Archive for July, 2008

Mixing it up in the Mix window

– July 25, 2008Posted in: General Topics

The Pro Tools Mix window is a pretty straight forward place for engineers with a good grasp of signal flow, but there are quite a few keyboard shortcuts that make it even more flexible than you may at first believe. In this entry I’ll go through some of the more commonly used techniques to get the most comprehensive control of your mix.

Do to all – holding the Option key when you do something in the mix window is the old “Global modifier”, so if you want to change the master outputs to your interface, hold option and change one track, and all the outputs will switch.

Do to Selected tracks – this is a good one, hold Opt AND shift AND then do the task and it will multiply it across your selected tracks. This is very powerful when used with “Link Track and Edit Selection” enabled. Say you are editing your BVox group, highlight a quick swipe across their tracks, Command + = to switch to the mix window and then opt-shift and change their outputs to a buss. You now have all your BVox sent to a unique buss master, or maybe you want to instantiate a reverb send on those selected tracks…save yourself from…

Opt + click and drag to copy sends and inserts around the mix window

Ctrl click on SOLO buttons to enable Solo protect mode – this means that this track cannot be muted by another track’s solo state. Very useful with effects returns from post fader sends or sub group masters.

Command/Apple click on the up/down icon next to a send and it will change send view from “Assignment” mode (the default) to show the complete info for the first send on that block – a small fader, pan and meter. Its a useful view. In fact for quick turnaround work, I like to set up my main two sends on send A and F slots so they can both be viewed at the same time in this mode for quick visual feedback.

Ctrl clicking when you assign an output allows you to send the output of a track to multiple places, like hitting multiple outputs on the assign section on a console. This is EXTREMELY powerful once you can think about it transparently – for example, you have a buss master for your drum group, its currently assigned output is the mix buss. Ctrl click and assign a second output, to a buss. Now its going to both places. You can return the buss to an aux alongside it and throw a compressor on it and you’re now in a parallel compression configuration. Advertising engineers can use this to set up a buss master for a mix minus, so everything is sent to the buss master EXCEPT the voice over. They can now have multiple VOs on seperate tracks mixed in with the mix minus, tracking to seperate outputs at the same time.

When creating your mix groups, you have a choice of what letter they get assigned – I never thought much about this until I was shown a great workflow, where you choose the letter that starts the name of the group, and this enables the keyboard focus to switch that group on or off by simply hitting that letter (when the mix window is in the foreground and keyboard focus is on). So you’re mixing, you’ve made a drum group and assigned it to the letter “d” instead of the default “a” for your first group. Now, when you have the mix window open, you can simply hit “d” to turn that group on or off!

Speaking of groups, if you are not using a VCA, the normal group behaviour is to gang all your faders together when the mix group is enabled. This is mostly what you want, but what about fine tuning? Simply hold Ctrl and move the fader – this acts as the group clutch key and temporarily disengages the parameter you are touching/moving from the ganged group. (This saves you turning the group on and off)

Lastly, another groups tip. Since 7.2 we’ve had a lot more control in the Groups Window by adding two new tabs, Global and Attributes. These features allow us to do things like group our effects controls together independent of the fader controls, or send levels grouped independent of faders. These can be useful tools in some situations, so be sure to explore the hidden tabs in the group creation window!

Hopefully there are some useful tips there! If you’ve got any other great tips for the Mix window, please comment down below and share them!

NEXT BLOG: I’ll make another video, having a look at the Automation “Write to..” commands and how powerful they now are.

Editing Music beds, the fast way

– July 22, 2008Posted in: General Topics

In the advertising industry (aka “churn and burn”!) an audio editor could find himself producing anywhere up to 200 x 15-30 second ads per week. Yes, its quite a few ads! The important skills in this sort of work are knowing your SFX library and having a solid music library readily edited into the right durations, at your beck and call.

The problem is…well…producers. You see, they often fall in love with a special piece of music that they “Really think would add a stronger message to this piece”…and well, YOU know its just a 15 second ad about sausages, but hey, its a gig and you have to oblige…

So they whip out their CD and here you are again, trying to cut down a 3min music bed into a 15 sec clip that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Its an art. You’re good at it.

However, if I’m guessing your background right, you’re probably looking at a Timecode or Mins:secs ruler and dont want to try playing with that “bars and beats stuff” as “thats for music guys, not us churn and burn guys, I dont have time to play with that!”.

In my opinion, you don’t have time NOT to! The trick is to know two features in the Events menu, and your whole style of music bed editing could change.

The time saving is all to do with identifying where the musical bars are. If you can find the first beat of each bar quickly you can slice it up and put it back together super quick, but how do you find the first beat of each bar? Well…you can listen for them and seperate your regions when you find it, and seperate, and seperate and so on and so on for every bar. OR you can let Pro Tools do half the work for you…

First thing: Find the first beat of your song. Let me clarify: this is the first beat of the first bar, not the first thing you hear! Alot of music will have a drum fill leading in to this beat, so you need to use your intuition – Im sure you know what I mean…

Put your cursor there, go up to the Event menu/Time operation/Move Song Start and you’ll get a floating window pop open. First time you use this, you’ll need to be sure to tick the box to “Renumber to bar 1″ and then you can simply click OK.

In your Tempo ruler, you’ll see the red diamond of your song start is now aligned with Bar 1 Beat 1 and if you switch over to the bar:beat ruler you can see it clearly when you play through. The problem is, nothing else is in sync!

So, listen for the first beat of bar two, place your cursor there and go to the Event menu and choose “Identify Beat”, enter 2 on the numeric keypad, hit return and you should see a new tempo marker put in place, and the tempo ruler will show a change in tempo take place.

Repeat this step, Identifying the beat (Command-I or CTRL-I) for a few beats until your tempo map is locked in tight – this is an art in itself, but it shouldnt take too long – particularly if you use “Tab to transients”.

OK – onto the fun part. Switch to Grid mode, your ruler should be bars and beats, and now, change your grid to a whole bar. Now, everywhere you click, you will have your cursor on the start or end of a bar. Make a selection and loop it, it should loop freely on the bar no matter where you click!

Last trick – highlight your whole music bed, go to the Edit menu and move down to “Seperate selection” – and choose “on the grid”. Your music bed is now cut up into 1 bar chunks for you – saving a lot of seperating!

Switch to Shuffle mode, cut out what you dont need and rearrange as necessary. Opt-drag bars around when you need to copy them, until you are close to the duration you want. Highlight it all again, Batch Fades and you’re done!

This workflow really depends on metronomic music – things that have very rigid and easily identifiable tempo, but that is pretty good description of an awful lot of production music, so hopefully this helps you speed up your music editing!

PS Correction for the video: I said “go to the Event menu” at the end of this video when I meant “go to the EDIT menu” to find “Seperate region – On the grid”. Sorry for any confusion there!

NEXT BLOG I’ll be drafting up a comprehensive list of shortcuts to make the most of the Mix window. Check back later this week if you haven’t subscribed.

AutoJoin, AutoMatch, Autowhat??

– July 17, 2008Posted in: ICON Videos, ProTools HD tips

Pro Tools HD 7.2 introduced so many new automation features that they almost deserve a name all of there own, ala SSL or Euphonix or Neve automation systems. In this blog I want to concentrate on one of those many features, a button called “AutoJoin” – you can see this mode when you open your Automation Enable window, down the bottom above AutoMatch.

How many of you reading this feel you know Pro Tools automation inside out? On the flip side, how many are comfortable with Touch mode and leave it at that? Hopefully this post will encourage the touch mode ops out there to experiment with Latch mode…

So, you are using Latch mode, writing automation from the point when you grab a fader or pot, writing it at the level last touched as the transport continues forwards, until you have potentially engaged up to a hundred different parameters, all latched and writing automation, a MIX moving forwards down the timeline…

THEN, it happens… you miss a cue. Maybe you should have grabbed the BVox and pulled them up earlier to prepare for the chorus, or maybe the FX buss came in too loud, either way, it just happened, you’re in the zone, and you can fix it. Hit the “Back and Play” button above your transport controls on the DCommand or DControl.

The transport drops back in time (by the Back/Forward amount in your preferences) and you get a second shot at the cue, and you nail it. Transport hasn’t stopped but a disaster has happened – when you dropped back, all your 100 parameters dropped out of auto record and now you have hard breakpoints and you’ve lost your mix – you would need to touch all the 100 parameters during the back amount to get back to where you were!! Impossible!

This is where AutoJoin comes to the rescue – with Autojoin enabled, when you hit Back and Play, a red line appears on screen clearly showing where you hit it, and you are now approaching it from your back amount. You can fix your cue, but when you pass the red line, ALL your previously engaged automation re-latches and you continue with the mix, as if nothing ever went wrong!

You can go back and play as many times as you like, the trick is to always let it pass the red line before hitting back a second time or you will lose your record enabled cache.

Ive seen music guys using this to great effect, mixing all their BVox or drums in a single (sort of!) pass or post guys doing a doco, cranking through a mix on the first pass – only needing a little bit of trim at the end to tidy it up for broadcast.

There’s a video below showing the behaviour WITHOUT autojoin and WITH autojoin enabled. Hopefully this is a pretty clear description of the workflow and you can see the power of AutoJoin and add it to your quiver for those times when you need to mix super fast on your ICON.

Next Blog: We’ll be looking at a quick way to edit music tracks when they weren’t recorded by you and aren’t locked to your bars and beats ruler…

Indiana Mix and the Template of Doom

– July 10, 2008Posted in: General Topics

The idea of stem mixing is as old as film sound, but in recent years its taken off in the music industry to the point where mastering engineers are often being supplied with stems (or requesting them) instead of the traditional 2-track.

If you adopt a stem based workflow, one of the most effective ways of saving time is setting up a mixing template.

In ProTools that may consist of two parts, both a *.ptf file (write protected/stationary pad) and an io Setup file – so your busses are labelled the way you like and your outputs are set up for either stereo or 5.1 mixing. Be sure to keep a backup of these files somewhere safe!

Going down the path of setting up your ptf file, if you adopt a template there are two killer features you should be using, markers and window configs…

Picture this: you are mixing the project, diving down, working on backing vox or ambience tracks or SFX or the drum kit and you want to change the overall balance of your stems. So what do you do? You simply hit “.”, “2″, “.” to recall memory locate 2 and what happens?

Potentially, all of this: in the edit window, the track list gets hidden, the region bin closes, the io view and inserts views disappear, all your tracks disappear except the buss masters, in volume view, which blow up to take up a quarter of the window each (red lines drawing as you mix in latch mode), on the right hand side, your favourite buss master compressor plug in window opens and maybe Signal tools, showing you the current level in Peak and RMS and you are now in the sweetest place to mix your stems – all the info you want, maximised on screen at the press of a memory locate.

So how? Well, create a memory locate, tied to no “Selection” but with track show hide/track height and a window config attached…

This is the point – combining windows configs and memory locates in your template gives you alot of power when it comes to everyday tasks, navigating your session as a power user who can anticipate the every day tasks of crafting your mix.

Ive seen some power users with templates that include windows configs that open/close a tonne of info in both their edit windows and mix windows saved to common sense buttons on their numeric keypad like 4 and 5 to open and close the edit window, 7 and 8 to do similar with the mix window, 1,2,3, 5 and 9 for project specific views – seeing it in action is definately a “penny drop” moment.

ICON Power feature:

Taking this idea a step further – dig into your ICON preferences to enable “Track Show/Hide: ShowHdn”

This means that tracks that are hidden in the edit window are still accessible on the control surface using your custom fader groups! So you can now mix on tracks on the console, independent of what is visible in the Pro Tools GUI.

Next Blog: An ICON automation feature called AutoJoin, how to mix effortlessly without reaching for the stop button and a mouse when you make a mistake!

The Beginning: Why Blog?

– July 7, 2008Posted in: Thoughts

So, why Blog?

For some time now, I’ve been working for Digidesign in Australia and New Zealand, demonstrating Pro Tools and helping train our clients. What I see, mostly, are engineers with tighter and tighter deadlines, long working hours and the relatively thankless task of polishing “product” for mass consumption. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, those few lucky individuals who get to craft something they believe in, that they enjoy and that they have time to create but they have the rare gigs not the usual ones!

So, my priority is and has always been, to evangelize the methods, workflows, tips and tricks that enable our pro users to save time. Time saved gives you two choices, either do more work or craft your existing work to a higher quality. Both options are vitally important goals in both the creative and “churn and burn” market sectors.

On this blog, I not only hope to impart some of that information that I’ve gleaned over the years, but also learn from you, the readers – hopefully we can have some stimulating discussion on here and I can pass on that vital feedback to Digidesign.

This blog would not be possible without a few people however. Mentors like SImon Leadley, Andy Stewart, Charles Tetaz, Bruce Emery, Gerry Nixon, Jason DeWilde, Peter Thomas and Chris McKeith amongst many others. At the end of the day, every time I have a meeting with clients, its a two way street – I learn as much from them as they hopefully get from me.

Also, I have to thank my partner Stephanie for being so supportive, patient and understanding of my ongoing problem with being a big geek.

Anyways, so where to start?? Well firstly I’d love to have folks comment here about what they would like to see. My intention was to create some videos, using screen caps and show specific features alongside discussion about how those features can help in day to day professional work. The first idea that came to mind was a feature introduced in 7.3 – Windows configs. We have a pretty good Digi video for that feature (cop out!) so I’ll just post about my experiences in the field and how people are using this feature alongside the old Memory locates, in my next blog entry.

Talk soon,

Brent