Hi, what is an easy method to get vocals to sound stable (dynamically) in a recording. Aside from compression and limiting. For editing, I have been using the volume edit but I find it tedious. Protools has something that lets you just draw on the wave form and it’s really intuitive. so for instance the beginnings of some of my words are louder than others. I would really like to smooth it out, so it is less jarring when listening to. Thanks
I use hornets plugins to smooth out vocals. Works like vocal rider and is a lot cheaper. Saves ages doing tiny volume edits.
You can draw volume edits directly on the waveform in Cubase also.
yeah I discovered drawing vocal edits. It’s very slow compared to others I have seen. some other DAWS you just click on the spot you want to edit and drag up or down and it smoothes out the dynamic really nice. I hope Cubase will utilize this in future versions
Most of the pro’s I’ve watched on youtube do this with extensive manual editing of the automation curves, with one or more dynamics plugins. Search for pensado place vocal on youtube for tons of tutorials. (He use Protools but it’s the same in cubase).
What the heck did they do before digital audio?
Manually fade onto a tape?
Depending on the size of the board they used extra hands. 
I like Vocal Rider, but feel it gets me maybe 80% there. I still have to go back and make some dB edits. Some of them due to timing because Vocal Rider is similar to a compressor with side chain. Other issues are mostly subjective where you want more vocal dB’s in a phrase for a purpose. On rare occasions it just sounds like it did the opposite of what I thought it should do. But overall it’s been fairly useful.
If you work much with vocals, I would recommend it.