Automation
Saturday, February 21st, 2026 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio26F with a chance of snow overnight.
I didn't get much done over the week. I tried tackling the piano in a few songs and came up with a general PQ2 setting, but then I got hung up in the instrumental interlude of Never Rains, where there's a piano solo... getting very frustrated that I could not get the piano out of the mud.
While it's doing it's solo, the guitar is going, as well as a horn, a trumpet, and an occasional cello... and there just was not enough PQ2 slots to do all the notching that would be required to truly carve space for everybody.
This was exacerbated by the fact that many of them want to resonate at the same spots.
I tried cutting the trumpet, but felt like that wasn't a solution or a sacrifice I wanted to make.
I tried adding delay to the piano, but it didn't help. You couldn't hear it in all the noise.
I kinda gave up for a couple days, just stressing about how maybe I'd finally been bested! Maybe I just wasn't clever enough to get this done right!
But a consultation with DeepSeek offered some hope.
They suggested that a second instance of PQ2 is an easy way to, essentially, create more slots for carving. Also, such a second EQ could be automated to turn on only in parts where needed, like the interlude.
Lastly, it confirmed that a convovler setting for the piano might help to beef it up a bit.
But this all felt like it required too much mental focus and concentration to try and tackle after work when, even with a second wind after a decompression... I just don't have the bandwidth left for such focus... after a long day at work.
Gain balancing? Sure. Tweaking the patterns? Sure. Working multiple instances of PQ2 like a big jigsaw puzzle, and learning how to automate?.. Sorry, no! It'd have to wait for Saturday.
I slept in later than I wanted, but finally got going with Never Rains at 5PM, monitoring with the iLouds.
The first thing I did was to add convolver to the piano channel, and I found a good, "living room" impulse that did help to beef it up and make it feel more present in the mix.
I then added 2nd instances of PQ2 to the guitar, and the horn, and subtracted notches in them for the freqs where the piano needed room.
The result sounded much better... the piano solo sounded like a solo. But that 2nd PQ2 on the guitar really stole all it's energy in the normal parts of the song... so it had to be animated to turn on only for the solo... on at measure 84, off again at measure 107.
What followed was a 2-hour comedy of errors as I struggled to wrap my brain around how to program an automation script.
Consulting with DeepSeek, and later, Gemini, did not help! Their instructions were clear as mud! I felt I was doing what was required, but nothing was happening when I played the song.
In desperation, I went to YouTube in search of a tutorial, and it was in the first minute of that video that it suddenly clicked.
What Gemini & DeepSeek had failed to mention was that FL treats an automation script like a playlist pattern... it's a visual pattern you place into the song, at the desired location, and then you can edit it there, to turn on, or fade in, then fade back out, or turn back off... etc.
And automation scripts appear in their own list on a side panel, just like instrument patterns do.
So, finally!.. I created an automation script for the volume knob of the guitar's 2nd PQ2. By default it was at zero, and then the script begins at measure 84, turning it up to 100%... introducing those subtractive notches that allow the piano to breathe.
Over the run of the interlude, the script has the G2 PQ2 B volume go down to 50% in a few spots where the guitar pattern changes... to give the guitar a bit more presence, while still preserving the subtractive notching... and then finally it goes back to 0% at measure 107, and stays off the rest of the song.
This was a huge breakthrough.
And then, emboldened by that, I created a 2nd automation script for the piano's convolver effect.
Again, default volume for that convolver is zero, but it fades up to 100% as the piano solo begins, and stays there until measure 107, then fades back down to zero.
This improved the solo even more! The piano, which in other spots is only there to add a bit of accent, suddenly takes center stage, with a room impulse, as the guitar thins out a bit to let it shine... and then everything goes back to normal when the solo is over!
So, I'm considering this yet another, "proof of concept," meaning that I just proved to myself that the tone balancing of all these songs is within my grasp, now that I understand how to automate 2nd instances of PQ2, and other effects like convolver, for specific passages of each song!
That's great news!.. but it also means the tone-balancing phase of the mix is not done, and will take more time to complete!
And that's sad, because I really wanted to have moved on to compression by today.
Okay... back to it! I'll talk to you later.
Okay, so I got Never Rains all EQed and automated as best I could and then exported the mix as a test WAV to review later.
After that was the Saturday night phone call with Tim.
And after that, I got to work on, Closer To You, which features piano in various places prominently, and also has some denser orchestral moments... and I did the same kind of work, on a slightly larger scale... automating 2nd EQs for various instruments, as well as both convolver and Delay3 effects on the piano.
That was just finished and now it's exporting to a test WAV.
Next up will be Clue Phone, which has piano in one passage, where the music swells to an apex... which were also very muddy.
I'll do the same work on that, in the very-late session, and then settle in to review test wavs in headphones for a bit before bed.
Last week I saved test waves for all the, orchestral-sans-piano mixes, so this weekend is about replacing those which have piano, with these new automated mixes... and taking stock of the whole album... musically.
I think the only other two songs with piano are Archeology, and Miss Fortune, so I should be able to get those going tomorrow.
But between last weekend, with revamped orchestral PQ2, and revamped guitar sounds... and this weekend... fitting the piano in with automated effects to many different players... these are big changes to the mix.
Careful review, both casually in headphones, and more actively in the ilouds doing near-field gain balancing, is the logical next step to familiarize myself with this new sound and determine what, in terms of tone, still needs to be tweaked, and how.
But I'm not gonna get *too* anal about tone balancing, as I can already predict that when compression begins... that's gonna change both the gain and tone balances.
So, really... what I've been doing lately is just breaking the ice with a lot of different techniques that are necessary for mixing... from gain balancing, which is easy enough, to tone balancing...
Which began with a fear of a "spectral analyzer" plugin that doesn't exist... continued with deeper dives into the guitar's signal chain... and, thanks to the piano, has now lead to breaking the ice with automation.
So, compression is going to be just another technique I need to break the ice with, and add to, these 2026 FNMX FLP files... which are becoming so much more sophisticated than the 2025 FLPs.
Okay, that's all i've got to say for my Saturday.
There's another hour or two tonight, and then tomorrow is another day.
Talk to you then.
°¦}
