Week 3 asignment

Hello fellow Courserians,

I’m Mircea Oculeanu from Bucharest, doing week 3’s assignment for Coursera’s Introduction to Music Producation.

In the following few minutes I’ll try to explain the concept and the practicalities of automation in Ableton Live. First of all, why do we need automation in any D.A.W.  Automation is where you decide a parameter – any parameter – should follow a certain pattern which – depending on the D.A.W. you use  - you can draw this pattern. These automated patterns of the parameters could lead to immensly creative sounds but there also used for simple tasks too – let’s say adjusting volume in certain regions of the audio.

I’ll go back to Ableton now, and try to demonstrate how it’s done. You basically  draw a pattern that Ableton reads and follows and we are talking about volume for a track but you cand also do the same with the cutoff in a synthesizer and so on.

I tried to do things as basic as possible because I read in the forums that many of ‘’us’’ courserians J are really beginners in this beautiful domain – music production - . So I’ll try to show you the steps to automate the volume envelope of a basic track.

As you could see, I’ve played a few notes with the keys in my laptop – my midi controller is coming next week J - and. After pressing Tab I’ve changed into session view because the mixer there is more handy. You have one global recording button in Ableton that you must hit and, while playing those few notes again I’ve modified the volume with its respective fader.  Press Tab again to return into arrangement view and you’ll see your automation. A simple and efficient implementation.

That’s a basic presentation for this kind of operation – the automation – but you must note that you can do this with any knob/ function in the modern D.A.W.’s. You practically make a knob/ function move over time in order to obtain variation in sound, volume, envelope, etc, anything you can imagine. Of course, there are several different implementations of the process. Even in Ableton there’s another way of ‘’drawing’’ an automation that the one I’ve just showed you. In fact instead of using the mouse to draw the volume fader you can do the same thing with one knob from your midi controller.  There are certain D.A.W.’s that have separate knobs for recording automation – on every track. Or, you don’t have to record it live – as you’d do on a mixing board but you can simply grab a pencil – the function in the respective D.A.W. – and draw the envelope you want to create.  For any of these scenarios you’re left with the possibility to edit anyone of these envelopes later in the process.

Thank you for your time and understanding.