From Slow Tools to Pro Tools

By Joe Gore

Learning the Pro Tools basics is easy. The hard part is becoming so fluent with the program's functions that they become second nature.

When you're starting out, it may seem that you'll never get past the stage of balancing the manual on your lap or squinting at edit menus. And if you're like me, you may actually feel more discouraged than inspired the first few times you witness great Pro Tools engineers in action. You already know their "secret": untold hours of practice. Experience is the only real route to PT fluency.

Keyboard Calisthenics
But while there aren't any secret tricks that can transform you into an audio shredder overnight, you can start developing some of the techniques the experts use to haul ass. If you start polishing these skills now, you'll get fast faster — and without having to unlearn inefficient habits later on.

You can think of the following techniques as the Pro Tools equivalent of practicing scales on an instrument. Just as no two musicians play exactly the same way, every expert Pro Tools user has a unique technique. But like great instrumentalists in all styles, PT pros have usually developed sharp keyboard skills that rely on a minimum of excess motion.

Chief among the wasteful moves we'll be trying to avoid:

1) Using pull-down menus when there's a key-command equivalent.

2) Schlepping your cursor across the screen to work the mode, view, and tools icons.

Or to put it more simply: We're going to work on keeping your cursor away from the top and upper-right-hand corner of the screen! Learning to control everything without removing your cursor from the waveform portion of the edit window is the single most important technique you can cultivate to increase your PT fluency.

(If you don't have a copy of the Keyboard Shortcuts, download them for Macintosh or Windows here. It's probably a good idea to print out a hard copy.)

Set Up a Session
Start by downloading the four sample files (Macintosh 2.5 MB, Windows 3 MB) — a stereo drum loop, and mono guitar and bass tracks. By now you should be pretty familiar with setting up a session from scratch:

1) Open Pro Tools.

2) Create a new session.

3) Select File/Import Audio to Track and load the "drum.L" and "drum.R" files via the convert/add dialog. Leave the bass and guitar files out for now.

4) Choose the default location: the audio files folder of the new session.

5) Select the large waveform view by click-holding on the ruler graphic to the immediate left of the audio file.

Now your screen should look something like this:

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(If your onscreen view is a lot more cluttered than this, try un-checking some of the options in Display/Edit Window Shows and Display/Ruler View Shows.)

Select the drum loop with the grabber tool and press Play. The pattern should loop cleanly. (If it's not looping, make sure Operations/Loop Playback is selected.) Note that the loop is four bars long.

Now calculate a session tempo with the AudioSuite/Time Compression/Expansion plug-in. Type "4" into the "bars:beats:ticks" field, and the loop's tempo appears: 104 BPM. Enter the new tempo in the Transport window (make sure the little conductor icon is deselected). If the Transport window isn't showing, don't use the Windows menu — type Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Win) + Keypad 1. (We'll be using several keypad-only commands in this lesson. If you're attempting this on a laptop, make sure you know how to access the keypad equivalents via your QWERTY keyboard.) Now the loop should occupy exactly four bars.

Click image to enlarge

Minimal Mousing
I've noticed that many good Pro Tools engineers never use the upper-left-hand-corner view controls or scroll bars. Let's take a look at some of the speedier alternatives.

1) Option (Mac) or Alt (Win) + A sizes your entire session to fit the screen, like so:

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2) Drag the selector over a small section of one drum region, then hit Option (Mac) or Alt (Win) + F, which sizes any selection to fill the screen, like this:

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3) Toggle back and forth between the Option (Mac) or Alt (Win) + A and Option (Mac) or Alt (Win) + F views. Big. Little. Big. Little. Woo-hoo.

4) Zoom in and out, camera-style, with the bracket keys. Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Win) + [ and + ] adjust the horizontal. Command/Option (Mac) or Ctrl/Alt (Win) + [ and + ] tweak the vertical.

5) Memorize these six commands. Run them over and over until they start to feel automatic.

Views You Can Use
Pro Tools also lets you store five instant-recall views, accessible via the numbered buttons below the navigation arrows in the upper-left-hand corner. But you, key-command ace that you are, will surely prefer to switch views by pressing Control (Mac) or Start (Win) + alphanumeric keys 1 through 5. (You may find, as I do, that Digidesign's preset settings work just fine for you. But you can also store your own settings by selecting a view as outlined above, holding down Command + Control (Mac) or Ctrl + Start (Win) and clicking directly on an upper-left-hand-corner numeral. It will blink several times to indicate the that the new setting has been stored.)

A Good Sense of Zoomer
The Zoomer tool provides yet more ways to adjust your screen views. Try these moves:

1) Select the tool and click on the waveform. Watch it grow. Holding down the option key while clicking zooms you back out.

2) Drag-click across the waveform with the Zoomer. The dragged-over segment fills the view. Keep click-dragging over a single area to get a sense of how quickly Pro Tools lets you travel from a global view to a single waveform.

3) One super-fast way to navigate views: Alternating between the Option + A (Mac) or Alt + A (Win) (view entire session) command and click-drag zooming. Practice it.

Finally, make sure you know these two essential navigation commands: Pressing the numeric keypad's asterisk lets you position the cursor anywhere in the song by typing in a bar number. And the Return key places the cursor at the start of the session.

Functionally Literate
The fastest way to select that Zoomer: The F5 key. In fact, the function keys are the smoothest way to select editing tools and zip between Shuffle, Slip, Spot, and Grid modes. Even if you're the sort of computer user who tends to view the function keys chiefly as a pencil holder, you owe it to yourself to explore the ways they can accelerate your Pro Tools editing.

Laptop users are not excused! On a Mac laptop, you may want to set your top row of keys so that they default to function keys, rather than brightness and volume controls. Make the adjustment in Control Panels/Keyboard/Function Keys/Deselect "Use F1 through F12 as Hot Function Keys."

The layout is fairly intuitive: F1 through F4 set the edit modes. F5 through F10 select the edit tools. Check it out.

Groove Microsurgery
Let's try combining function keys and zoom techniques in a real-life scenario: Fixing a track recorded by a musician with a lousy sense of time.

Import the guitar track as you did the drum track. Now you should have something like this:

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Highlight the guitar track and use that Option (Mac) or Alt (Win) + F move so it fills the screen:

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Listen to the drums and guitar looped. Does that guitarist suck, or what? The second chord lands early, and the third and fourth are way late. Our work-putting the guitar chords in time-is cut out for us.

1) Start by setting the Grid resolution via the pull-down menu in the upper-right-hand corner. Since the guitar chords are supposed to fall on the downbeat of each measure, set it as coarse as possible: 1 Bar.

2) Press F5 to activate the Zoomer.

3) Drag it over the second guitar stab.

4) Press F7 to change the Zoomer to the Selector. Click precisely at the start of the guitar chord. If Pro Tools doesn't allow you to situate it right at the start of the chord, that's probably because you're in Grid mode. Press F2 to make sure you're in Slip mode.

5) Make a cut here using the Command + E (Mac) or Ctrl + E (Win) command.

6) Now choose Grid mode by pressing F4. Activate the grabber with key F8.

7) Drag the newly separate region slightly to the right so it "clicks" into place at location 2|1|000, like so:

Now we're going to reposition the other guitar chords. Zoom back out via any of the abovementioned means, then repeat steps 2 through 7 at locations 3|1|000 and 4|1|000. (Remember, these later beats are further out of time than the one at bar 2.) That should give you something like this:

Click image to enlarge

Now when you loop the drum track, the guitar should sound fairly solid. You may hear some clicks on the guitar track, depending on how accurately you made your cuts (namely, at the exact start off the first loud waveform of each guitar stab, as opposed to somewhere mid-waveform). If you were a little sloppy, don't sweat it. You can smooth the edits with crossfades like so:

1) Choose the selector tool with F7. Triple-click anywhere on the guitar track to select the whole shebang.

2) Press Command + F (Mac) or Ctrl + F (Win) to open the Batch Fades menu.

3) Press "OK."

Now the guitar performance should sound smooth and click-free. (We'll go deeper into cuts and fades in an upcoming installment.)

Finally, you can simplify the view by selecting the entire guitar track again and pressing Option + Shift + 3 (Mac) or Alt + Shift + 3 (Win), which consolidates the fragments into a single region.

Now import the bass track. You'll find similar groove deficiencies here too. Try repairing them, only this time with the Grid set to "1/16th note," since the part includes both eighth-notes and sixteenth-notes. This repair job will take longer-there are a lot more notes! You'll wind up with something like this.

Create crossfades and consolidate the regions as detailed above.

If you're feeling ambitious, check out another timesaver and read the section in the manual explaining the Tab-to-Transient function — an even faster way to make some of these edits. We'll look at that technique in an upcoming installment.

We've barreled through a lot of material here. Don't expect to get it all under your fingers overnight. Until you do, you might want to create a cheat sheet for the new commands covered in this lesson:

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