good call, Morry. I suppose gain is synonymous with volume? But not on my guitar amp! Hmm :/ Gain on a compressor boosts the volume of the compressed signal. But gain on a guitar amp creates saturation/distortion. Is this a different use of the word gain or what? I've been wondering about this for awhile. Thanks

It comes down to where the gain is in the chain. For the compressor, the gain is last in the chain; the comporessor has alrewady done its compressing so its just a volume control in this case and won't cause distortion unless you run the master output into the red. For the guitar amp, the gain is first int he chain, and it controls the level of the guitar into the preamp. Turning up the gain increases the level into the preamp, which makes it react differently to the signal. The hotter you run it, the more the the amp will react, to the point of distortion and beyond. In other words, turning up the output after the compressor won't add distortion because there wasn't any to start with, but turning up the level into the amp will make the amp components react in their unique characteristic way, by adding saturation/distortion

Hi again Just adding to Morry's suggestion... Volume automation is always last in the chain - it moves the channel fader up and down. So if you add a gain plugin to the channel, it will still come before the automation - because the gain plugin comes before the channel fader. Which means the automation will override the gain plugin. Unless.... (and thanks to Rounik for this trick) instead of automating the track volume normally, insert a gain plugin on the channel and automate that instead. Then you can use the channel fader as you like, and it won't be affected by the automation. OK thats enough out of me for now Cheers Hamish

That works brilliantly, Hamish, great tip. I think the moral of the story might be that if I spent more time on the early production stage getting everything as perfect as possible, before going into arranging and adding automation, etc, I wouldn't have to be thinking about this as much. I just watched a good video on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_JReiE1uFk&list=FLqucLjuKqSKT1NCl1chl8yw&index=1&feature=plpp_video

The "gain" plug-in is something I use frequently when I don't want to mess with temporal variations in volume automation. Just put it last on your channel strip chain and turn it up or down as you like. Rob

don't forget you can select a track's automation events with the marquee tool and move their levels as a group.