Am I the only who holds their breath while doing automation ?
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OMG that’s amazing… I do that too! It’s as if I might mess something up if I breathe on the track! 
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I don’t know about holding my breathe but i did write a post in RR about how much i dread doing the automation. I have since improved my attitude but still do tend to put it off.
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Yes! 
Not always, but if it’s a critical part like lead vocal or a section where I think fractions of a dB will make or break the flow of the song, I do.
I also get a sore neck from tensing up too…
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Again, me too… sometimes I get up from the music computer and feel like I got hit by a bus. I need to chill the folk out, maaaan! 
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Aye, it tends to be the last bit I do - I like to get the best static mix with processing I can before diving in, because mentally it feels like once the automation’s down things start getting cast in stone.
Quite often as I’m automating sections I’ll change processing to suit the changing mix as it develops, but it’s good to have a solid starting point!
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Yeah i have often wondered how it would change my mixes if i did the automation process earlier.
Lol at least im not the only one then
It’s one of those things - everything affects everything else. I think until you’ve got a pretty good static mix it’d just be too much of a moving target though - like, how could you automate a vocal before you compressed it, or before you’d EQ’d out that conflicting guitar tone? It’d change where you wanted the vocal to sit.
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Why not take it to the next level? Hold your breath while you instantiate a vocal rider plugin also lol. Hold your breath, close your eyes AND use only your dominant hand when set your clip gain! Then and only then will you be considered a real engineer.
Vocal riders for girls lol
I like 'em easy. ~ so…um…vocal rider…yeah. Makes things easy.
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Well, that’s of no meaning to me!
I hate level automation, you do it at one point and the next day you find it’s off, too loud, too soft, not right, and you have to do it all over again. When I have level automation on a track, I often end up sending it to a group so that I can at least change the whole level in one go.
And yes, Vocal Rider is really useful, and I use it for much more than vocals, as a transparent leveler when I don’t want to push the compression too much,.
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Nothing wrong with vocal rider mate Use whatever tools it takes I say .I was only joking when I said its for girls tho I should have said wimps