Get yourself a moving fader
I’ve been thinking this week about mixing1, and about how it can be easy in modern workflows to have it be a purely intellectual, non-physical exercise.
And that can be fine, a lot of the time? Mixing does to a large extent happen in the brain.
But it can happen in the body too! And that physical connection is the thing that computer-based workflows, wonderful as they are, can remove from our practice.
But you can fix that — by getting yourself a controller with a 100mm touch-sensitive motorized fader!
And don’t think that this has to be expensive — it’s not. You can get a first-generation Presonus Faderport — the original one, with the Alps fader, just like in an SSL console — for USD $55 on Reverb.
This is what I use! It connects to my computer via USB, and all I have to do is select a track in Pro Tools and the fader will control that track. The fader is 100mm long2, which enables you to write accurate and nuanced automations, and it’s touch-sensitive, so it won’t start overwriting any existing automation until you touch it. And it’s motorized, meaning that it will play back existing automation, which if nothing else is very fun.
There are definitely times where I know that I want to do a very specific automation — maybe one syllable in a vocal phrase is getting a little bit lost. In those situations, the mouse is infinitely preferable; you just zoom in and make the exact automation you need to make.
But there are also situations where you want a more gradual, evolving, musical gesture. Maybe an instrument needs to gently push forward and back under the vocal over the second half of the verse. Doing that with a mouse can be both unwieldy and also detached from the musicality of the idea.
But doing it with the Faderport is so fun! You arm the track, park the playhead back a little bit so you can get a running start, and keep doing live takes of the automation until you have one that feels good.
Like any physical movement, you’ll get better at it with a little practice — and there’s always the chance that perhaps your fingers will do something better than what your brain thought it wanted to do. There is wisdom in our hands that our brains don’t always have access to.
The other cool thing about writing automation with a motorized fader is that it takes the mixing task at hand from the left brain to the right brain. I’ll sometimes put a key instrument track on a fader when I’m feeling stuck with a section of a mix for precisely this reason — sometimes the fresh perspective from a different part of my brain is just what I need to get unstuck.
Bilaterally — jamie
Weird, right?
I would caution against trying to write automation with a mini fader on a controller keyboard or the like; they’re not long enough or accurate enough to automate with the degree of nuance that the task typically requires.