Jeff Strong

Congratulations! You have used your home recording studio and produced a final product. Now you have to work on getting people interested in buying your music. You’ve just gone from being a musician-composer-engineer-producer to being all those plus a record-company-owner-businessperson. (Exactly how hyphenated can a person get, anyway?

Writing automation for your home recording is easy— simply enable the parameter for which you want to write automation data, choose your automation mode, and then adjust the parameter as the session plays. The following sections detail this process.While automation is being written, it appears in your track as breakpoints with lines (ramps) between these points.

One of the best things about recording with MIDI (the Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is that, aside from being able to change the sound at any point without any compromises to the performance, you have immense control over nearly all aspects of your musical performance.In most newer sequencer programs, you have two main windows from which to do your editing.

Once you start learning your way around Pro Tools, you probably want to know how to start using MIDI, right? To get started with MIDI devices and Pro Tools, you first need to know just what you have to buy to do some MIDI-ing yourself. Well, sorry to inform you that you can’t do any of this cool MIDI stuff with your vintage Stratocaster guitar or your acoustic drum set (unless you do some fancy rigging to your gear).

Recording audio tracks in Pro Tools requires that you first choose your Record mode, create a track, set levels, enable recording, and turn on a click track (if you’re using one).After you have all these steps taken care of, you’re ready to record some audio in Pro Tools. The following information leads you through recording a single track or multiple tracks, undoing or canceling takes (recorded performances), recording additional takes, auditioning takes, and using playlists to organize and choose which takes to listen to.

Chances are that your studio occupies a corner in your living room, a spare bedroom, or a section of your basement or garage. All these spaces are less-than-ideal recording environments. Even if you intend to record mostly by plugging your instrument or sound module directly into the mixer, how your room sounds will have a big effect on how good your music will turn out to be.

Whenever you want to process tracks in Pro Tools — add EQ, effects, or dynamics processors — you use a plug-in. Plug-ins are audio-processing tools that change the sound of your original file. Some plug-ins permanently alter the original file and work offline (that is, processing happens without playing the session).