Using faders and automation

Manually adding automation data is perfectly acceptable in many situations. However, it is often the case that relying on it exclusively does not provide enough precision or ultimately makes things sound too mechanical and not natural. The use of physical faders to manipulate sound has been around a lot longer than automation, but with Pro Tools, you do not need to have a physical fader controller to achieve similar results. We’ll use Pro Tools’ built-in tools to create smooth and responsive volume automation.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you will need a Pro Tools session with a single audio track. No audio clip needs to be placed, but having one will help demonstrate the volume automation effects. Your session will need to have the I/O column active. You can enable this by going to the menu bar and selecting View | Edit Window Views | I/O.

How to do it…

We’ll now create some volume automation using the built-in...