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4. Accentuating drum fills with volume automation

1 If you’re looking to add some energy to a song, it’s often helpful to push the drum fills up a little louder than they were recorded. If you’re using multitrack drums, create a sub-bus to automate the whole kit. If it’s a stereo drum track, you can automate its volume directly. 2 With the drum bus or drum track’s automation mode set to Touch, push up its volume fader a couple of dB just before the beginning of each drum fill, and release at the end of the fill. Repeat for all the fills in the song. 3 Use the graphic editing features to tweak the changes you made so that boosts start and end in the correct spots and at the desired level. Alternatively, create changes like this using Touch mode to automate them in real time.