Pro Techniques from BT

By Randy Alberts

It's safe to say that no one can squeeze more Pro Tools tips into a 15-minute cell phone call than the effusive BT. Even with his busy schedule creating wild successes — from his hit progressive house pop album, Movement in Still Life, to producing N'Sync's "Pop" single, doing soundtracks for The Fast & the Furious, Under Suspicion, and Go!, and cutting his recent Rare & Remixed CD of Godspeed, Sarah McLachlan, Seal, Tori Amos, and Mike Oldfield remixes — can't keep him from taking time out to get all geeky about gear and share some audio tricks.

"It's eight years running now that I've been chopping it up with Pro Tools," BT recalls between sessions for his new album and preparation for his upcoming tour. "I've been doing that vocal stutter effect for years that you now hear everywhere." He didn't include his trademark s-t-t-utter edit move as a tip here today, but BT was kind enough to share some of his own unique production techniques that he's been pioneering since first collaborating with Deep Dish in the early '90s. Always eager to experiment with audio and music creation, we caught up with BT just as he found some time between tours, soundtracks, and remix projects to start creating his next solo CD with Pro Tools.

Pro Technique 1 —
Penciling in a tempo-locked filter part
A new favorite effect for BT on his new album is to create rhythmic, randomized effects parts by automating plug-in parameters locked to grid. Using the pencil tool and selecting "Random curve" and a 1/16th-note grid, he likes to drag the pencil across to easily create random, yet time-locked, phaser, EQ filter, or sample hold effects.

"It's phenomenal and one of the most exciting things to me about using Pro Tools," BT continues. I'll then copy that bar and repeat it a bunch of times to create a groove or a whole song just from that. It's random in terms of the depth, plus you're automating the depth and can make it sound like a sample-hold filter or phaser that's in time with the tempo. The filter point or phaser depth or the EQ notch you're automating is random, yet all in tempo [he imitates with staccato "ee-ow-ee-ee-ow-ow-ee" vocal sounds]. I just go back over notes I've already played in MIDI with the random curve pencil as a cool way to add some rhythmic texture to a musical passage I already have or to use it as an accent line to the main rhythmic theme. It's great because you can add a rhythmic component to a sound that's subtle, yet locked in with what's happening rhythmically in the song."

Pro Technique 2 —
Turning a free aux send into a rhythmic instrument
After sharing an interest in merging alternate down-tuned acoustic guitar with electronic beats, BT quipped right back with another unique way to fuse rhythm into existing recorded parts. He's apparently been doing the same thing on his new album when it comes to acoustic guitar parts.

"Dude, here's a cool thing to do with an acoustic," says BT, barely catching his breath from the last tip. "Take a recorded guitar track and bus it out to an auxiliary fader. On the aux fader you put a filter, say an F1 [McDSP], or even simpler, just put a bandpass filter on the aux, automate the filter points like I was just explaining, and then send that filter into something like a [Digidesign] D-Verb. Now, you've got your clean original acoustic guitar signal and you then automate the filter points on that aux fader that's going into the reverb, and you can hear the acoustic guitar perfectly and then in the background. The effect is this filtering, bubbling wash of sound that's also very much in time with the tempo of the track because of the way you're automating the filter points. It sounds crazy but I do stuff like this every day!"

Pro Technique 3 —
Using Beat Detective by the bar on Zoolander
Don't even get BT started on Beat Detective. "I use it a lot, it's really phenomenal and I'm always talking with the Digidesign programmers about ways to make it even better." OK, but first the tip, then the programmer feedback.

BT finds that Beat Detective can often turn a bar around by the odd 1/16th note when working with source material rich in certain complex polyrhythms and triplets. He claims his solution of using Beat Detective with multiple bars-worth of source material and then progressively working in quarter, eighth, 16th, and 32nd note segments is the best approach to using Beat Detective.

"It sounds like a stupid thing, but if you use Beat Detective, you'll see that it can often turn the bar around by a 1/16th note," states BT. "If you start out using Beat Detective in progressively smaller chunks, it works really, really well for all sorts of different source material, but especially for things like drums. It's like zooming in beat-wise with Beat Detective."

BT suggests that the best way to use Beat Detective is to first capture a 16-bar selection, apply Beat Detective, then work in quarter-note and 16th-note chunks and such until satisfied with the results. He first developed this way of working with Pro Tools and Beat Detective when working on the soundtrack for the Ben Stiller movie, Zoolander. Importing North Indian-sounding Vedic tamboura parts at one point for that movie, BT thought Beat Detective was, again, phenomenal for the task.

"I'm so obsessive-compulsive about making the attacks sample accurate," he admits. "The tamboura stuff from Zoolander was the ultimate, perfect source material for working this way with Beat Detective. The tabla stuff in that movie was where I first developed the trick of using Beat Detective by the bar. Out of hundreds of ragas, I think there are only like four that are in 4/4 and there are lots of 64th notes. Every time I'd use Beat Detective on these intricate Indian parts, it was whipping it around by a 32nd or a 16th note. So, I thought, ‘What if I lined the bars up and then go back and do quarter notes and 32nds?' The result was just great! It adds two extra steps to the process, but it's fantastic."

OK, BT, now your feedback. "Beat Detective doesn't yet create attacks, which is actually something I'm talking to the Digidesign programmers about," BT concludes. "A really strong feature would be to add a timestretch-to-grid feature in Beat Detective, too, as opposed to doing a crossfade. It would be extremely powerful because there's nothing like Beat Detective, nothing is even comparable."