I’m not gonna lie to you, the last few weeks have been amazing! Not only as an engineer, but also a fan of music. I am currently getting a chance to work with one of the most talented music people of our generation, Butch Vig.

Photo of Pro Tools 310 M Expert Level Class: In Atlanta: February 2012

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It goes without saying that you will want to use effects (fx) in your mix. We all like to hear a little reverb, maybe some delay, or any number of creative fx tools we have available to us in audio land. In fact, many of your favorite songs have an effect that is instantly recognizable such as Peter Frampton’s “Show Me The Way”, or any T-Pain song. It's hard to even imagine what certain songs would sound like without the creative use of fx in the mix. While we have discussed topics such as using reverb and delay in the past, I want to show you some new tools now available in Pro Tools that will really speed up your work flow and help you with complex routing and documentation.

Where do you start when you want to write and record a new song? Sometimes the hardest part is simply knowing where to begin. Let’s be honest, making a song from scratch can be an overwhelming task, especially since you are using creativity alongside technology, it can feel like you’re always hitting a brick wall. In this series of articles, we will be looking at various ways to approach the song making process and how Pro Tools can help you make your creativity come to life. We will be discussing the various phases of song production and the relevant technology you should be aware of.

One of the truly innovative feature modern DAW’s like Pro Tools have introduced to the world is the ability to manipulate audio in ways never thought possible. Amongst the myriad of features relating to editing and recording is a very powerful tool known as Elastic Audio. This feature is built into Pro Tools and gives us the ability to treat our audio as if it were a rubber band, hence the name, Elastic Audio.

How many of you have had a musical idea that can go in several different directions? I bet most of you have, it common with the creative cycle and it comes up quite a bit in production. Lucky for you, Pro Tools has some great feature that lets you quickly and easily deal with this situation.

Importing your vocals, or any track, from one session to another is a feature that has many different benefits in multiple situations: creative experimentation, music production, mixing, post-production, and re-mixing.

Using an audio bus for effective routing and mixing

When most of us think of a bus, we usually refer to our local public transportation system, and in reality these busses perform much the same function as an audio bus would in our D.A.W. or mixing console. Think about how a bus works, it has a specific path it follows and at any time someone can get on that bus and ride it to its final destination. Furthermore, there are many different busses each following their own path with their own passengers. This is exactly the same purpose of an audio bus, except instead of people, the passengers are audio signals. Also, if you think about it, a bus is only effective to get people from one point in the city to another. It generally doesn’t take you outside the city. For our purposes, the “city” is our mixing console. This is where the concept of an audio bus came to be. As recording started to get more complex and users were offered more audio tracks to work with, there was a need to be able to easily have control of those tracks. For our purposes, we will be looking at using a bus and return to control a “sub-group” of tracks. In our next article we will look at how to use busses for effect sends.

Hey there! I just thought I’d share a project I’m working on that comes up a lot as topic in our classes. “How do I renovate, or convert a space into a working and creative audio environment?”

There are many things that can get frustrating during the songwriting process: melody ideas, chord progressions, loops, the list goes on and on. Making this whole process a little more tedious can also be the constant digging through menu’s to find features and functions. It also doesn’t help that you are constantly pointing and clicking with a mouse the entire day. Luckily for you, and me, Pro Tools has many keyboard shortcuts that can easily speed up your workflow and have you spending less time with the mouse. *For the purpose of this article we will be using a full size keyboard with a numeric keypad.