When talking about mixing in the beginning of this week, I mentioned that the one of the roles of the mix engineers is to guide the listener through the mix. To kind of tell them what to focus on at each moment. And many times you can just set that and kind of forget it right? The vocalist will be the focus the whole time, you can keep them loud for the entire mix. But there are many times when you really do want to change the mix over the course of the tune. You want things to move, maybe the volume to come down to the vocal, or to go up at a certain moment. Maybe to bring the guitar up during the solo. And that function of kind of a, a moving mix, is called automation. And you're going to find in a contemporary DAW, that pretty much any knob you see can be automated, can be made to move over time, and you can kind of draw those lines with a pencil. In fact in many kind of contemporary electronic mix, mixes, I think the, the engineer spends more time drawing the lines than anything else, and creating these kind of complex, shifting textures with automation. Now, they look similar to CC data, which we talked about earlier, and I'd like to make that distinction one more time. In that CC data, while it looks like lines, and has a similar kind of effect, CC data is part of the MIDI specification. And that's information being sent to a synthesizer or sampler of some sort, you can think of CC information as kind of hairpin diagrams that you put on a score. They're something you're telling the performer to do. Automation is done in the DAW itself. And the reason we want to make that distinction is it actually is often of a higher resolution and can sound much smoother than CC data. And it's not really instructions to the performer so much it is as instructions to the engineer. So we're kind of seeing that even though we're performing many roles within the DAW and within the production process we want to think about where those instructions are being sent. Now DAW's vary in how automation is actually recorded and edited. In some DAW's, every channel strip has its own automation functions. I have like read, write, latch, and overwrite modes for automation. And each track has a separate kind of record and playback function for automation. Other DAW's treat automation recording as any other kind of recording. They hit Record in the project, and you just move a fader and it is recorded, and those motions will play back later. I think the concept of automation is pretty clear. Any fader, knob or button can be made to change automatically over the course of your piece of music, which I think you can imagine, brings in a ton of creative possibilities. Though it's pretty clear how it's supposed to work, it's implemented a little differently from DAW to DAW. I'd like to show you one of the more advanced implementations of automation. In this version, we have a separate automation play, record, and mode in each track. Now, in some DAW's you just hit the global Record button and automation will record on all tracks. In this DAW, which is pretty common, each track actually functions kind of independently. It has its own record and play, just for automation in that track. It really opens up some great possibilities and I'd like to show you how that functions here with a practical example. At the end of this piece of music the bass note lasts too long, and it's kind of awkward how it hangs on when everything else fades out. Let's hear it. [MUSIC]. So that bass note just fades on too long. I'd like it to fade out a little sooner. I'd actually like that cymbal to be the last thing we hear. So I'd like to take this bass fader and put it in motion right during the end of the track. To do this I'll have to record enable automation for this one track and let's see how we would do it. I'll rewind to the point where I want to start my automation. I'll go to the automation section and record enable this track for automation. Now we have a variety of automation mode. The most common among DAW's are going to be Latch, Touch, Overwrite and Play. I find Latch to be the, most useful. But we'll talk about Touch a little later in the video. Now, I'll hit Play. And we'll see that the Record Enable button is going to flash. That's meaning that the, track is ready to automate. And it's waiting for something to happen. As soon as I touch a parameter in that track. No matter what it is. A plug in parameter, or a volume fader, or a pan knob, it will start recording that automation. Let's try it out. Hit play. Record Enable's flashing. I can grab this and I can start dragging it down. Give it a natural fade out. You'll notice that as soon as I started dragging that down, the Automation Record when solid instead of flashing. I hit Stop, and I'll rewind back to before that moment. And we're going to see immediately that this is just going to jump back up. I'll turn off Record Enable for automation. That's the one challenge of automation I find happens all the time is I forget to turn Record off and any kind of thing I hit accidentally ends up being recorded, which can be a problem. But let's hit Play now. [MUSIC] I get a nice natural fade out on my bass. And it matches well with the piece of music. So that's a really good usage of automation. And you can image that it can be used much more throughout a piece of music. So with this kind of implementation of automation, we have to be very careful whether every track is play enabled or record enabled for automation. And you'll notice, even though I was recording, automation in the track, I never hit the Record button on the very kind of global record. I think it's also important to see how this shows up in the Tracks window, or in the Sequence Editor as it's known here. We see it as a line drawn over our track. And we can see the automation drawn in here. Very often, you don't need to record automation kind of live, like I was doing in the mixing board. And instead we can use Pencil tools to manipulate that. So, I could easily, grab some kind of Pencil tool and draw more of a break point type of editing. Kind of a linear line, instead of drawing the individual points or recording it in real time. Let's hear this. [MUSIC] And we get a nice, natural fade out. So automation is hugely useful and something really to be aware of and really to explore on your DAW. You'll find that the more you get into working with production, the more you find yourself in this area. Drawing these subtle lines. And it really can have a major impact on the music. Now one thing I'd like to show you is the difference between Latch and Touch. it's a very important thing if you are getting into getting these automation to know the difference between the Latch and Touch mode. So let's try something out. First I'll set this to be Touch mode. And let's see how this works. I'll rewind back to that same point, and I'll hit Record Enable the Automation for the track, and hit Play. [MUSIC] I'll bring this way down and let go, and it ramps back up to the previous version. So let's see what happened in the sequence editor. So this is what happened. I was recording automation, I grabbed the fader, I brought it down. I then held it down, I let go of the fader it automatically ramped up the preference set kind of ramp time and then kept going down. So, with Touch mode, it's kind of an overwrite for automation. In that I can kind of grab the fader, change it from it's level, as soon as I let go of that fader, it's going to go back to the previous automated level, and then continue on from there. I'm going to undo that, and then go back to my mixing board, and choose Latch instead. And we'll try the same exact thing. Play. Grab this and I'll drag it down and I'll let go and it stays at the level it latches at that level. And let's look at in the sequence editor. It went down and it stayed. So Touch mode functions as an over dub for automation. In that when you let go of the parameter, it'll go back to its previous automated level. But Latch mode will continue on at that same exact level that you left it at until you hit stop. So, it's important to know how automation works in you DAW. Most likely the implementation in your DAW will be different than what we've seen here. But it's important to know how it works. You'll find yourself using automation more and more, the further you get into production. So please take this moment to go to your DAW and really figure out how automation works. Figure out the specifics of drawing and of recording automation. It will really pay off in the long run. Before you go to the next video, I'd like you to try some of these things in your own DAW. Figure out how you can record automation. How you can edit it. And how you can draw it in within your DAW. It varies quite a bit, how this is actually done. So it's worth figuring out. Because these complex motions are important, and they really play a major. role in contemporary mixes. And remember, it's one of the main ways that you can guide the listener through this complex sonic environment that you're trying to create.
