Pro Tools: Expert Guides and Resources

Pro Tools is an audio and musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) recording program. Aside from recording audio and MIDI tracks, you can use Pro Tools to tweak your recordings to a high level of detail, clarity, and accuracy. It features some of the most powerful editing functions available.Pro Tools also offers excellent mixing capabilities that help you mix your tracks together, EQ (equalize) them, and apply effects.

Chances are, at some point, you’ll have a track that works well overall but has a few timing issues. Rather than re-record and hope for a better take, you can fix the timing of your note using Elastic Audio (of course, you can also re-record just the section you want to fix with a punch recording). Here, you are introduced to the Elastic Audio process and shows you how to fix the timing of an audio performance.

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).

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).

Pro Tools has six types of tracks (Audio, Auxiliary Input, Master Fader, VCA Master, MIDI, and Instrument) as well as two track formats (mono and stereo). All possible permutations and combinations of these various types and formats are explained with subtlety and style here. Pro Tools track types When you work with tracks in Pro Tools, you have to keep in mind that you’re sure to end up dealing with six distinct flavors of tracks.

Before you can do any recording, editing, or mixing in Pro Tools, you have to set up a session in which to work. A session in Pro Tools is simply a song file that contains all the audio and MIDI tracks, plug-ins, and mixer settings for all your tracks. Pro Tools session files don’t actually contain the audio data; instead, they just have the audio files attached to them.

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.

The makers of Pro Tools only offer one host-based interface, the Eleven Rack. Built for guitarists, the Eleven Rack is both a recording interface and a standalone live unit. The Eleven Rack interface has a limited number of inputs and outputs, but it makes up for this deficit by including serious power for guitar-amp modeling and effects.