I am Hans, I'm from Chicago and i am taking this course because i want to expand my knowledge about home recording. So far the lectures and material have been great, i am learning a lot.
I hope all of you have the same experience!
Thanks for taking time to look at my blog, i have come to appreciate how much time it takes to look at all these different assignments. Your attention is much appreciated.
Apart from the assignment this week, in which i'm going to talk about automation in Cubase,
i have posted all my assignments on the same blog. If you are interested, take a look at my other posts
if you are interested in working with Cubase. Hope you like it.
Now for the assignment.
Automation in Cubase is GREAT! It is a great tool for a lot of reasons, and i will show you some of those advantages.
Although automation behind the scenes does a whole lot, making it work and applying it to
your projects is really very simple in Cubase.
For this lesson, lets assume i want to add some panning for a recorded (semi) acoustic guitar.
I know there are ( in most DAW's) auto-pan functions available, but i just want to pan it left and right
for part of my recording, to add a natural "feel" of space.
You could call it "riding the panner".
First, let me show you the track(s):
These are the same source, the upper track is a Direct input of my hollow body's pickup, the second track is a microphone recording of the same guitar. Recording like this gives me great creative options, because i can make the guitar sound completely different with just a few changes in volume or panning on either of the tracks. If you have ever recorded this way, you know what i mean.
Apart from changes to the sound , i can change the stereo image of the guitar sound.
This is where automation is a great tool. You can not only change parameters, you can also decide
when you want to change them.
Next i open the automation bar, simply by clicking a little button underneath the track:
We now see a slightly bigger version of our track, which will show the automation on the track.
To turn on automation and have it "record" what you do, simply click "R" and "W".
They stand for "Read" and "Write". Reading in this case means that it will apply the automation to the track. If you leave "R" off after recording your automation, it simply won't work.
The "W" for writing really explains itself. It is the "record" button for your automation.
Now the fun part starts!
Automation will basically record everything you do in your mixer, or anything attached to your track.
Back to my plan: I wanted to add some manual panning for my first track..
All i do is make sure "R" and "W" are on and start playing the track ...
( so do NOT press the record button in the transport bar...!) Always remember to turn off R&W after you finish automating your track, in any DAW... As Loudon pointed out during the lesson about this, its very easy to forget and then you have to start all over again.!
After i am done, this will show in my automation track:
You can see the lines i "drew" by panning from left to right.
Cubase automatically saw this was a panning automation, and it will show up next to the R&W in the automation strip. You can give it preset functions like panning, fading etc.
Of course it is possible to edit these lines. For this "R" ( read) has to be on again, and then i can edit the points Cubase used to connect my parameters. I simply drag the points to where i want and that's it!
This is a recorded fader automation...Same principle. It connects what changes in parameters you give it, and you can always edit those points.
The great thing about automation is that it also works great for example plugins.
If i want to introduce lets say a reverb halfway down the track, i can turn on and change parameters in the plugin. i would simply have to make sure the plugin is active before i start automation, and the moment i want to add some reverb to the track, i simply add ( in this case) "mix" so i can manually
decide where and how much reverb to add.
As you can see these kinds of automation are really easy to use for post recording editing.
I really love automation in Cubase because it is so easy to use.
It is a great way to dynamically mix your tracks.
If nothing else, it looks really great to see all the faders move automatically in the mix!
I hope this was a useful lesson, i enjoyed making it. If you have any comments, do not hesitate to let me know in the forums or directly on this blog.
Thanks again for taking the time to read it! Hope everyone is doing well with their assignments.
Hans Hendriksen
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