Penny & Giles: All You Need To Know About The World Famous Fader Family

Today I was talking to Penny & Giles and their official dealer in North America; Manquen. They pointed out a very interesting section on their website which describes how P&G Faders are made, their testing procedures, the parts and their numbers, and the Flying Faders automated fader system.

I thought it was pretty cool. Here’s the link: http://www.manquen.net/png/

Yours Sincerely,

The Music Surgeon

"Snapshot" Automation in Pro Tools

Today a very good question draw my attention when I was reading my emails. I got a question that came forward about an earlier post of mine, the “Starting the Mix” blog post of last month.

Intro
The question basically was about the way we mix a song in sections. The reason for this is quite simple; every song contains different phases, these phases are engaged to different types of emotional expressions. For example the verse might be more relaxed, meanwhile the prehook rises it’s emotion and by the time the hook (chorus) hits, the song becomes loud and very emotional. We can’t simply mix these phases in the same way we thread the verses, bridge, intro, outro’s, and so on. Therefore we like to use the so called “snapshot” automation. This is available on both Pro Tools as the Solid State Logic, AMS Neve consoles among many other analogue and digital mixing consoles. To make this blog post more mainstream and understandable for most of the readers I will explain only how “snapshot” automation works in Pro Tools.

What is “Snapshot” Automation?
“Snapshot” in general is basically just the way of writting a static mix. Meaning that you will only write one setting, or series of settings with the same time stamp of the mixers setup across a section of your mix. To bring back the example given before, mixing in this way you will be able to make your mix suite the structure of the song. You can set up all the levels, mutes, voice keyboard, drum processing, and so on for each section (phase) of the song and write them as the foundation of your (final) mix.

So how does it work (Pro Tools HD)?

1. Select the selector tool to highlight acoss the section where you want to write your “snapshot” automation (e.g. chorus). NOTE: make sure you have selected all the tracks and parts you want to be included in the “snapshot” and that the selection is of the correct length.
2. Enable playback looping (ctrl + click on the transports “play” button). I’m always mixing in this mode.
   
3. Click Auto Suspend in the Automation Enable Window (command + 4 on numeric keypad).
4. You will now be able to loop around your selection (section) and set up your mix. When done press Stop.
5. Choose Write Automation to all Enabled Parameters (command + option + forward slash).
6. Take off Auto Suspend in the Automation Enable Window (command + 4 on numeric keypad).

Thats it!TIP: I always work in Relative Grid Mode while mixing. This mode allows you to move “regions” while retaining their position relative to the nearest beat. In practice this would, for example, mean that when you move a “region” who’s starting point is 360 samples after the beat, can be moved without causing the “region” to automatically snap to the beat. Which would have been the case in Absolute Grid Mode.

Hope this little entry will help you guys get mixes going with various states of emotions!

Signing off,

Yours truly!