Pro Techniques from Blue World Music

by Randy Alberts

Gina Fant-Saez's phone rings every half hour with calls from friends and associates looking to her for help and tech support. Owner, engineer, and 'Head Honcho' at Blue World Music in Austin, Texas, she's very gracious in sharing her deep Pro Tools knowledge. Just ask session guitarist Gerry Leonard (David Bowie) and bassist Paul Bryan (Aimee Mann.) "Instead of paying them to play on a specific project, I used the budget to buy each of them each a Digi 001 system and taught them how to use it over the phone," says Fant-Saez, herself a talented Julliard-trained songwriter, guitarist, vocalist, and keyboardist.

Gina Fant-Saez and her Pro Tools rig.

"It's a win-win because I send them songs and they send 'em back with their tracks on it, and they're getting even more work now because they're Pro Tools users."

Billed as 'Austin's best kept secret,' Blue World's Pro Tools rig and SSL board recently played host to Chris Vrenna's and Paul Leary's remix singles of U2's "Elevation" and "Turn Out The Lights" for Nelly Furtado. There's no doubting that Shawn Colvin, Jimmie Vaughan, Bela Fleck, The Meat Puppets and King Crimson have also dug Fant-Saez's Pro Tools knowledge and Texas Hill country hospitality, as well.

Pro Technique 1 —
Comping Vocals, Drums and Orchestrating MIDI Tracks with Duplicate Playlists
One of Fant-Saez's favorite Pro Tools features is playlists. Introduced with Pro Tools 4.3, each track's playlist is accessed by clicking on the black triangle just to the right of the track name in the Track window. Most Pro Tools users know there is one playlist per track but many aren't aware of making the best use of the practically limitless number of new and duplicate playlists each track can accommodate.

"Playlists have saved my butt numerous times," says Fant-Saez. "I tell all my friends to always duplicate their playlists before editing something they're unsure about. I always create 'safe' playlists and then edit the original, just in case. A lot of people don't know how cool playlists are and will typically just create a new track for each new take, mainly because they like to see tracks visually stacked on top of one another. Before I worked in this way, I used to run out of tracks using even the biggest Pro Tools systems, so playlists have saved me. It's not the best way to work with certain types of instruments and tracks, but its really great for vocal and drum comping."

After recording a vocal take, Fant-Saez creates a new playlist on that same track and does countless other takes, naming them 'Vox 1,' 'Vox 2,' and so forth. Then she creates a new playlist on the same track and names it 'Comp Vox.' She then goes phrase by phrase through each playlist and copies the best phrase from each playlist and pastes it into the 'Comp Vox' playlist. Naming each track numerically allows her to easily see at a glance which take each phrase of the comp vocal comes from. If the artist she's recording doesn't like a particular phrase, she always knows which take not to use.

"Let's say I'm recording a verse like 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and I want to comp that using the best parts from each take," Fant-Saez continues. "I'll go back and highlight 'Mary' in Vox1, 'Had a' in Vox2, and 'Little Lamb' in Vox3, copy each phrase and then go into the CompVox playlist and hit 'paste' and it keeps the location of my pastings. This is all happening within one vocal track so it cuts down a lot on using up precious tracks, which is very important if you're working with a 24- or 32-track system and so much easier if you use a lot of plug-ins on your vocal tracks."

When preparing to record and comp drums, Fant-Saez sets things up in much the same manner. "I'll set up one playlist for six or eight drum tracks, group them, and then duplicate that playlist so that when the drummer comes in we can go from take to take quickly. If he wants to put the intro of take 1 into take 2, for instance, I just go back to playlist 1, copy the intro, open up take 2's playlist, paste, and voila! Grouping is a fairly recent feature for playlists. If tracks are grouped, a playlist is created for each track in that group which is very cool and convenient."

Since playlists apply to audio and MIDI tracks, Fant-Saez also uses duplicate playlists in much the same way to experiment with her keyboard and synth parts. "I'm working today on MIDI tracks for some songs I'm writing for a new film and I'm wondering which key is best for the song. I have one MIDI track called 'PianoG,' another named 'PianoF,' and I can do the same thing with audio drum loops. Should it be 80 bpm or 86? Duplicate playlists are beautiful for working this way. I'll duplicate the playlist and drag a note from a G to an A or A7 or whatever and create a different chord without having to copy and paste anything. With loops, I'll take my loop track and duplicate its playlist, change the tempo, and then grab the time compression tool in Pro Tools and make it 86 bpm or whatever feels best."

"He'll receive back their original tracks, my newly arranged tracks, and my vocals and everything will be confused and in the wrong place if he doesn't do that step before sending it to me," says Fant-Saez. "A lot of people who get on to DigiStudio are excited about how cool it is but don't know about the 'Make Selected Tracks Private' feature. Hanno now knows to group and highlight his original tracks, select 'Make Selected Tracks Private,' then mute those tracks or turn off voices and hide them immediately after uploading a file to me. Once he's posted his tracks in this manner, I just select 'Take Ownership of Tracks' when I download his tracks and I'm free to make any changes."

When Fant-Saez uploads her changes to Di Rosa he receives only her new arrangement and not a huge mess of both their tracks combined. "This way he doesn't see his original tracks and my re-arrangement of those original tracks and vocals in the same window when I send it back to him, and I don't see his tracks bounce back to me again when we collaborate on the song the next week. DigiStudio is a great to way to collaborate, its songwriting in the new millennium."

Pro Technique 3 —
Saving Sloppy File Management with Mezzo
Fant-Saez likes backing up her Pro Tools sessions with Grey Matter's Mezzo, a standalone program designed specifically for Pro Tools. Her AIT backup drive accommodates 50 GB tapes and she can restore an entire visiting client's album in less than 20 minutes—even if that client scattered unnamed audio files on multiple hard drives since last visiting Blue World.

"I do a lot of training with new Pro Tools users here so I'm really militant about telling people about file management," Fant-Saez continues after answering another phone call. "In fact, that was a friend in New York calling who inadvertently erased some files and didn't backup. It's typical for people, especially musicians, to have files laying everywhere all over one or more hard drives which can easily lead to confusion meltdowns, harmful crashes, and those dreaded 'Where is the audio?' messages when trying to load a session with files like that."

Fant-Saez advises every user to adopt the habit of naming their tracks before they record and admits it is her biggest pet peeve to receive a session with generic audio files on every track.

"Some users aren't aware that audio placed a session's audio files folder are named by the track name it originates from," continues this helpful Austinite. "I use command-shift-R quite frequently to rename files. If that's done before editing or right after processing a file, then when you rename the file it also names the region and disk file so the audio file renamed on the hard drive."

Fant-Saez has seen unnamed audio tracks cause more than a little grief. "I once used Norton [Utilities] to recover a friend's crashed hard drive and it put every single file into a folder called 'Recovered Files.' There were 10 songs with 32 tracks each and not one track was named. He had to listen back to every little chunk of sound because everything in the folder was called 'Audio1,' 'Audio2,' and so on. I've also seen Pro Tools have to search for a file and end up choosing the wrong audio file because everything was named 'Audio1', etc. Be sure to name your tracks and audio files and know where you save them!"

Whether Blue World's clients heed her advice or not, the affable and patient Fant-Saez can rely on Mezzo to save the day. "When users run out of space on a drive during a session they go right to another drive to finish the take or song. If they're using something like Retrospect and don't back up that second folder, though, they're screwed. With Mezzo, all you have to do is simply click on the Pro Tools session icon, drag it into the Mezzo folder on the desktop and it finds everything automatically--even if you've got bits of audio scattered over 20 local hard drives. It's backing up the Pro Tools session and audio instead of just backing up the location of a folder. I prefer it over Retrospect because it's built specifically for Pro Tools, and the incremental backup feature is unique to Mezzo."