automating the unautomatable
this is for the hardware heads. maybe it's a bit obvious and i'm just slow to figure things out, but nonetheless...
for a long time i found it frustrating to work with non-midi gear, especially if i had more than one project on the go. it's easy enough to write down compessor settings and such, but i've got lots of recordings of manual filter sweeps etc that essentially capture a performance at that moment in time, but that have been near impossible to recreate at a later date.
i could toss out all this non-midi gear, but i love the sound of it too much. so what to do? here's an idea: hook up a microphone and route the track to the headphones, but not the main mix, and record yourself talking about which knobs you are twisting as you twist them. you might feel a bit foolish doing this at first, but it will give you the chance to go back and recreate or improve upon even the most spontaneous of performances at a later date, and the best part is that the info is stored along with everything else in your sequencer, so there is no need to keep a log book or separate set of text files that might get lost.
