We all know that to be a real Pro Tools power user you need to know your shortcuts. I’m not sure anyone knows them all but considering I speak to veteran users with decades of Pro Tools experience who are still learning new shortcuts it seems there is always more to learn.
In this article, we collect 30 of our favorite shortcut tips for you to peruse and hopefully find something new. If you’re just starting your journey into Pro Tools shortcuts, or even if you’re not, you could speed things up a lot by considering getting a shortcuts keyboard or overlay like the ones from Editors Keys. It helps if you struggle to get those shortcuts to “stick” in your muscle memory.
The 2022.4 release of Pro Tools was dominated by the changes to the product lineup. However there is one feature which surprised many and deserves close examination as it affects one of the things we have taken for granted for so long - Pro Tools keyboard shortcuts can now be customised!
In this article, we collect 30 of our favourite shortcut tips for you to peruse and hopefully find something new.
The Command Focus single keystroke shortcuts are so useful many of us don’t consider turning them off. We look at 3 reasons you might want to do this.
Most of us are aware of the commonly used keyboard shortcuts for things like New Track, Save Session, making an Edit, etc. However, there are some less well-known keyboard shortcuts in Pro Tools based around the 3 fingered salute and it’s these we are going to focus on in this article.
To become fluent in managing automation it really helps if you can see what you need to see when you need to see it. This keyboard shortcut really helps speed things up. Find out more in this free tip.
In this premium video tutorial, Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers takes a thorough tour of all the ways the scroll wheel can be used in Pro Tools. Scrolling and zooming, MIDI, clip gain and more. With some bonus, related keyboard shortcuts for good measure!
Here’s a really handy tip which will speed up your editing. When trimming, if you want to trim exactly to the boundary of the next or previous clip, check out this article to learn all about this.
Navigating large sessions can be hard work if you’re not used to it. Once the edit window gets deeper than your screen you have a few choices, you can hide some tracks, you can reduce the size of the tracks or you can scroll up and down the edit window. Going straight to the track you’re interested in can be done by using Scroll to Track Command but there is a faster way using the Tracks List in the left hand sidebar.
If your MIDI is always either off the top or the bottom of the editor use these two shortcuts to take control of what you’re seeing.
Do you know how the keyboard modifiers affect what your scroll wheel or trackpad does? Brush up in this free Pro Tools tip article.
Keystrokes are usually faster than using the mouse but not always - Julian explains
To get the most out of Playlists there are a few shortcuts it’s useful to have under your fingers. Here are our top three…
Learn Pro Tools In 5 Shortcuts? Maybe not but these 5 shortcuts are a great place to start if you want to speed up your editing.
Pro Tools makes it easy to identify different elements of your session and with the tools available to help there’s really no excuse for having tracks called “Audio 1” in your session. In this tip Julian looks at some of the ways you can tidy up a session’s naming
In this Premium tutorial Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers runs through some of his favourite automation tips and tricks which help make automation work for you rather than getting in the way.
In this extended premium tutorial, Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers revisits a drum tracking session from some time ago in which he used a small room just off the tracking room as somewhere to put an extra mic for ambience. Julian decided to see whether he could make something useful out of this dry, distant mic. See how he got on with this and some other tricks he used to control his drum sound.
In this premium video tutorial Julian demonstrates some of his favourite shortcuts. There might well be some in here you haven’t come across before. The usual suspects like Command + Equals for mix/edit window and R and T for zoom certainly aren’t in there!
In this second article from guest contributor Chris Schmid, we show how to create custom macro and shortcuts for the Pro Tools Beat Detective using Keyboard Maestro.
Some Pro Tools users rarely use the Mix window, instead preferring to access the volume, pans, sends and inserts from the track headers in the Edit window. I’m unconvinced by this, even if you don’t use two monitors, hitting CMD+= isn’t a huge inconvenience considering all the benefits I think the Mix window brings.
In this free Pro Tools tip Pro tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers offers a handy way of showing and hiding elements of the transport window without going into the Transport window’s menu.
In this premium video tutorial, Julian Rodgers demonstrates how to use the new snap to next and previous edit actions shortcut introduced in Pro Tools 2019.5, it’s a neat shortcut and is the jumping off point for this tutorial in which Julian looks a some other shortcuts based around the comma and period keys.
In this free video tutorial Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers looks at the MIDI editor in Pro Tools and specifically on ways to direct keyboard shortcuts to the Edit window or to the docked MIDI editor.
Pro Tools Keyboard Shortcuts. There are just so many. Some are very well known, some really obscure but there is a middle ground of what I consider essential but in my experience aren’t as widely known as they should be. Here are six. You’ll probably know some of them. Do you know them all?
Julian considers changing how he uses tab in Pro Tools after being reminded of a useful keyboard shortcut on an Editors Keys shortcut keyboard.
Using the numeric keypad’s plus and minus keys, nudging offers a way to move clips, clip boundaries and many other things up and down the timeline by specified amounts. There are lots of variations on the nudge shortcuts. One of the simplest and most useful is adding Shift. To see what it achieves check out this free tip.
Pro Tools has SO many functions, some of which have been cleverly added over time thanks to user experience feedback, so well done you! In my first article, I covered the first 7 Pro Tools functions I could not live without and in this article I am going to cover the second batch of 7 Pro Tools functions I could not live without.
In this free video tutorial, brought to you with the support of Avid, Pro Tools Expert Team member Julian Rodgers demonstrates how to use the these playlist shortcuts introduced in Pro Tools 12.6 to audition alternative takes within a selection.
In this free video Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers demonstrates a useful tip showing how it is possible to duplicate a clip backwards down the timeline, creating a duplicate before the clip being duplicated rather than after it.
In this article, Lucy is going to share here the first 7 of 14 Pro Tools functions I could not live without. There are lots of different ways to do things in Pro Tools, which suit an individual’s needs, so this is not a list of all the shortcuts, this is purely a list of the functions themselves.
Avid has added a number of keyboard shortcuts to Pro Tools 2018.7 and to help to show how they fit into workflows and these 2 new free video tutorials from Avid Application Specialist Dave Tyler, you can learn how these new shortcuts fit into the existing navigation shortcuts...
Julian Rodgers is Editor of Production Expert. He has a background in live sound and has been a Pro Tools user since 2001. He lives by the sea in West Cornwall where he plays piano, bass and guitar equally badly and is an avid collector of microphones and opinions about all things audio.