what's up guys it's tom welcome back to the lab
welcome back to another video welcome back to
my life now a common thing that is overlooked in music
production that i see a lot both producing and mixing is the tool of
automation automation is an incredible way
to create moments in your song to allow certain parts and certain
instruments to stick out at certain times
by ducking others and changing certain parameters that way you can create these
moments that engage the listener's ear and all together make your track more
interesting so today what i want to do is dig into one of my sessions
and show you a few different ways that i like to implement
automation to create these moments and create these interesting things in my
track now before we get into it i want to remind you to please subscribe to the
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and if you do that i'll think you're super duper awesome too anyway
moving on let's dig into a session and i'll show you what we're working with
now to break all this down we're in a session for my track called must be
dreaming
i dropped that song about a month ago if you want to go check it out there's a
link below in the description of this video you can
go listen to it on spotify or wherever else you want to hear it here's the
track and here is the drop of the song which
is where we're going to be looking at some automation parameters that i've
used
now there are a couple of little spots in here that i want to show you
that i've created some moments around so the first couple are these
little uh effects that i've got going on in the second half of the drop
that again here
and then that little stagger thing that's going on so what i've done
is in these moments i have allowed space for those by automating
the volume in my synthesizers here so in the melodies and in the saws here
the volume ducts ever so slightly where these
moments happen that way it will allow the ear to peak
and they'll stick out a little bit more in the mix
it's not much but it's just a subtle small enough amount that will allow
your ear to pick up on that little effect that's happening
some other places that i have used a fair amount of automation are here in
the uh the big saw synth here so as you can see i have duct
the master volume of serum across the board
in here to allow space for the snare drum to attack
where that way it's not competing with the saws in the drop
and if you listen carefully you can hear it on the downbeat too so i've got it
ducking on one and three i'm automating the volume to
cut out completely out of serum that way it gets a full
attack from the snare drum but then i'm also
automating side chain compression from the kick drum so it ducts there as well
that way the kick and the snare throughout the entire drop
remain very powerful and punch through the mix so
you can hear them well another way to do this is to bounce this
track to audio and simply cut the audio out
i opted for automation and sidechain compression to achieve
basically the same result some other things that i'm doing
are automating mute in the drop so again on the saws here in the second
half where these moments are happening where these little sweeps and filters
are happening that i want the listener here
i'm just cutting this track out entirely that way those things have plenty of
space to come through again you could achieve this by just
bouncing the audio and cutting it out i opted for automation in this case
so there you go and i've also got this little volume sweep here happening
with the master volume and serum as well
so a lot of different stuff happening that allows you to add it all up and get
this
so as you can see there are a lot of different things you can do
and i just wanted to make this short video to show you that automation is
really your friend in your sessions it allows you to
create these little subtle moments that allow different textures and things to
stick out and can help assist with sound design
especially like in your drop or in big sections of your song there's a lot
going on there's a lot of volume coming from a lot of different
places you can do this across the entire eq spectrum so
you can carve space for your kick to poke out by ducking the base
you can do it for your snare to poke out by ducking your synth guitars things
like that you can do it so that your vocal tract can cut
through a certain frequencies by ducking other frequencies in certain
spots this is a way to have really specific control over what you
want to do in your session rather than just relying
on a plug-in to sort of blanket catch everything
this allows you to really carve and construct exactly what you want the
listener to hear and it's a really really effective tool
that i see a lot of people overlooking most of the time so i wanted
to make this video and share that with you this is what i do
and it has been really really helpful in my producing and in my mixing process so
i hope it helps i hope you dig it that's it for this video thanks for being here
and i will catch you on the next one
peace
you