Often when finalizing a mix I find myself automating volume, pan, and mute settings on an individual track. Though you can do this by editing the Mixer envelopes in the Arrange View there is a downside to doing this. A good example of why this can be problematic can be seen when you automate the Track Volume of a Mixer and then find that you want to adjust the volume of the entire track. At that point you either have to go through and edit your entire automation envelope or you would need to place a Utility device at the end of your device chain for that track and adjust its gain knob. The former is a pain in the butt and the later is kind of a hack because ideally you would like to still be able to use the mute, pan and volume controls of the Mixer.
The Utility device in Ableton Live
The solution to this is to put a Utility device at the end of your device chain for the track and to automate the mute, panorama and gain of the Utility rather than your Mixer. This way you can still adjust the volume, pan and mute settings using your Mixer. This can be really handy to bring the entire level of a track up or down, to mute it completely or to position the entire track in the stereo field.
So now, instead of this:
Level automation with Mixer Track Volume
you now have this:
Level automation with Utility Gain
This tip has saved me a lot of time editing envelopes and has given me more flexibility in adjusting my mixes. I hope you find it useful.
Respect. You just saved me lots of fiddly work. Cheeeeeeeeers
Great. Glad it was helpful.
By the way with existing project (made prior to reading your Utility tip) is it possible to do it vise versa – leave the track automation as it is and change the overall values by the Utility
You would only be able to change the level of the signal before the channel fader which is not what I think you want. Good news is that it is super easy to just copy your channel volume automation over to the gain of the Utility and then delete the channel volume automation.