Automation is an invaluable tool for adding colour to a mix, as well as its more mundane use for controlling volume, be it levelling peaks in tracks or adding swells and fades. However, its big drawback is that once you’ve written the automation, you can’t then go back and tweak the levels without editing the automation. In this video, I look at using clip gain and muting to balance parts of a recorded track against the rest of that track, without using automation that would impact on the levels of the recorded sound against the rest of my mix.