I’ve both heard of and seen on documentaries mixing desks with automated “flying” faders that automatically shift the faders. I’m confused as to what the purpose of the automation is – is it when switching between different songs, or is it picking up a certain sound that requires particular mixing too complicated to do manually?
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It is very common to have multiple audio channels for every “instrument”. For example the drums, choir or the ambiant sounds ar obviously using multiple microphones each. But even guitars might have mulitple pickups or have effects in their seperate channels. This setup allows for a lot of flexibility by the audio engineer allowing him to mix the sound just like he wants without having to run around and adjust the mix at the sources. However it means he have to move a lot of sliders to change the mix. A good principle is to only enable the channels that is actually in use. This way a guitar in the background that is not played will not cause any noise as the strings vibrate to the sound from the monitors. It also allows the artists to speak to each other and the crew when not singing as well as tuning their instruments. Before flying faders you had to have multiple sound engineers to be able to move all the faders whenever someone is about to play or are just done playing. There are also examples of special tools being made allowing a single engineer to move a set of faders together as one. The flying faders do exactly this. The engineer would program the faders to move together as one or move opposite of each other. This means that he have fewer faders to work with live as the others are programmed to follow the pre-programmed profile that he have set. It is also possible to program them in time as well, this is mostly used for recording and mixing but it can be used in live shows as well allowing the engineer to focus on more dynamic tasks.
Back before those were invented, if you wanted a track (corresponding to one instrument/microphone, usually) to decrease or increase in volume during the song you’d have to move the fader manually while you were creating the mixes. If you needed more than a couple tracks to change you’d need a team of people. Obviously, you needed to know exactly what you were doing and if you screwed up you’d have to start over. Once they invented automation everything went smoother and it opened the door to more dynamic mixes.
It’s for convenience while programming. Let’s say you have 2 banks of 12 faders on a desk that has 48 inputs or something, you obviously don’t have 1 fader for every input so as you flip pages in the audio consoles GUI your faders will follow along and track position from bank to bank. Or another use case would be yeah from song to song making quick changes to a mix say if you’re a monitor engineer and want to quickly jump from one sub mix to the next, the faders will track with the GUI of the console
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