Intro to Protools (Lesson 8) - Posted on 2018-02-12 by Hunter Rick

This lesson marked the first lesson I had with my new mentor David Hughes of Shine On Studios. We covered the importance of getting a good recording before even beginning a mix, the social aspect of the business, and the basics of protools.

He showed me several projects he was working on for clients, with the raws, and the current WIP mixes he had. Each one sounded phenomally better than the raw recordings. However, he stated that it's always best to have recordings good enough to be used as the final mix without any processing. You should only be polishing, not creating. One song in particular had very low quality recordings and so he had loads of processing going into it. 

When we spoke about clients he made it very clear the main goal in the end is to have them leave happy. When in the studio it's very important to keep a fun creative vibe, and to never interrupt an artists flow as it'll be very frustrating for both of you. It's also important to give the artist what they ask for in the end despite your own personal opinions of what sounds good. Finally, be aware of the impacat to your career when working on a project. Your name will be on the credits of that song or album and you want to make sure it's something you can be proud of showing people.

Finally, we spoke about optimizing pro-tools. He opened protools for me and went through the system settings one by one explaining the importance of them. Latency was to be turned up during playback, and lowered during recording. Backup files can be changed to save at a different rate per minute in case of crashes. There's also a different version of protools you can run called Protools HD which runs off its own harddrive and optomizes your computers CPU usage to the best of its abilities. I was also told I should lok into getting a surge protector as it'll help protect my gear from being fried in case of a surge.