What is Your Automation Controlling?

I learned something important today. The horn parts I am writing had seemed very dark and a bit muted to me and I've been so focused on the melodic content that I had forgotten about the timbral character of the voice. I had added an automation lane in Bitwig to control the mute parameter of the horns and had incorrectly assumed that a value of zero (0.0) would result in no muting. Not so! It is actually the other way around and I had been accidentally composing for muted horns! 

This may seem incredibly obvious, but sometimes you need to check and see what is happening when you adjust the controls, while looking at the VST plugin's UI, so you can see what is happening.