The performance comes first (so don't over-automate)
It’s possible, if you over-automate something, to suck the life completely out of it. And the reason I’m thinking about this is that I just did it!
Shannon turned in a dynamic, thrilling performance for the upcoming new 80s kids song. I approached it in my normal way: I got it properly compressed and EQed and shined up, and sat it in the mix. So far so good! It took me two hours to find the right compressor, but that can happen; every performance presents slightly different demands.
The dynamic nature of the performance meant that the vocal was sometimes a bit out front and sometimes a bit recessive. I noticed this, and so I went about addressing it, which resulted in a whole bunch of little +/- 0.5 dB volume automations. And it ended up much smoother! The narrative felt solid, and I went to bed happy.
But when I woke up in the morning and listened with fresh ears, my first intuition was that something was missing. Some excitement that I remembered from the part of the night before I’d dived down that automation rabbit hole. So I bypassed the automation — and it was so much more interesting! Hmmm.
With a bit more quick investigation, I realized that I could turn the whole vocal up +0.5 dB, and leave the automation off, and it sounded a lot cooler. Part of what Shannon did with the performance had been to masterfully and subtly push it out and pull it in, giving the listener moments to lean in — and I had screwed that up.
Lesson (re-)learned. If you finish up a mix and you find that you’ve done a lot of automation, that can be fine — but it’s definitely a good idea to gut-check yourself to see whether you got too obsessive and sanded off all the interesting corners.
Doing too much — jamie