Carlo Libertini is a Melodyne audio editing specialist with Music Marketing Inc. of North America. He’s also an audio production engineer with twenty years’ experience, and performs trainings, demonstrations, and services for top studios and institutions across the country. In between production responsibilities he conducts online training seminars, collaborative production meetings, software demonstrations, and video tutorials.
Of course, Carlo is our resident Studio One expert, too! In this segment, he demonstrates basic volume automation.
At the bottom of each channel in the mixer, just above the track’s name, you’ll find your automation controls. By default, Studio One’s automation is off. When you click the button on a channel, you’ll be able to select which type of automation you’d like to use.
From the edit view, you can also open lanes of automation for viewing. This is done by right-clicking the waveform symbol at the top righthand corner of a channel. Next, choose Expand Envelopes, at which point Studio One will open lanes of Volume and Panning automation below the given track. This is a simple way to see a track’s volume automation, especially when writing it in real-time.
With your volume lane open, you can now automate levels.
Change the automation type to Write; when you start playback, you can ride the fader to literally “write” in the volume automation you’re after. To play back the track with automation, change the automation type to Read—if you leave it on Write, you will overwrite the work you just finished! You can also draw automation by double-clicking the volume line the expanded automation lane. This will create a node which you can drag up and down to make level changes.
Volume automation can be as subtle or as dramatic as you’d like! For instance, some engineers will automate a track’s peaks only. This is to avoid over-compressing the signal by not solely relying on compression for dynamic control. It’s tedious work, but can make a drastic difference for you mix.
For more volume automation tips in Studio One, check out this tutorial with Carlo Libertini!
