This article closes the series devoted to digging into some of the Pro Tools features that help you work faster in this DAW. We have covered topics such as naming conventions and playlists, track creation and templates, exporting sessions and files, modifier keys, comping, relinking and file management, visual editing and snapping... all accompanied by the corresponding keyboard shortcuts that let you carry out these tasks efficiently. This third installment adds new editing methods and covers various shortcuts for automation, navigation and mixing.
Once again, version 7.4 is our reference and, to save space, only the Mac shortcuts are given throughout the text. The summary table lists both the Mac and Windows shortcuts.
Editing
The previous article described how to do pocketing, a procedure that consists of editing the tracks before mixing to correct small performance flaws in the various instruments.
It explained how to do this editing using visual editing, which, among other things, makes use of the nudge function (+ and - keys on the numeric keypad) to move regions forward and backward in time.
After you have spent a while moving regions back and forth, it is sometimes useful to return a region to its original position, to check how everything was at the start and evaluate the work you're doing.
You can do this with Spot edit mode (F3). This mode is commonly used in post-production, and it lets you move regions by entering numerically the location where you want to place them.
Figure 1 shows the dialog box that appears when you move a region in Spot mode. You can see that the region is at 5|1|155 (Start), but it was originally at 5|1|127 (Original Time Stamp). To return the region to its original position, just click the black triangle next to the Original Time Stamp value and click OK.
This way, no matter how many times the region has been moved, you can always “undo” the entire edit and go back to the starting point.
Another very useful editing tool is the well-known Beat Detective, which detects transients in an audio region and automatically places them on the grid.
A full explanation of how to use this tool would fill an entire article, especially when it comes to drum editing. That is not the aim of this text, but we do want to offer a brief guide to using Beat Detective quickly for small edits.
Suppose you want to edit the percussion region in image 1. The Beat Detective window is available under the Event menu, or with the keyboard shortcut Command+8.
Once this window is open, go to the “Region Separation” option, select the part of the region you want to edit and click “Capture Selection.”
Next, select the analysis type (Low Emphasis for instruments with mostly low-frequency content and High Emphasis for high-pitched instruments) and click Analyze.
If the sensitivity is at zero, no transients will appear. Move the horizontal slider to reveal the detected transients, and once all of them are marked with a vertical bar, click Separate.
At this point, the region will have been cut, with each hit separated into its own region (Fig. 2).
Next, go to the Region Conform tab and click “Conform” to align the different regions with the grid. If the subdivision (eighth notes, sixteenth notes, etc.) of the audio or the grid has not been selected correctly, the regions may not land properly. If so, just go back to the previous step and select the right subdivision.
Once the individual hits are properly aligned (Fig. 3), some regions will probably overlap others and there will be “blank spaces” in some places.
To fix this, go to the last tab, Edit Smoothing, and after selecting the “Fill and crossfade” option and specifying the desired crossfade length, click Smooth. This “fills” the gaps between the regions and places a crossfade between them (Fig. 4).
Of course, Beat Detective is far more versatile than all this. As mentioned earlier, we have deliberately set aside many of the tool's options and possibilities, since there are so many and they are so varied.
In fact, this small edit could also have been done with the “Separate Region at Transients” command (Edit menu -> Separate), which does a job similar to Beat Detective's “Separate Region” but without the options for subdivision, analysis type, resolution, collection mode, etc.
Once the regions were separated with this command, they could have been placed with Quantize To Grid (Command+0 or Region menu -> Quantize to Grid) and, this time, the edit could have been “smoothed” with BD's Edit Smoothing option.
This second approach offers far fewer options, but it has the advantage of being very fast, which makes it useful when you want to test how an edit might work without the laborious process BD can require.
Region Groups
If you now wanted to copy these regions somewhere else, a convenient way would be to first make a Region Group out of them. To do so, select the regions and press Command+Alt+G, which creates a new “virtual” region containing all of them (Fig. 5).
It is virtual because no new audio region has actually been created, as would have happened if you had consolidated the regions (Alt+Shift+3). Region groups can be ungrouped (Command+Alt+U), and the underlying regions reappear.
When you want to copy many regions at once, region groups are very useful, since you can make divisions that in turn contain other groups, and you can even group regions spread across different tracks.
Groups can be given a name. Another added benefit is that they “camouflage” the underlying regions by showing a single waveform, which is visually convenient when you have made a lot of automatic edits like those done with Beat Detective.
Loops
Once you have edited the percussion region and created a group, you will most likely want to “copy and paste” it throughout the session to make a loop out of it.
To do this, first adjust the length of the group so that it is an exact number of bars (in the example in Figure 6, one bar), and add a fade in and a fade out to avoid clicks. As you can see, the usual Trim, Fade and other tools work on these groups.
Then you would just copy and paste the group as many times as needed, or use the Repeat function (Alt+R), which does this automatically a set number of times.
However, a more convenient way is to use the Region Looping tool (Command+Alt+L), which lets you specify the loop length in repetitions, bars, or until it hits another region or the end of the session, and also offers the option of creating a crossfade automatically between repetitions (Fig. 7).
Once a region loop has been created (Fig. 8), it becomes a single new region (not a set of many regions, as with the Repeat function), so it can easily be moved to another point in the session, or its length can be adjusted afterward with the Trim tool.
Navigation
Speaking of getting around the session, one of the places where you typically lose the most time is moving the mouse back and forth to click an edit mode, change the zoom (vertical or horizontal), scroll the page, jump to a specific point in time, and so on.
The edit modes are available on the first four function keys (F1, F2, F3 and F4), zoom on F5, and the edit tools on the keys from F6 through F10.
To access the Smart Tool (see the first article in this series), press either F6+F7 or F7+F8, and the zoom presets are on the keys 1 through 5.
If you want to change these presets, just set the screen to the zoom level you want and Command+click one of the numbers shown beneath the navigation keys (see Figure 9).
A widely known shortcut is the horizontal zoom keys (In = T, Out = R), but perhaps the shortcut for changing the vertical size of tracks is less well known: Ctrl+Up/Down Arrow to increase/decrease the size of the tracks where the cursor is.
Similarly, Command+Ctrl+Up Arrow (or Down) lets you select the “Fit to window” size for the tracks where the cursor is, and Command+Alt+Ctrl+Arrow lets you fit all the tracks in the session vertically. Horizontal centering is done with Alt+A.
The Page Up/Down keys scroll vertically through the screen, and if you add Alt, the scrolling is horizontal.
Markers are also a very useful tool for navigating the session. To create a marker, press the Enter key on the numeric keypad, and in it you can store information about a point on the timeline, a selection you've made, the zoom levels of the tracks, the size and tracks displayed, and so on.
As you can see in Figure 10, each marker can be assigned a number. This is very useful, because from any point in the session you can recall a marker by pressing “.+marker number+.” (that is, “numeric keypad period key” + “marker number” + “numeric keypad period key”).
Many people find it useful to do a vertical and horizontal fit to get a view of the whole session and store that information in marker number one. That way, pressing “.1.” zooms out to give you a global view of the state of the session.
Markers can also be recalled from the Memory Locations window (Command+5 on the numeric keypad) and, similarly, the Transport window is under Command+1 and the automation window opens with Command+4 (the other numbers call up other windows).
As for Window Configurations, this feature lets you arrange windows and their sizes in different ways and store them in a configuration.
As with markers, it is usually helpful to create a few common configurations and save them, such as one for editing and another for normal work.
In the first, the edit window is left free of every kind of horizontal ruler (Min:Secs, Tempo, Key, etc.), and vertically it shows only the track name information (I/O, plug-ins, sends, etc. are removed). That way you gain as much room as possible for editing, and you store it as, say, configuration “1.”
In configuration “2” you save the edit window with all the information that was removed before, and switching from one to the other is as easy as pressing “.1*” or “.2*” on the numeric keypad.
In addition, each window configuration can be assigned to a different marker, so the possibilities are enormous: in a single marker you can store the zoom information, track sizes, etc. and assign it the configuration of the windows themselves.
Note: all the keyboard shortcuts given are valid with the Keyboard Focus feature enabled. You can access this feature at the upper left of the edit window (the little “a..z” next to Tab to Transients, see Figure 9).
Automation and Mixing
You probably already know that to enable plug-in automation you open the Auto tab at the top of the plug-in and select which parameters you want to enable.
You can also reach this window by Command+Alt+Ctrl+clicking the track view selector (where it says waveform, volume, pan, etc.), and to switch to the automation view of a given element, just Command+Ctrl+click it.
That is, with Command+Ctrl held down, clicking the fader switches the edit window to volume automation, clicking the track name goes to waveform, clicking the pan knob opens pan, clicking a plug-in parameter opens that parameter, and so on. Once you get in the habit, this keyboard shortcut lets you work much faster.
When you're about to write automation, it's worth knowing that with the Smart Tool selected, Command+click sets a point, Alt+click deletes it, and Ctrl momentarily switches to the Pencil tool.
Similarly, while in Grid mode, holding Command momentarily switches to Slip mode, so you can edit (adjust a fade, place the cursor, move a region) freely without having to change modes.
Other Shortcuts
Continuing with modifier keys, if you want to adjust a parameter precisely, just hold Command to enter “Fine tune” while you move the corresponding fader, pan, etc.
When you have a selection on a track, you can move the selection to adjacent tracks with Ctrl+P/; to go up and down, respectively.
As for Paste Special, it lets you copy and paste one type of automation onto another type. For example, if you want to apply volume automation to pan, just press Command+C on the first and Command+Ctrl+V on the second.
Once the whole mix is ready, it's time to do a Bounce to Disk (Command+Alt+B). Lately, though, a growing number of people prefer to record straight to disk instead of bouncing.
To do this, just assign all the outputs of the main channels to a single bus, and then pick that bus up at the input of an audio track. Instead of bouncing, you simply arm the “master” track and record onto it the signal coming from all the others.
Then, to export the region, use the Export Region as Files command (Command+Shift+K), where you can select the file type, sample rate and bit depth (Pro Tools' dither is applied automatically if needed).
This method has the advantage that you can work the faders or controls while recording (not possible with bounce to disk), and you can also stop the dump at any time and pick up from that point. Afterward, you only need to consolidate the regions before exporting them.
Here are a couple of very useful commands, available only on HD.
With the “Copy to Send” command you can copy any type of automation on a track to that track's sends. That way, once the main faders' levels are set, copying that mix to the headphone sends is as simple as pressing Command+Alt+H and indicating that you want to copy the volume information to the send you're using.
Similarly, you can import entire mixes from one session into another. Open the Import Session Data dialog (Alt+Shift+I), click “Match Tracks” so Pro Tools assigns (by name) the source tracks to the destination tracks, and then indicate that you only want to import the level and plug-in information.
