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.

Have you ever run out of processing power trying to get a reverb on each of your tracks? This is a common problem if you put a reverb plug-in directly onto each track. Reverb is probably one of the most DSP hungry plug-ins you can run. The more efficient and professional way to use Reverbs, and other additive types of effects like delays, chorus, flangers, etc,, is to insert the additive effect onto a stereo Aux Input track. Then, create sends from each track that go to said aux track, and bring up the send levels from each individual track, adding as much effect as you like to each! So here is a quick guide how to create an Aux Track, insert a Reverb or other additive effect, and then effectively create sends to the Reverb!