Pro Tools Track Types with Fab Dupont

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Good morning, children! Today, we're going to explore new topics to help you hold your own in good society conversation namely: we're going to explore track types in Pro Tools! First, let's reflect on the concept of tracks: A track in Pro Tools hmm..

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Traditionally a track was on the recorder, on the tape player, say your Studer would have 16 or 24 tracks if you have the money.

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And then you had a channel on the console: a Neve or - for other people - an SSL.

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Or maybe a Trident.

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But in Pro Tools the track is both the track and the channel! So the track that you know is called a track let's look to at a track's a track..

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..that's a track! This one's mono and this one's stereo. For those of you who wonder how I was able to put tracks in Pro Tools without touching my mouse I recommend Shift+Cmd+N which brings this 'New Track'.

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So here's the way to think about it: In Pro Tools, this is your channel and here, right here, is your track.

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And it's an all-in-one object that can play audio onto its track here and process it here.

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Right now, we're gonna look at the next track type, which is: the aux input.

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Aux Input, let's make a mono one and let's make a stereo one.

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Boom.

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What is the purpose of an aux channel.

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Well, there are many purposes.

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One is aux returns.

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You can use it for delays and reverbs.

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You can use it for parallel processing and you can use it to submix or to sum different channels for example: say you're a kind soul and you let your drummer have more than one tom.

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Say they have five toms.

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You're not gonna process five toms separately because you're not that kind of girl.

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What you're gonna do is you're gonna take these five toms and sum them down to a stereo channel that has all five toms summed together.

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You're gonna use an Aux Input for that.

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Here's where people get really confused with Pro Tools: people are used to calling these things a Bus right? 'Oh, let's bus this down!' But Pro Tools calls it an Aux Input and by the way the channel icon for the Aux Input is that little down arrow, here.

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So you can tell: this is an Audio Track and this is an Aux Input.

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I understand it's confusing but this is the way you can think about it: This is the bus in Pro Tools.

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You can see here, you can go and choose a Bus.

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So the bus in Pro Tools is not the receiving object the bus in Pro Tools is the cable.

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Ok, think of the busses in Pro Tools as cables.

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And the busses in Pro Tools let you go from track to track from track to aux input and so on and so forth.

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And that's a really important concept.

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I'll rewind. [TAPE REWINDING] In Pro Tools a bus is just a connector cable in-between two objects, it is not a receiving object.

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Next track type is a master fader this is another typically Pro Tools concept.

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Remember this guy? Well, this guy happens to have a volume knob on it if you want to and only if you want to.

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I'll show you an example.

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Let's imagine that these are my toms.

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Ok? And let's imagine that this is my tom submix so I'm gonna call it: 'Toms Submix' just so we know what it is.

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And then I'm gonna choose a bus as the input of that aux.

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Still with me? Ok, good.

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Now, these are my toms, Audio 1 and Audio 2 or Tom 1 and Tom 2 and I'm gonna send them to Bus 1-2.

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Meaning, I'm gonna connect this guy to the output of these two objects and the input of this object.

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Consequently now anything that's playing from these audio tracks right here will go through these two objects and then be fed to the input of this Aux Input..

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..remember: this guy who goes between the object audio track to the object aux input, as a connector, has the ability to have a volume knob on it and that volume knob is the master fader's.

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All you have to do is choose that cable (bus) as the object that the master masters.

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Quick mid-term summary: We have the Audio Track object which is a combination of a tape player like 'audio player' and a console channel.

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We have the Aux Input object that is just a console channel, just a receiver, a summer, or an aux return, we have the bus object, which is invisible, you can only see by name, at the output of a track or the input of a track or at the send, right here, of a track and that is just a cable, just a connector in-between two other object types and then we have the master object which is just a volume know for the bus object or physical outputs.

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Next in line we have the VCA object.

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For those of you who were born yesterday, a VCA is a Voltage Controlled Amplifier.

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What does that mean? Back in the day.. '70s and '80s when they had big consoles with lots of faders and they wanted to be able to bring a bunch of faders together they had to find a way to make that happen with the technology at the time. And what they did is they basically had one fader physically control the other faders and that was a VCA. Because it's a very useful device, they have adapted this concept to the DAW environment, even though obviously they don't really need to have a VCA here, because everything is virtual anyway, but there are very good uses to a VCA.

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A lot of people get confused about the difference between a VCA and an Aux.

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An Aux Input will pass audio from the tracks that feed it 2, 5, 100 tracks.

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Whereas a VCA is just a fader remote controller and also a mute and solo remote controller for that many tracks.

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Next track type is the MIDI track.

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So, the MIDI track in Pro Tools and any DAW, really, is an abstraction because there is no MIDI running in the DAW.

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Right? It is MIDI data, it's playback data for MIDI instruments and it will only turn to MIDI if you feed it out to a physical MIDI interface and feed it out to an old keyboard that has MIDI on it but most of the time you are gonna feed that to a virtual instrument because nobody has hardware keyboards, these days.

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Next track type is the Instrument track type.

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That's an interesting one! What is this object type: it is a smart combo of a MIDI object and an Aux Input object, which means that you can put an instrument on there, so for example, in good company, so many instruments so little time, let's do XPand 2 for example, love this thing! You can put an instrument on that track but you can also turn it in record and hit a keyboard..

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and get sound right away.

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Before the Instrument object existed in Pro Tools you had to have a MIDI object and an Aux Input object and connect the MIDI to the Aux Input, up there, in the Instrument area and then you could make music. Now you have this one object and you're able to put an Instrument on it and use it both for the MIDI data and for the audio data, because you can still process all this stuff like, for example, here I could put like a really nice compressor, like this.

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And hit it: Give it some attack and then play some tasteful stuff..

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Well, that happened! Ok, so now the Video track doesn't show in the audio mixer you have to switch to the Arrange window to see it.

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And this is where you're gonna drop the video if you're gonna score to video.

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It has lots of interesting features, it is not a full-featured video editor but it's very practical you can drop videos in it, you can score to video you can cut it a little bit, you can move it around, it can be in frames, it can be in samples, there's a lot of things you can do with it but it's not a primary focus here, today, so I'm gonna move back to the audio side, which is the interesting side of what we do.

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So now that we are acquainted with all the different objects let's look at a couple things that are often overlooked and what they can do for you.

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For example, here: for me to be able to show you this resolution my resolution on the screen is quite small, which means that I can't see it all at once.

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The beauty here is, this little window here lets you choose what you see.

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So if we go down to only five sends and five inserts, I can now see everything I am doing.

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Another really cool trick that these tracks can do is, for example, say I wanna send my aux..

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..1, to my toms sub, I'm gonna use the Bus 1-2, remember: the bus is just a cable.

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And I can choose here what I'll do with it. But more importantly in my track I can show my element like this. All I do is Cmd+Click on it and it opens and closes.

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And that's really awesome. So you can open and close as many of these as you want. So you can really have like a physical console, a real view of what's going on without having to go dig inside which is really great for mixing quickly.

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Here's another cool trick, let's create another mono audio track.

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There you go, Audio 3, I'm gonna put it with its little brothers and sisters, right here.

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And say I would like to send this to the toms submix.

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I have several options to do that.

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Remember, I'm using Bus 1-2 to go from these audio tracks to this aux track.

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I could go here, select Bus > Bus 1-2 and it's going there. Now, if I have a big session with 100 or 150 busses it's really difficult to find that.

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So another way to do this is to use this track menu, here.

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If you go here, you can go down to "track" and you can say, I'm gonna send this track to the toms submix. And it looks for the bus and connects it automatically for you. And that's really awesome.

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Another cool trick is: imagine that this toms submix is the best thing in the universe but you need to put a reverb on it.

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The traditional way of doing this is create a new stereo Aux Input, find a bus that's free, say for example Bus 3-4, connect the send to that bus and connect the input of your reverb to the same bus, bus 3-4, call the track 'Reverb' maybe call the bus 'Reverb' too because we're grown ups we name our busses and then assign a reverb plug-in on it, something tasteful like an UAD 250.

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Ok, so that's the process.

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Now, you can use this send, you can look at it here, too, it's pretty! You can use this send to send this toms submix to the reverb.

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Fair enough.

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But say you don't have that kinda patience and you want to work faster, here's a cool trick that's fairly recent in Pro Tools, like two or three revs ago.

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Straight from this aux send I can click here and say 'New Track' I can decide that this new track is an Aux Input and it's stereo and I'm gonna call it: 'Quick Reverb'.

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And Pro Tools will create an Aux Input, create a bus, name it 'Quick Reverb', connect the output of the send to the bus, connect the input of the track to the bus, name the track and then all you have to do is put a reverb on it: boom! And that's a lot more efficient.

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Another cool thing that tracks can do is I/O Inserts.

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And this is really important if you work with a big Pro Tools rig and you have hardware.

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You could use your Manleys, your Dangerous as inserts as plug-ins, all you have to do is, here in Insert, use the I/O function, and what it does is it looks for a pair of outputs and a pair of inputs that are matched, so for example say I have my..

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..my Dangerous Liaison with my entire rig here, on I/O 3-4 and say I want to insert that on my toms submix.

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I'm gonna go to my inserts and I'm gonna I/O 3-4.

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Pro Tools is gonna take the signal, is gonna go through the aux input, it's gonna hit this insert, it will send the audio from this aux input to Output 3-4 of your interface.

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You will do what you wanna do with your Liaison and all your little, pretty processing..

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..and you will connect that back to Input 3-4 and then Pro Tools will take that input, delay compensate it, perfectly phase accurate, and feed it back to the rest of the stack, right here.

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And that is wonderful! It also works on masters, by the way.

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For those of you who are still scratching their hands on the VCA thing, let me show you: Say, we're gonna get all the stuff that we don't need out of the way and make them inactive.

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By the way you can hide these tracks like this, and they're still here but they're just no longer visible, you can decide if they're visible here or not.

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Most of the time, when I am in the mixer view I keep this window open, because that gives me an idea of everything that's available including the inactive tracks.

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The inactive tracks give you DSP back and your CPU back so you don't have to worry about that.

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You don't have to hide them but since I am a little bit OCD on the sides I like to hide stuff I don't use.

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These are my 3 toms, let's them name 'Tom..' because I am not OCD.

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'Tom 2', 'Tom 3'.

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Good.

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And these three toms are going through my tom submix aux object.

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Of course since I am not OCD I'm gonna rename the bus, remember: just the cable, 'Tom Submix' and you can do that by right-clicking on the bus and you can rename it, you can make the bus inactive and you can do a whole bunch of stuff, here, which is not for this video, it's gonna get too complicated but this is the basics you know to be able to function in Pro Tools.

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So now these three toms are being submixed through an aux object, which means the audio of the three toms is going through the aux object. So if you take this down, obviously, the sound of the three toms is gonna come down in concert, and if you put an EQ here, like this, this is a good EQ, and you do this, all three toms, because they go through this object, will get the boost and EQ.

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What if I wanna be able to change the volumes of these three toms together before it hits the object.

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What you would do is: you would create a group like this, Cmd+G, and call it say something very specific like: 'Tom..

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..s' and give it a good letter, I tend to try and give it like the same letter as the instrument, so 'T' for tom.

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Boom.

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So now these move together.

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If you wanna move just one of the group there's a clutch system which is a life saver! With your pinkie you hit Control and then you can move one fader and offset the range in-between the three tom faders or whatever faders you have.

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It also works for kazoo faders! Why would you need a VCA? Well, say for example you had 100 faders.

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You could assign the VCA to that group 'Toms' and now you can change all the toms levels, you can solo all the toms and you can mute all the toms from this one object, right here.

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What I do is, I call it: little 'v' Toms.

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Imagine, you have 200 tracks.

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And you have one VCA for drums, one VCA for all basses, one VCA for all guitars, one VCA for all keyboards, one VCA for all vocals and one VCA for all the kazoos.

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You keep all those VCAs to the right of your session or to the left, depending on your political leaning and now you have your entire control over the whole session with just the VCAs without having to look at 100 tracks.

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But! It's different from an Aux that is submixing a bunch of those tracks.

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Remember that! With the VCAs you can actually change how hard a group of tracks is hitting an aux, right? Or less hard so, for example, you could use a VCA of all your drums to lower all the drums proportionally before they hit 2-bus compression.

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All this to say that the object track types in Pro Tools are incredibly flexible and let you do just about anything you want which makes the strength of the software for example: say you wanna print this submix.

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You can do it offline and say commit, or you could do it manually just for a little moment in time and say: create a new track make that an audio track and call it 'Tom Sub Print' and now this aux object is being routed automatically through a new bus automatically created for you to this new track which you can put in record and you can record into it so it's really kinda like a tinkertoy, build-your-own-mixer if you want to with enough automatism that you don't have to go crazy.

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The ability to clutch groups, the ability to route from anything to anything, the ability to choose VCAs on the fly, change them, to VCA VCAs, to VCA masters, to have masters and all that stuff and being able to arrange it the way you want is so strong that it makes using other DAWs quite complicated after that and there's a lot of chasing after these features in other DAWs.

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So it is very interesting to learn Pro Tools to be able to figure out this workflow so that when you go back to your regular DAW you can use these techniques to ease up the workflow and go to a more traditional, better workflow, better gain stage in all the DAWs.

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Meaning: when you have a track here, in this view, you have a track here, in this view, and if the track is here in this view, it is also here, in this view.

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And, if you move this track from here to here, in this view, guess what?! It's moved to there, in this view! Isn't that wonderful? That, my friends, is the pure genius of Pro Tools.

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