R
RAMI
Guest
Just admitting it is the first step. You might want to look up your local branch of Automaters Anonomous and set up a meeting. It can only do you good.
Just admitting it is the first step. You might want to look up your local branch of Automaters Anonomous and set up a meeting. It can only do you good.
G
Greg_L
Banned
You're not the boss of me! I can quit any time I want!
Steenamaroo
...
Man, It'd be sweet if there was an app for that.
R
RAMI
Guest
Denial is not just a river in Egypt.
Armistice
Son of Yoda
I can't remember when I got my AW4416, but early 2000s somewhere... it has the full automation thing which includes visible things such as faders moving all over the place, but also less visible things such panning, EQ changes, channels on and off, recalling of scenes (useful when I didn't have enough tracks and I'd stack something on a track in use for something else and it would need a different EQ, pan etc.) etc etc. If you can't quite get the faders right in automation mode, you can edit the actual parameters, but that's a PITA.
When I first got it I'd be playing stuff back for friends etc. and it'd be hilarious to watch them initially wonder whether they'd seen a fader move on its own, and then when it was clear they had, give me a "WTF dude, your machine is haunted" look...
Only now has channel #4's fader apparently decided not to automate any more... curses!
snow lizard
Dedicated Slacker
Automation usually means having the recording dealie (DAW, console, whatever) do something automatically. It started with riding the faders. Then consoles came out with "flying faders" or whatever automatically programmable features.
"Riding the faders" implies volume automation. Say you've got a vocal track or whatever. Some parts of it are too quiet or too loud. If you're printing a 2 track mix in real time on a console you can manually adjust the fader for the vocal as you record. With automation you can program the changes and play it back as many times as you like to make sure you want it to do that and then record it (or render if you like...) without touching the fader.
Compression is an alternative. In a sense.
Okay, not really.
Compression can reduce the changes in dynamic level by squishing the audio, but that changes the envelope of the source. It still doesn't push levels up in some spots and down in others. It makes everything closer to the same.
Pretty much any DAW should allow you to automate stuff like volume, panning and effect balances. Sometimes it's called "envelopes" or whatever. When enabled, you'd have a waveform displayed in the DAW. When you enable the envelope a horizontal line is displayed over the wave. If you click on it to place control points you can draw in changes so that when the line isn't quite horizontal something is happening to change whatever it is that you have enabled. You can automate volume this way. I'm sure there are creative and stupid ways to abuse this technology. If you have a pan envelope and you make it look like symmetrical saw teeth instead of a horizontal line, whatever track you did this to will pan back and forth between the left and right speakers as if you were using a wah wah pedal or a tremolo.
Automatically.
"Riding the faders" implies volume automation. Say you've got a vocal track or whatever. Some parts of it are too quiet or too loud. If you're printing a 2 track mix in real time on a console you can manually adjust the fader for the vocal as you record. With automation you can program the changes and play it back as many times as you like to make sure you want it to do that and then record it (or render if you like...) without touching the fader.
Compression is an alternative. In a sense.
Okay, not really.
Compression can reduce the changes in dynamic level by squishing the audio, but that changes the envelope of the source. It still doesn't push levels up in some spots and down in others. It makes everything closer to the same.
Pretty much any DAW should allow you to automate stuff like volume, panning and effect balances. Sometimes it's called "envelopes" or whatever. When enabled, you'd have a waveform displayed in the DAW. When you enable the envelope a horizontal line is displayed over the wave. If you click on it to place control points you can draw in changes so that when the line isn't quite horizontal something is happening to change whatever it is that you have enabled. You can automate volume this way. I'm sure there are creative and stupid ways to abuse this technology. If you have a pan envelope and you make it look like symmetrical saw teeth instead of a horizontal line, whatever track you did this to will pan back and forth between the left and right speakers as if you were using a wah wah pedal or a tremolo.
Automatically.
