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On this the third week of our Tips and Tricks Series focusing on Automation we are going to get to the pros of using automation in your mix. Last week we talked about the issues when implementing and using automation can be and they included things like fear of the system breaking down and the need for better time management during rehearsal times. If you missed that post, check it out at this link. But if you decide to start utilizing tools like board automation than you can reap several benefits that would be nearly impossible to achieve without the use of some sort of scene memory tool, which is at its’ core, automation. The benefits I planned to discuss in this post include things like just being able to getting to mix faster, the ability to bring a level of consistency to your mix even with inconsistent inputs, and the ability to get into the more complex audio routing and bussing with ease so that your mix can be more dynamic.

But, let’s start with the most basic of benefits that I can see with automation. Back in the day when I was mixing on a Mackie 24:4:4 for the big shows I used to have someone standing next to me with a list of all the things I needed to do for each mic change. I needed someone to remember for me all the sends to monitors, FX sends, etc. Man were things a bit crazy. The funny thing is that we weren’t doing anything that was all that crazy. Whatever it was, I couldn’t remember it all. One thing I love about making scenes for things is that I can make notes on the console to remind me about the little minute things but more importantly I can setup the board to make all those changes for me instantly. As fast as I hit the button the board switches everything in an instant for me. In recent shows I’ve been able to do some crazy FX routing both to on-board and outboard gear, on-board plugin changes, adjustments to verb sends, all setup during rehearsal (occasionally adjusted if the situation warrants it), and everything goes every time. It’s almost like I have a digital assistant, taking notes on all the simple, routine, and mundane things that anyone can do, than execute those tasks, leaving the operator to do the things that computers cannot do.

Along with that huge help comes the ability for anyone to step in and mix. The way we automate here at CCC becomes really helpful when someone gets sick between rehearsal and the weekend or perhaps during the weekend. Several times in just my stint at CCC has something happened where the FOH engineer that weekend has gotten sick or needed to step away and anyone from my team has been able to step up and mix because we had a set of scenes setup and ready to go. There has even been a few times when I’ve stepped in during a show, reviewed notes left, caught with our producer, and been set for the show. I may end up mixing things a bit different but I all the mutes and transitions are setup just as practiced so most people wouldn’t even know the difference. This is something that is possible without automation but is definitely not easy and I bet most people would notice a difference. This kind of preparation allows for an extremely prepared technical environment. However i want to stress that automation is not auto-mixing, it is simply a streamlining of mundane non-active tasks. My scenes only save the starting place of the song, not is build or ending. I still have to mix to produce a great sounding dynamic product.

That planned beginning state also gives the operator to bring a great level of consistency to each individual event that belongs to a series. This is something that for me produces some spectacular customer relations results because they aren’t guessing what things will sound like generally. In my own career so far this has been something everyone has been expected: things don’t have to be perfect, just keep it consistent. Each week, by the time rehearsals are over, I have a scene saved, FX setup in each scene, and a great starting point saved which gives me a pretty good idea what things will sound like from a 30,000 ft perspective which then frees me over in playback and in our last rehearsal to start focusing on the little things like making the solos pop, increasing vocal clarity, and highlighting those unique things in each song from inputs across the board. Each time I mix the song after that initial rehearsal, it’s going to get better and better (unless I tweak it to death, which has happened before). Having that ability has made my mixes jump light years beyond where they were and it can do the same for you.

Another great benefit is the ability to setup the same conditions you had in the show and be able to leverage multi-track playback into helping you reproduce what you were doing. For instance, if I heard something weird in my mix I could play it back, recall the stored scene taken from when I heard it, and actually have a chance to troubleshoot the issues. This works doubly well for when, not if, you get complaints about your mix, you can pull up that scene, turn on playback, and you’re there. This works great for troubleshooting and learning waves plugins as well. Sometimes you don’t always have something content accessible to try out waves plugins with but because we save showfiles and scenes I can pick the service, pull up the cue and in a matter of moments be ready to start experimenting.

Lastly, and I believe most importantly, automation gets you to doing your job faster during the show. Instead of fumbling through FX routing, bus assignments, etc when a song starts you can have the board set it up for you like we discussed above and just as soon as the song starts, everything is set and your focus is back on that opening lead guitar line or the lead vocal that could come busting in at any moment that you’ll need to ride up and down. Many people will tell you that automation could make you a lazy mixer, but I’d argue the opposite. As technicians we have utilized yet another tool in the arsenal to improve our mix. That subtle improvement in the long run will push you into mixing more dynamically because that cool tap delay you want to use from the chorus is already setup, right along with the snare verb that was dialed in perfectly each time to the sweet spot you found in the last run through in rehearsal (or in my case occasionally, the last show you ran). As as you hit your next go your consoles instantly allows you to build on what you’ve setup and recall on a whim freeing your ears and mind to actually focus during that real short opening bridge followed by a solo guitar part that always seems to need a little mix love.

Well that about does it for this week’s post. Thanks for tuning in as we discussed some of the more prominent benefits of using automation during a live event. Hopefully you can see why I automate at all and will start to consider it if you don’t at all. Feel free to message me if you are on the brink and want more practical examples of why or how I automate, I’d love to help. Next week I’ll be talking about automation setup, go through what I do during rehearsals to get my scenes setup, and talk about what exactly I automate regularly. As always if you have any questions, please leave a comment below or email me at daniel@studiostagelive.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. If you’d like to receive a notification when new posts are up each week sign up at this link and you’ll be added to our emailing list. I hope to see you next week and happy mixing!

Time for week two in this new tips and tricks series based around the idea of automation. Last week we saw an overview of automation and discussed what automation is, how it can help, the consistency it can bring, and how it can generally bring up your mix. But I don’t want to gloss over the hurdles that need to be overcome in regards to automation. So this week, I am going to highlight a few of the biggest hurdles I see to automating your console and discuss how I stepped over those hurdles and pushed forward. Hopefully if one of you is facing these issues you can learn from my struggles and be able to grow yourself. This is by no means an exhaustive list so if there is a significant hurdle you are facing, with regards to automation, please feel free to comment below and I’ll respond if it’s a problem I faced and how I got over it. Obviously if you are mixing on an analog console, you’ve discovered one of your biggest hurdles and if you are looking for a new board if you reach out to me at daniel@studiostagelive.com I can pass some suggestions your way as to great consoles that fit just about any budget besides no budget. Some boards also have more capability to others, if you’d like some help getting your settings correct or just figuring out what you can do with your existing gear, feel free to shoot me an email as well.

Probably the biggest hurdle to get over is fear. So many times I’ve heard big name FOH guys talk about the biggest reason they don’t want to automate is because they are afraid of what happens when they aren’t looking during scene changes. In many ways this is a legit fear but for me, it seems more like a fact of life in today’s digital console world. We don’t have as many faders as inputs we are running. We don’t have a knob for each function of our boards. We are moving to an age of programming and setting up computers to do things we just don’t have time for but would like to manage. This is especially true for plugins we use. We don’t have a display for all of our compressors anymore like we used when we only had a few. We are programming these plugins, checking them throughout the event, and just simply trusting that we have it setup right and listening for a time when somethings not right. Fear is simply not a good reason to not take a calculated and acceptable risk in order to make an improvement to our mix. Things might not go well but it’s when we fail that we learn the most. For me, I got over my fear because I was simply told to do it. Yep, my boss at the time just said to me something like, “look, this is how we do it here, just give it a try, take your time, do it right, and if at the end it’s not working for you we will figure it out,” basically telling me to just jump in the deep end. Looking back, that was the best thing that could have happened to me. That weekend was a bit risky but I got through it, without issues, and walking away much happier with my mix having just stepped up to a new normal for my mixes. If this is your hurdle, I challenge you right now to at least sit down with some playback and try it. If you are still hesitant, stick around for the rest of the series, by the end I’ll have given you a process to automate and helped you setup some fail safes.

Right after I got over my fear and stepped up to get some work done on the console I reached my second hurdle, the setup. Between store safes, recall safes, propagation, saving, showfiles, fade times, and everything else I realized that I may have electronically labelled channels on my board but I am going to have to know a lot more about my console that I had ever needed to before. That setup would not come easy. But I was lucky, I had the fortune of building on a console template that had been improved and built upon for over 8 years before. Getting all those check-boxes setup so the board does what you want it to when you want it to is difficult but it isn’t unlike the first time you see a huge xlr patch bay with wires going everywhere. At first you see the wires running everywhere but once you start digging in and learning, making mistakes, etc you start “seeing the matrix” as it were and stuff starts clicking. Once you get oriented in your new world of automating, your brain starts making connections and soon enough you’ll hit a critical mass and then it’s like you see things from 50,000 feet and it all makes sense. If you don’t have someone who can teach you personally check out youtube. There are so many videos on just about anything you can think of. You will probably find that someone somewhere has what you have and made a video of how to use it.

The next thing you’ll realize that you have to conquer is time management. Before you pushed quickly to get to a good mix not only for the band but also because our ears get tired quickly. That practice of time management and priorities will come back into play as you consider automation. Each week you automate be on the lookout for the things that you didn’t setup beforehand that if you could have waiting for you would make life easier and get you to that basic mix faster. I personally keep a simple text document with template issues so when I get time I can go back and fix those and not worry about forgetting that one thing I have to do every week that I keep forgetting to fix in the template. Taking the extra time to properly set your automation in rehearsal can pay dividends later in the event. Putting aside the obvious benefit of anyone being able to walk through your cues with the band during the show as a great backup if something happens to you, automation in general allows you to improve your mix with each pass and fix issues that you’d otherwise not even be able to hear or think about because of everything else going on. So take that basic mix, save it as your primary scene that you will duplicate. Take your time with it if you can so that you have less to do later. Many times with bands you get little or no soundcheck but I would argue wholeheartedly that if you have time, automation is always worth it in the long run.

So you’ve gotten past your gear, past your fear, past the setup and have a great template to improve each week, and managed to fit proper prep into your rehearsal time, the last thing you have to deal with is the variable of change or issues during the event.  I’ve talked with so many people who think that when I automate I program everything and just hit go the whole time. But in reality, this is pretty far from the case. I still use VCAs, mutes, manual fades, etc, just like I did before I got a digital console and started automating. Automation doesn’t mean I don’t need to actively mix but it also doesn’t mean that I’m manually triggering everything. Some things I do program and trust to work. If there are issues, which do happen either as glitches or as programming mistakes, I can still react and interrupt the process or change it on the fly. What you can do while the console is transitioning depends more on your console than anything else but since I still use VCAs which allow me to quickly mute inputs as well as the fact that you can just touch the fader and stop the movement that started in transition. My biggest piece of advice in regards to fighting against programming mistakes is to always watch those inputs that are extremely important. If a speaker is coming up on stage, I’m going to have his/her fader up and make sure it does what I programmed it to do during the process. I also love safe buttons. These can be found on just about any console that can make scenes is a feature to basically remove that input from the automation and exclude it from everything that’s going on. If I’m at all concerned with what I may or may not have programmed you’ll find me quickly getting to this setting and using it through a transition. This then allows me to go “old school” and manually take care of things as I see fit. Programming issues aren’t always avoided but don’t think automation takes away the mixing, If anything, because I automate, I’m tweaking more than I’d ever have gotten to without automation.

Well that is my list of keys issues regarding automation and how I’ve dealt with each one. As I mentioned above, let me know if there is something glaring that I missed, I’d love to help as best that I can as you venture into this new way of mixing. Last week, my survey showed that most of people’s concern lied with setup issues or complications so consider this my first response to that concern with my second response coming two weeks from now when I discuss how I have my boards setup and what you can do to help avoid issues when you setup your scenes. Next week we are going to go through the opposite list, all the things that should excite you about automation. As always if you have any questions or thoughts, comment below, email me at daniel@studiostagelive.com, or leave a message on facebook, I’d love to hear from you. If you’d like to submit your responses to last week’s automation survey, check out this link. Lastly, if you want to receive an email when new posts are up, follow this link and sign up to subscribe and you’ll receive a weekly email with a link to that week’s post.

Welcome to a new tips and tricks series. This time around, as the title suggests, we will be discussing using automation to enhance live mixing. Since the advent of motorized faders and eventually digital mixers, engineers have been automating settings for years. Some analog consoles even allow you to setup scenes and mutes for channels or VCAs that can be controlled automatically based on what scene you are on. But there are some drawbacks and challenges to be overcome if you start automating even in its simplest form. In the coming weeks we will be talking about all of that. This week will just be a broad overview of automation, in the weeks after that we will be talking about the pros and cons, getting automation setup and process to step through that, and lastly some tips and tricks to think about as you walk through your first few weeks automating your audio console. My goal in this series is to expose you to automation if you’ve never heard of it or to perhaps help you better understand and use automation if you are familiar with it already.

For some of us older guys (in terms of sound I’m in this group) automation used to be a guy standing next to you, with a script or plan, reminding you what is coming up and you frantically getting ready for that event. I can remember Christmas shows at school or church, running what seemed like a million wireless channels (likely just 16 or so), with people swapping packs, running several monitor mixes for the bands and speakers, and just realizing as we plan for those shows that I’d need some help keeping it all straight. Those were the days when an A2 was a really important position to have at every show. Many times, because there were so many shows happening, you’d find that A2 mixing and the A1 running the notebook helping hit all the cues. The idea of automation was limited to studios with really high end consoles with those cool motorized faders. But these days the landscape looks quite a bit different. The tools of the studio have made their way to the FOH consoles in use today in many, if not most, of the active venues around the world. We can makes scenes to change just about every function your console can control. Depending on your console, you can automate patch changes, bus mixing assignments, compression settings, gates, and even manage outboard gear through the use of transport protocols like midi.

Sure, you can go on without automation and mix the way men and women have been mixing for decades. There is nothing wrong with that, but what if using that new tool, though it might be hard to learn and you may make a few mistakes, helps your mix get to the next level. I’ve just mentioned the biggest hurdle to automation is learning curve of starting to use it and the inherent risk of using it, but, I would argue that if you truly use your automation to its’ fullest potential you can bring a new level of consistency and truly begin to mix smarter and more proficiently. Transitions between music and speech with be smoother and PA noise from things like electric guitar amps and open microphones will be reduced. That crazy transition during the Christmas show just needs to be programmed and with the hit of one button, it all can happen, instantly. That A2 could be a trainee that you’ll actually have time to train during the rehearsals/shows instead of handing them a run down sheet and asking them to help you through the transitions.

Most importantly, your mix will improve. How do I know? Because of the universal principle I’ve come to understand about mixing audio. If you take away my sound check, I can get to a good mix before the song is done. If I get a soundcheck and a run-through before the show starts I can get there much faster. If you give me multiple runs, I can guarantee it will sound great from the first note. That applies to automation because by the time the process is done, you have scene created for each song that you’ve been refining since it was made. For me, even for our first service on Saturday evening, I’ve heard that song 3-4 times after the cue was made so I have arrived at a great mix. I know that for each service, I have a great starting point to mix from, every single time. On top of that during the final rehearsal I usually have time to walk around the room real quick and make sure things sound good everywhere in the room, not just at the soundboard. Without a scene created I would have to recreate that scene from memory which is a lot of information to have to remember and implement each time. If I remember all those little things I had planned I’m often through a good portion if not all of that first verse. Before I automated I often found myself sitting on my laurels mixing and just going with what I had instead of pushing my mix to new levels each time I stand behind the console. If I’d automated, I’d hit go, and it would all happen instantly. and I can build on each mix before the one I’m currently mixing.

Most consoles can automate all the main settings like bussing assignments and fader levels and there are few that automate everything you can think of under the sun (patching, matrixes, FX settings, inserts, etc). If the console has a midi output it can likely send signals to an outboard rig like waves multirack or a slate rig. Automation can make what would be a difficult transition to make, instantaneous and pain free. The key is to spend some time behind your console and experiment. If you have some multi-track recordings you can load up this is a great tool to use as you figure out how best to automate with your console. One of the best ways to learn is just to dig in and see how things work. However, if you are a manual reader, I hear those work pretty well too. Lastly, one of the benefits I love about automation is the built in reminder of what is coming next in the show. Personally, I create a scene for just about every change in the show and try to include in the name of the scene who/what needs to be emphasized so that anyone can step up and mix just in case something happens. Once again the key is to figure out what works best for you, whether that means complex automation or a simple system. Over the next few weeks we will talk more about how we do things here at CCC and hopefully you can pick out a few principles to make your own.

That’s all for this week. If you have a few minutes, follow this link and answer a few questions for me about how you see automation. My hope is to do these every now and again to help guide a series that I’m not exactly sure what to do with. This way, with your input, I can make sure these posts end up being useful to those who read it. As always if you have any questions or just want to talk about automation with your system please feel free to hit me up on facebook, leave a comment here, or email me at daniel@studiostagelive.com. If you’d like to get email reminders when new posts are posted just head over to this link and sign up! See you next week!