Week 10 Blog - Posted on 2015-04-19 by Andrew Jordan

This week I learned more about Pro Tools. I learned that Quick Punch, a feature of Pro Tools, allows you to set a key on your keyboard that you can press to immediately begin recording a track. When making music with Pro Tools, you should use Bars/Beats mode, and set a grid for the designated BPM of the song to make editing easier. When downloading plug-ins for Pro Tools, you should make sure they are in the same folder as the Pro Tools program data (although this is not required for the plug-ins to work, it is highly recommended for organizational purposes). When using insert plug-ins, you can apply an effect on a track or clip that can be removed at any time. On the other hand, when using AudioSuite plug-ins, you can apply effects to a track or clip, but here you actually render/change the actual audio rather than simply putting a removable effect on it. You can also map an electronic musical keyboard to Pro Tools and play around with effects and sounds using various different plug-ins. One of these plug-ins is called Structure Free, a sampler program that lets you map and patch sound clips to your keyboard. You can then play those sounds on the keyboard, altering the pitch of the sound accordingly with the keys you play. There is already a digital keyboard in Structure Free whose keys you can simply click on to play, so a physical keyboard is not required to operate the program, but having a musical keyboard would make playing with sounds and music much easier than not having one. You can group multiple tracks together so they show the same color; this makes it easy to tell what tracks belong together (drum tracks, vocal tracks, etc.). When grouping tracks together, you can also set it so that when adjusting the volume on one track, the volumes of rest of the tracks adjust themselves along with it. It is recommended that you make faders that you are not currently using inactive so minimal processing power is used.