It's easy to fixate on the latest spiffy third-party Pro Tools plug-ins. But while you can't blame PT geeks for collecting esoteric plug-ins with the enthusiasm of second-graders hoarding Pokemon cards, don't forget: You can inflict massive audio carnage with the simple plug-ins included in your basic LE install. In fact, some of the most skilled PT engineers would argue that the real artistry in digital audio engineering lies in the skillful application of these basic functions. There are two types of Pro Tools LE plug-ins: AudioSuite and RTAS (Realtime AudioSuite). When you process a track with an RTAS plug-in, you hear the results immediately, just as if you were adjusting the tone controls on your stereo or playing a guitar through an effect pedal. But with AudioSuite plug-ins (that is, the non-realtime kind), you select a single audio region and process it in isolation. Both types of plug-ins have their strong points, and both are indispensable resources. One huge advantage of the latter: While RTAS plug-ins place heavy demands on your CPU, you can sound-sculpt with AudioSuite until the cows keel over from exhaustion. Users with older, slower computers often get their best results in Pro Tools by going light on the RTAS plug-ins and doing most of the heavy lifting in AudioSuite. This month we'll learn how AudioSuite plug-ins can modify the volume, tempo, and tuning of your tracks. We'll use them for such frequently encountered tasks as synchronizing rhythm loops and building arrangements in the edit window. We'll also revisit many of the basic editing moves we looked at in the last column. I've posted four practice files for this
workshop. Download them by clicking the links below.
Open up Pro Tools and create a new session with the File/New Session command. Bring the edit window to the front with the Window/Show Edit command. Now load the practice audio into the session using the File/Import Audio to Track command, which brings up this dialog:
Click image to enlarge. Select the first file, "Bass Loop," and click Add. Select the second file, "Conga Loop," and…whoa! The Add button has suddenly grayed out. No worries — that’s because "Bass Loop" is a mono file, while the other three are stereo. Pro Tools thinks of stereo files as two linked mono objects — a distinction you rarely have to worry about. Just select Convert instead of Add, and then do the same with the remaining two files. Click Done. Now Pro Tools will ask you where you want to stow the new files. Do as the program suggests and place them inside the Audio Files folder of your new session. Now your screen should look something like this:
Click image to enlarge.
Pretty slick! Pro Tools has not only imported the files, but also created an appropriate set of mono and stereo tracks to play them. Go ahead and press Play if you must, but the music's going to sound pretty awful till we perform some audio surgery. First let's focus on the "Drumbox Loop" track. Press the track's solo button and highlight the file by clicking on it in the edit window. Press Play. The file should loop seamlessly. (If it's not looping, make sure there's a checkmark next to the Operations/Loop Playback menu option. And since we'll be matching loops to bar numbers, click on the pulldown menu alongside the Main indicator near the top-center of the screen and make sure it's set to Bars:Beats. Also, set the adjacent Grid control to its coarsest resolution, one bar.) Our first problem is determining the loop's tempo so we can specify it as session's master tempo. Musically speaking, "Drumbox Loops" is two measures long. But the Length display near the top of the screen says 2|0|549 — more than two bars, at least as reckoned by Pro Tool's default tempo of 120 beats per minute. We know the loop's tempo is slower than 120 bpm, but what's the exact figure? No need to recall that high school algebra. Just highlight "Drumbox Loop," and then select Time Compression Expansion from the pulldown AudioSuite menu. This is the plug-in you'll use whenever you want to change to speed of an audio file (and remember that in the digital realm, speed and pitch are independent variables). Time Compression Expansion lets you reclock audio files by absolute values, percentages, or bars and beats.
We're going to sync the congas and drumbox by
repeating the previous move in reverse: Instead of reclocking Pro
Tools to match the loop, we're going to resize the loop to match
our 112 bpm tempo.
Now add the "Bass Loop" track by pressing its solo button. No need to do any time adjustment — it's already clocked to 112 bpm. But there's no getting around the fact that it's a wee bitÂ…well, weenie-sounding. There's little we can do to remedy the line's musical wimpiness, but you can do something about its wimpy volume level. You could simply raise the volume control — one perfectly decent solution. Another strategy is to increase the level of the actual file. Highlight "Bass Loop" and open the AudioSuite/Gain plug-in. Click the find peak box, and the window informs you that the loudest portion of the file is -13.8dB, which is to say that the file can be boosted 13.8 decibels before it distorts. Type in "13.8" and press process. The bass line might still be wimpy, but quiet, it ain't. (You can also get the same result even faster with the AudioSuite/Normalize command, which calculates the headroom and maximizes the file's volume in a single step.) Note that the Gain plug-in, like many AudioSuite functions, includes preview and bypass controls. If you select preview you'll hear an approximation of your impending edit. Select bypass while previewing, and you can compare the original sound and the new one. You can even change the plug-in settings while preview is engaged. Just remember that the preview function requires a few seconds to update itself. This preview function predates the multiple undo stages of current Pro Tools LE systems. Sometimes it's simply faster to execute the edit and play the results in context, though preview remains a good strategy if you're processing a long file or many files at once. Check out the last loop, an eight-bar electric piano phrase already synched to 112 bpm. Let's duplicate the first three loops so they form matching eight-bar segments. Shift-click to select the three short loops, and then select the Edit/Duplicate command, or use the keyboard shortcut (Cmd+D on Mac, Cntl+D on PC). Duplicate the set three times so their lengths match those of "Epiano Loop."
Click image to enlarge. Turn off any solo or mute switches and press play. The groove should sound halfway decent by now, though the sequence is pretty darned monotonous. One thing that might help: turning some of the short loops into longer phrases. Let's try, for example, snipping some notes from the "Bass Loop" track so that it doesn't repeat literally every two measures. Select Slip mode in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. Place the cursor just before the short group of notes at the end of the first loop. Select Edit/Separate Regions, or use the key command (Cmd+E on Mac, Ctrl+E on PC). Then mute the newly created region via Edit/Mute Region (or Cmd+M on Mac, Ctrl+M on PC). Make the same edit in bar 6. The results should look like this: Sounds a little more "open," doesn't it? Let's try a related move on the "Drumbox Loop" track. Notice how the second half of the loop has a relatively busy electronic snare figure. What if we were to loop only the first half of the drum part, reserving the snare fill as a turnaround figure in bar 8? Try it: Switch from Slip mode to Grid, and then click on the midpoint of the first "Drumbox Loop" region. Separate the region, and then listen to each half separately to make sure it loops cleanly. (It does — I'm just giving you busy work.) Duplicate the first measure five times, right on top of what's already there. (You don't need to delete first — Pro Tools automatically overwrites when you paste or duplicate over extant regions.) Now you should have six one-bar phrases and a single two-bar, like so:
Now let's create a spacey intro for this sequence as an excuse to check out some other cool AudioSuite functions. Select all the sequences we've assembled so far via shift-clicks, and then drag everything two bars forward so that everything commences at bar 3. (Another method: Nudge the files forward with the numerical keypad's + key. You set the nudge amount in the upper-right-hand corner of the edit window.) Now separate the last two measures of the electric piano track and copy the new segment at bar 1. You can use the standard copy/paste commands or — even better — select the electric piano region between measures 9 and 11 and drag it back to bar 1 while holding down the option key, thus duplicating it.
Click image to enlarge. This newly copied segment consists of a single electric piano chord. Like all piano chords, it commences with a strong attack and then gradually fades. But if you highlight the track and process it with the AudioSuite/Reverse plug-in, it becomes an eerie fade-in.
Click image to enlarge. We can exaggerate the spookiness of the effect with an unnatural-sounding transposition. Highlight the region and select AudioSuite/Pitch Shift. Drag the lever alongside the coarse control until the setting reads "+6" — a tritone above the original tuning. Press process, and listen to the results. Still don't dig it? Fine — make something cooler. You have the technology! Next time: We whip out the RTAS plug-ins. Click here to read previous columns.
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