Automation - Posted on 2015-04-06 by Alexander Schug

Automation allows you to adjust perameters in your project to a very percise extent. Say you want a sound in your project slowly panning left to right. In order to do that you can select panning on the sound and draw it in with the edit tools. You can also record automation and as the part of the song that comes along that needs panning you simply move the pan knob left and right then adjust it to your likings if it wasnt perfectly on time. I have assigned perameters to knobs on my midi controller and recorded automation clips like that as well. You can automate volume, pan, mute, on audio, midi, and instrument tracks. You can pretty much automate any knob thats in the plug in assigned to a sound. There is alot of automation drawing happening in Bass music. People drawing in filters alot and effects to modulate a sound in a very profound way. Being able to draw or record automation allows you to make knobs move by themselves. There are 5 different automation modes you can choose from to help benefit you in a certain situation. The first one is off. In off mode you wont hear any automation or be able to create automation. Then you have read mode which is a write protected mode where you can hear all the automation you made in the project and cant accidently write over it and mess things up. There is also touch mode where automation is created soon as you move a perameter but when the perameter is released it is returned back to where started. Latch mode is almost the same thing as touch mode but when you release the perameter it continues writing where you left the perameter. It does not stop writing until playback is stopped. The last mode is write mode where automation starts when play back starts and stops when playback is stop. In the mode you will erase any automation that was previously written. In order to see what you automated or to draw in automation you go to the track you want to automate in the edit window and click the drop down arrow below it. You will see the options of what you can automate and right under the track you will see the automation clips you just made. If your drawing in automation with your edit tools than thats where you would begin to draw it in. In order to get a specific perameter to show up in the automation list from a plug in you have to go into that plugin, select the perameter, and add it to your automation clips. Volume, pan, and mute will be the only perameters already in the automations list. Without being able to draw in automation i feel that the music i produce would be very boring and have terrible transitions. Before automation engineers had to adjust perameters while bouncing to tape when its suppose to happen in the mix. This took multiple people on the controls at once and if one person messed up then this whole process would have to start all over again. It sounds very nerve racking. Also all perameter adjustments had to be written down for each project because there wasn't total recall. Total recall is where you can reopen your project and all your perameters are right where you left them. Engineers back then had to reset all the perameters for each project. I can't even imagine the time spent writing all that information down then when you re-open that project you have to re-assign all the perameters. Im truly thankful for how far music production has came.