Tracktion Waveform has a variety of built in ways to automate our tracks and get them
all ready for a final export.
In this tutorial we’ll go over setting up a USB MIDI control surface and recording automation.
After that, we’ll finish it off by exporting the project as an audio file.
This is the 5th and final video in this Tracktion Waveform tutorial series, so make sure to
check out the previous videos so you’re all caught up.
In the last videos, we looked at setting up the program, recording audio and MIDI, and
the basic mixing tools and plugins.
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Automation is a tool that allows us to automatically change settings in our digital audio workstation
in a controlled way every time it plays.
This gives us consistent changes in things like volume, panning, and plugin controls.
All the parameters that are automated will be automatically exported with the final song
when we decide to create a file from it.
To create automation, we can use the A button in the top right of the track to add an automation
lane over the track, but I prefer to add a separate automation lane underneath to keep
it cleaner.
Do this with the plus button under the A button.
Here we can see that we get automation options for everything on that track.
This includes the volume and panning and every knob that would be found on the track’s
plugins.
Choose one to add the automation lane.
Now we have an automation lane for that parameter.
You’ll see the automation lane has a line running along the center of it.
This is the line that represents the value of the setting for that automation parameter.
By adjust the line, we adjust the setting.
To get the setting to change throughout the song, double click on the line to add new
nodes.
If we add two nodes, we can set them at different values, and this will cause a transition between
the two points.
We can see that there’s also a circle between the two nodes, and we can drag that left or
right to adjust the curvature.
We can also see that the curvature value shows up in the bottom center panel.
To undo some of this automation, we can click on a node and press the delete key on the
keyboard to get rid of it.
Waveform isn’t like some other digital audio workstations.
Many other programs allow you to draw on the automation lane with a pencil tool, but we
can’t do that here.
The process of adding all these nodes to change the automation can be time consuming, but
it really depends on just how much automation you plan on using.
If it’s used lightly, then it’s not a big deal, but if you’re someone who uses
automation heavily then it can take quite a bit of time.
One way that you can write automation really quickly is by turning on automation write
mode.
This is next to the play button in the bottom right panel, and we briefly mentioned this
button in the first video.
With this mode enabled, when we play the song and drag a control with our mouse and it will
write automation to that automation lane.
Just make sure to turn it off after you’re done writing with automation.
Turn off read automation, otherwise it will fight you as you try to adjust it and you
won’t be able to hear back the setting as you try and automate it.
The automation mode that’s used in Tracktion Waveform is basically like a latch mode in
other digital audio workstations.
This means that it only starts writing automation after you click on a setting while it’s
playing, and it will latch to the last point it was at when you release the mouse, overwriting
all the previous automation unlike you press stop.
We can also automate parameters that we haven’t created an automation lane for yet and it
will save the automation, but it won’t show the lane unless we choose to display it.
Now we should go over how to use a control surface.
For this, I’m using an AKAI MPK249 that we mention in the MIDI video, and we’ll
use the faders and knobs on it as continuous controllers.
Make sure it’s set as a MIDI device first, as we did in the previous video.
Then go to Settings and select Control Surfaces on the left side.
Press the button to Create New Custom Control Surface, and name it to your MIDI controller.
Then click on it and we get the settings down below.
Set the input and output device to your MIDI controller.
Then press the button to Edit Control Mappings.
Here we can click to move each controller, then add it to a function on a track.
I’ll set the knobs to pan the track left and right, the faders to adjust the volume,
and the buttons to mute the tracks.
There’s also options for the transport controls.
On my keyboard, I have to change the mode of the transport commands to MIDI continuous
controllers to get Tracktion Waveform to recognize it, then I can use the record to start, stop,
rewind, fast-forward, and record by pressing those buttons and pairing it with the commands
on the screen.
Now when we go back to the project, we can turn on the write automation mode and use
the controllers to write automation in the project.
Another way we can setup the control surface is with the MIDI learn button in the bottom
right panel.
Let’s start by turning with on.
When it’s on, we can see all these options come up on the screen.
Click on something like the volume, or a button in the transport and it will highlight or
give us more options.
Then that control becomes activated.
From here we can move a continuous controller on the USB MIDI controller to link them.
You can do this for all the controls, and it’s just a different way of setting up
things that we saw in the settings menu earlier.
When you’re done this, click the MIDI learn button again to exit this mode.
That covers all the automation tools, now let’s move on to getting our project ready
for export.
When ready to export, we would want to make sure all the tracks are how we want them.
Then, we can consider adding plugins to the master channel area in the bottom right, or
skip this step.
If you’re interested, you can check out our video on free master VST plugins on this
channel, and these plugins would be compatible with Waveform.
We would just click and drag them to this area just like we did when adding plugins
to a track.
If we click the master volume control, we get the option in the center panel to apply
a fade out to the entire song by adjust the length and setting the curvature.
The default is set to 0, which means there’s no fade out.
Now that we’re done, click the Export button in the bottom left of Waveform and select
Render to File.
This brings up a window for our export settings.
The top field is for the file location and file name.
Clicking the button on the far right allows us to choose a different folder that it will
be saved in.
The main audio settings to concern ourselves with now are the audio quality settings.
The default is MP3 with a 320 bit rate.
This is fine for sharing, but it’s also a compressed audio file that will lose some
quality.
I would suggest making an MP3, but also using an uncompressed format like a WAV file.
The sample rate for an exported file should be 44100 Hz and 16-bit, even though we recorded
at a higher setting than this.
Dithering helps account for the change in bit depth from 24-bit that we recorded at
to 16-bit for the export, and we should leave this setting enabled.
I like leaving all the other settings off, since these are things that I would have preferred
to adjust from the project itself, so there’s no need trim silence or adjust the levels
from the actual export window itself.
Once done, press the render button to create the file.
One last thing we can do is render each track separately, or only render certain sections
of the song.
We may not want to fully cut out empty space at the beginning from the project, so one
way around this is to define the loop region and export that.
We can also export separate files to use them in other software or remix at a different
time, or use stems for mastering later on.
Thanks for checking out this video series on how to use Tracktion Waveform as a free
digital audio workstation.
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