Dear Brooks.
I am NOT an expert by a million miles, can only say what I myself do. I have to use MIDI for everything cos I'm disabled. I don't use outboard controllers cos I can't use them FAST enough - I find by the time I've heard the problem and hit the right fader, the song's gone on another 40 seconds and I'm changing the wrong part. My DAW, Quick Score Elite Level 2, excels in automation - instead of one of those ghastly lines-with-nodes it uses rows of little sticks, which makes it FAR easier to tweak bits - you just grab'n'tweak a stick or several! So I listen, stop when I hear the problem, tweak the sticks, listen..... And keep on going round and round the song till I feel I've tweaked all the sticks right. Kinda like doing stop-frame animation in movie-making.
Would you be pausing the track to adjust the faders, or are you fast enough to adjust them on-the-fly in the right places (kudos to you if you are, I could never do that!!)
If you're pausing the track, you might as well automation-tweak, no? As far as keeping the old version goes - this is how my odd DAW works, not sure about the posh ones - I'd have 2 instances of an instrument. Do the initial work on Instance One. Copy the automation track to Instance Two. Do the tweaking on Instance Two. Then you've always got Instance One as a fallback - if you mess up, you can just re-copy the automation line over and start again. Yup, I know that's a tad long-winded but I can't think of a faster way unless you really ARE that fast at tweaking faders when you hear errors so you're not actually tweaking the fader 10 seconds too late!
Yours respectfully
Chris.
