(Or: How To Use Volume Automation Without Pissing Off Your Faders.)
Here’s some good audio editing nerdery. One of the best aspects of mixing music on a real console is the instant gratification of faders: you can easily make a track louder or softer with great precision. And if, in the process of getting lost in experimenting and thinking, you’ve pushed your faders so high that the mix becomes a mush, you can easily bring everything down at once, preserving the relative differences between tracks, but giving you lots of headroom to make improvements. This is true whether you’re on a professional mixing console or in an audio app channel strip, but in the case of the latter, the ability to select multiple tracks at once means it’s never been easier to lower a mix’s volume without changing the mix itself.
Volume automation is part of any good audio mixing app, but the problem with the feature in apps like Logic, Pro Tools, and GarageBand is that it also takes over the fader. In other words, as the volume moves up and down from your written line, the fader automatically moves itself, preventing you from using it to make manual adjustments. If you try to adjust the fader, it’ll simply snap back into place, wherever the automation tells it to go.
Now, let’s say you have, oh, 24 tracks, some of which have volume automation. And, once again, in the process of experimenting and getting caught up in in other tasks, you’ve unintentionally pushed your faders so high that all your tracks are starting sound like mush. The tracks without volume automation can just have their faders pulled down, but the ones with volume automation snap back to their automation volume. Adding to the frustration, you often don’t notice this until you play the project again, when all of your tracks are already screwed up.
A common solution is to select all the automation points on every track, all at once, and pull them down. I find this maddening — it’s tedious, less accurate, and potentially destructive to the mix. At just a handful of pixels, automation points are small, and it’s easy to accidentally click in the wrong place and screw up the volume without noticing it. Even if you’re an expert with a mouse, there’s no arguing that it’s faster (and less mentally taxing) to just use the channel strip faders, where all volume control is neatly in one place.
This advice isn’t new, but it’s useful: if you need to use volume automation but still want the freedom to move the fader, there’s an easy workaround. Instead of using the built-in volume automation, write your volume automation on a separate plugin:
Presto! You can write automation just like always, but now the fader in your channel strip can be freely controlled.
Another upside to this solution is its ubiquity: you can do this in any audio app that has some sort of gain plugin. In Pro Tools, your best bet is a one-band EQ, while Logic has its own Gain plugin. GarageBand doesn’t have a Gain plugin of its own per se, but you can use Apple’s bundled AUDynamicsProcessor to accomplish the same thing.
Extra bonus tip: Since volume automation normally takes place after all your other inserts, make sure this plugin is also placed last in the inserts.
