LESSON 17 | AUTOMATION |  AUDIO ENGINEERING & MUSIC PRODUCING
Channel: Recording Connection Audio Institute
Date: 2013-10-26

Lesson Seventeen of our audio engineering and music production curriculum deals with automation:  http://www.recordingconnection.com/courses/audio-engineering/audio-lesson-17 

In the early days of automation, what they would do is there would be five, six engineers at a console. As they were mixing down to two-track tape, which was the final step in the process, maybe they wanted that guitar to kind of fade out as the recordings happened. So there are a lot of these types of things. 

Maybe they want to turn the effect on or off during the time it was bouncing down to two-track tape, or they wanted these things to happen in real time. So as they were bouncing down, what they would do is they would have five or six engineers with their fingers on little teeny knobs. And then everybody would press play, and they would do the effect that they're trying to get in real time by moving knobs and moving things around. And then they would get these kind of cool, created effects that way. 

So automation is kind of the future of that. We've had this capability, even with analog consoles. Analog automation is basically motorized faders that you can teach to move a certain way. With DAW this process is even easier. You plot things on a chart on a graph, and basically you're able to do things like this in real time. 

This is Lesson Seventeen of the Recording Connection Recording Programs.