Automation Best Practices, Anyone?
I’ve been a CW user since 3.01 and I typically upgrade to the newest version every fall. As a long time user, clearly I like CW, so I don’t intend this to be a whining session; rather I would like to share my experience with automation, in the hopes of learning some tricks that have eluded me and perhaps do this more efficiently.
Up until recently I haven’t made heavy use of automation. Ok, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but the way I typically make music is to sequence/record everything myself and I generally build the dynamics into my playing/singing, so when it comes to mixing I can simply set the pan and volume levels to one setting and that takes care of most of it; I might need to adjust a few things here and there, and I do that by drawing a few automation curves and adjusting with the mouse.
Recently, I had the opportunity to record an 8-piece vocal ensemble; I was also one of the singers, so pretty much after setting the mic gains, I would just hit Record and the Space bar; i.e., didn’t do much engineering during the recording. The sessions were on 2 full days, a week apart. In addition, we had 2 more tracks of backup vocals, which were recorded in one of other singer’s house (he used Sonar X3 Studio and I have X3d Producer). We also had another person who recorded overseas in Pro Tools; we transferred the aiff files into X3 for editing and finally distilled everything to ~70min of music; each song has about 12 tracks or so.
Next up came the mixing. This was clearly a case where real-time automation recording was called for, since the levels varied significantly from singer to singer, take to take, track to track. So I put my StudioMix back into service and spent some time coming up to speed on Automation. I thought I learned enough, but I still must be missing something (fundamental), because in the end I find it cumbersome, or fiddly. I mean, it’s great that I can automate just about every conceivable parameter, but if all I really want to do is automate pans and volumes, there seems to be way more clicking than should be necessary to get the job done, particularly when using a control surface. Cakewalk has focused a lot lately on “streamlining workflow” – I think this is an area that can benefit from that.
Rough Mix: In the first pass I set levels and pans for a rough mix. I found that after doing an automation pass with the default Touch mode, that worked alright, except that it messed up my initial rough mix.
Snapshots: I investigated several approaches and at first I tried to use snapshots. That worked to keep the initial levels except that it was very tedious, as I had to select every fader and pan pot individually, right click and a take snapshot one at a time. I investigated other approaches, selecting all tracks, right-clicking on a control while holding the Ctrl key etc. At one point, I can’t remember how, but I managed to take a snapshot of every conceivable automatable parameter – not a good deal, especially if I hadn’t settled on the values for some of these yet, that I might want get to later on, and then I would have to delete envelopes and so on. I found one workaround, which was to open the automation lane and close those sub-lanes that I don’t want to take a snapshot of before taking a snapshot. That worked, but again it was a laborious process.
Overwrite mode: In the end I settled on using this mode to write the initial values; since you can set the controls where you want for a rough mix, enable write automation and start the transport. The problem is that you have to use the Inspector to change the each track’s mode to Overwrite, one track at a time.
And unfortunately, if you use the Track Write button to enable automation in this mode you will write automation for every conceivable parameter that can be automated in the track, so quite frankly the track Write button is useless in this mode. The way to work around this is to individually select each control, right click and turn on Write Automation, on a case by case basis. Again, a very fiddly operation. But, you can use the track Write button to turn off automation, when done.
Touch or Latch modes: for subsequent write automation operations, I found that Touch or Latch are preferred, since they will write automation data only when you touch the controls. Of course, you will have to switch back to these modes from Overwrite, one control at a time. Again tedious.
So bottom line: what am I missing here? How are you all doing automation? What are the best practices?
In my mind, I wish there was a way to control what parameters to automate on a per project basis. May be through an automation template, where you have different templates for different tasks that you can define yourself, like for volumes and pans only; or volumes, pans, and sends only, or plug-in parameters, only, etc etc. Or through configuration files. Or through a quick-group approach, where you create a quick-group, right click on a control (like a fader) in the group and change the write mode, or enable/disable write mode for each control in the group – I would want to turn things on/off quickly for a group, but still write individual envelopes.