PT8 Comp edit workflow from Brent Heber on Vimeo.

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.