So, I was in a conversation the other day about automation and how it changed recording forever once it became ready for prime-time. The single biggest thing was that one person could then more or less mix large projects, by themselves, with a great degree of creativity and control, without needing a room full of people with hands on console and/or outboard. It got me thinking about where we are today, and how we take that ability for granted.
Many will disagree on the necessity of automation in varying amounts, and I was curious as to what you all are using automation for, and how you go about adding it to projects. I realize that automation in the DAW world is a far different beast than console automation, and the way we use it has evolved accordingly.
When I start a mix, I will typically spend a long time getting things together before I even turn any automation on. It's common for things to be 90% where I want to be before I start to automate moves. I may write things earlier like muting accidents or stuff that shouldn't have made it to the "mix" phase in a track, or if I have an obvious automated "effect" like panning, or processing changes or something like that which needs to be done, but otherwise it's just getting balances for the most part.
Every song is different but that being said, typically I will write fader or "volume" envelopes for any track that runs the duration of a song. Tracks that have clean clips that are short pieces with no level changes may not see an envelope. Tracks that have obvious need for "rides" will probably get attention first. If drums are involved, I will always do tops and tails on those tracks, and then move on to other tracks that call attention to them needing to clean up as I find the sooner I get the thing to sound like it has a start and finish, the more I can focus on the body of the track starting to sound like something. I'm fanatical about getting these to sound correct for me and have spent many minutes on the last 5 seconds of lots of songs over the years. From there it's the fine strokes of rides to get things exactly where I want them in the balance. Could be anything from a lead vocal phrase by phrase, or tom fills on drums. A few db here and there and that's most of it.
It's not unheard of for me to automate EQ or other processing envelopes, but I find more often I will duplicate tracks and process different phrases separately which is more like multing to channels of a console from one track of a machine. It's just the way my brain works.