serious frustration question about automation in Cubase SX

G

GreenSpectrum

New member
Hi everyone

Damn I'm frustrated! Ive just been trying to automate a mix of a tune. All I want to do is fade it out. however its not working like I want it to. for some strange reason it keeps resetting certain tracks, specifically track 3, to some previous level each time I'm done automating and I enable the read automation. At another point I tried to bring track 3 up quickly and then leave it like that till the end of the song and when I enabled read it went up, belatedly, and then came back down after a second or two. What is going on here?
Basically the question seems to be this: how do you just get back to square one and "reset" the automation. It seems to me that if you take the cursor back to the beginning and unclick and then reclick automation, it should just start from square one, or whatevr pooint in the piece you're starting from. I donno about that unbclick or whatever, I just made that up. But really its kinda ambiguous: when and how does it record or store the automationm? when you hit play does it just take the levels wherever they hapen to be,? and what would happen if you kept it playing and then dragged the cursor ( or whatever its called) back to some earlier spotand let it play for a minute. Its just that the idea of it "storing" what you do with the faders seems to be kind of arbitrary. if you had it say on a certain volume level, then went all crazy with it for a minute, then stopped playing and disabled automation, where would the levels be? would they go back to where they were before you moved them? Even this wouldnt really solve my problem here because thats not what I did: I let tyhe whole damn tune play each time i tried to reautomate. then I go to read automationa and bang, it goes back to som,e level that I didnt leave it at and I just dont need or want.

any help appreciated. Thanks,

Will
 
can you see the automation graphically? (mine shows in blue over a grayed out wave)

if not then:
1. next to your track, to the left, is the track name , and a bunch of buttons. just to the left of that is the track number and the little picture of a wave (for audio track, different for others) at the bottom there is a plus in a lil square.. click that, it will open up the volume (track?) anyway you should be able to visably see the automation there, you can move or make points with the arrow, or begin editing a new track with the pencil ...

if you already knew all this , sorry, but hopefully it helped a little

gl
 
if you want it all to fade out, just automate the master fader.

or

use the fade out effect
 
Ideally, if you're fading out the whole tune, you want to leave that at the mastering stage. You don't want to do that during mixdown anyway, plus it's a pain in the ass to automate so many tracks to do that, and quite frankly unnecessary. If you're just doing it so you can check out the mix, listen to it in the car and such for example, just do a regular mixdown w/o a fade out, then pop the mix into a wave editor (or a new Cubase project) and do it there. Much simpler if you ask me, and you have a mix that won't give the ME headaches when using compression/limiting.
 
Automation...

Yeah, I thought the automation was tricky too. View your automation track, the red squares on the blue automation line can be deleted, but they can also be moved around. Delete all those red dots. Then put one dot toward the beginning of the track, be sure the "R" is clicked on to allow this. Move the red dot up to the level you want the track to be at. If you only have ne red dot, the whole track will be at this level now. Next, find the spot where you want to start fading. click new red dot there. now click another dot at the end. move the last dot down to slowly fade out the volume. you can also place dots in anywhere before to tailor the fade-out to you liking. I never use the "W" function, it's easier to manually set the dots and move them until I'm happy with the result and you can control much more detail this way. Hopefully this will make sense, I know the help file is about worthless on this, it took me some time to figure it out. Let me know if you need more help, it's a cool feature, don't give up.

...peace
 
i also just noticed that if you click the W (write button) in the mixer window for the main output, a main input/output automation/volume track will appear in your track window and you can use that automation track to fade the whole thing out.

gl
 
hey

thanks for all these replies. these should be a big help. The trouble is that ideally i don't just want to fade tthe whole thing out only but also as I mentioned bring up that one fader on track 3 to a higher level and do it that way for the rest of the song. I guess what I'll do is just visually point and click automate that (and yeah I did know about that but I didnt want to spend the time going in there and drawing fade curves for each track or whatever) point and click and automate just track 3 and then automate the master fader. dumb of me not to think of that, but I was hot sweaty, frustrated, my apartment was a mess (beer bottles and dirty dishes, miscellaneous junk and clothes on floor, jeez why am I including all this? etc.) and I'd been sitting there too long so I wasn't thinking straight I guess.
However the question as to why these damn faders were doing strange things of their own rather than what I automated them to do still isn't answered. However it doesn't much matter since I realize now that there are other ways to fade, but still I'd like to know how to just kind of "reset" the faders when youre automating it that way, so they start at the levels theyre at at the beginning of the tune, and then just stay there and only move where you move them ( ie just in THAT "take" of the automation). I'm talking about when youre doing it with the mixer, not drawing it in.
Anyway things are cool now and thanks again.

Will
 
I understand. I don't think there is an easy way to "reset" an automation track, as when you create automation by recording moves from the mixer, for all intents and purposes it's like drawing automation curves in with the mouse. So, once something is written, the only way to get rid of it is to open up the automation track and erase the data itself. I'm not aware of any other way.
 
Reset automation tracks...

you have to delete all the set points. Or you could just unclick the "R" button and set the level to whatever fixed value you want. You can also use the cursor to drag and select all of the points and then delete them.

good luck... I'm going to do my laundry now<G>...
 
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