAN button has an UNDO CLEAN state, and Cmd-Z works — you can back out of a step without recapturing.

RAW's RE-RENDER button above the drag chip that carries the processed range into a DAW.

Still stuck?

Nothing here matching? Write to a person.

support@nolvra.com