Once, on a master, I had this annoying click in just one spot. It showed up because of a mess of automations, special effects, unlucky layering of everything imaginable, and the piano sample had a super short attack that made it kind of “pop”.

I spent about an hour heroically trying to redo all the automations, trying to figure out why it was happening. I even managed to break the entire project at one point, thankfully I had backups. I did eventually find the cause in one messed-up automation curve, but once I started fixing it, the vibe disappeared (and I would have had to rework the previous minute completely).

Then I thought, what on earth am I doing, and just added an automation that muted the click for a few milliseconds right in that spot. Sometimes, instead of messing around and wasting a ton of time while breaking everything else, you can just fix the problem with duct tape.

By the way, this is good advice in general: don’t overcomplicate things you can fix with simple solutions.