In part 9 of our Getting To Grips With Pro Tools series, we are going to take a look at how to use template sessions. With Pro Tools you can set up sessions that can be templates for other projects. These are really useful if you have a number of regular projects.

Create From Template enables you to create a new session from a template session that has already been set up. There are a lot of template sessions that come with Pro Tools, but much more usefully you can create your own session templates and I keep mine in a folder called 'Mine'.

Templates can contain all kinds of tracks and can also include media too. Examples, where templates are really helpful, are when starting an album, building a template session with tracks for all the instruments that are likely to be in most of the tracks on the album and plug-ins that you would normally use for those tracks.

Adding media in templates is great in post workflows where you are working on a series where each episode has common content like into and out of music as well as stabs into and out of the ad breaks.

When starting an album project, as part of the planning process, I take a look at the expected instrumentation and plan out a template session for the album so that I can very quickly create a new session for each song.  Put in the template whatever you might need like a click track, busses for effects and headphone monitoring, include any plug-ins you might want to use with the appropriate preset loaded. Yes, there may be more tracks in the template than you need for every song, but it means you can quickly get started on any track in the album because you have prepped the tracks ready. You can always strip out the unwanted tracks when it gets to the mixing stage.

Whatever you find yourself doing when you start a session, try to have it in your template so you don’t end up wasting time doing the same things over and over again. It is also worth having some template sessions with things like regular effects combinations and use Import Session Data to bring in the appropriate tracks, or use the new Track Prests feature instead.

You can even add audio and other media to your template sessions so if you using the same content in a regular job then keep these in your template too.

Getting Started With Pro Tools - Using Template Sessions To Get Going Quickly

In this first part of a series of free video tutorials produced by Recording Revolution's Graham Cochrane for Avid back in 2015 using Pro Tools 11, Graham shows how you can use the templates included with Pro Tools to start working on a song.

New To Pro Tools? Never Underestimate The Power Of Making Custom Session Templates

Since the beginning of December 2017, Dan Cooper has been teaching his wife Georgie how to use Pro Tools so that she can record, edit and mix her own music. He started off by showing her how I start a Pro Tools Session, the "blank canvas" way, she didn't look too enthused.

For those new to Pro Tools, this particular starting point could seem a little daunting. Dan was keen to get Georgie's confidence up quickly with recording and the Pro Tools application instead of baffling her with routing, track types and bus jargon he felt that in order to get her using Pro Tools quickly the best approach would be to assess her basic tracking requirements and build a custom Pro Tools Session Template that she could use as an easy starting point over the coming weeks and months whilst she got familiar and comfortable with Pro Tools.

2 Premium Content Tutorials On Templates

We have two video tutorials that cover templates very clearly, one from Marcus Huyskens and the second from Mike Thornton. You will need to be a subscriber of our premium video channel to be able to watch them all the way through, but you can sign up for a free 7-day trial to get you going.

Next time in Getting To Grips With Pro Tools we will look at using Clip Groups, formerly known as Region Groups in Pro Tools.