Over the years, the Pro Tools Expert Team has regularly published free tips and techniques to help producers and engineers work faster, smarter and more creatively when working in Pro Tools. More often than not, it can be the smallest of techniques that make the biggest impacts in how we interact with Pro Tools. Here are 30 of our most recent free Pro Tools tips articles. Many are short videos demonstrating single case issues, others are insightful articles that show you cool Pro Tools keyboard shortcuts.
Browse through the selection of free content below to take your Pro Tools chops up a notch…
Updated for 2021, in this article we collect together Pro Tools tips for everyone from beginners to more experienced users. If you’ve ever wondered what the keyboard shortcut to create new and duplicate playlists is or whether you should automate that volume using clip gain or volume automation, and what to do if you’ve made the wrong choice, these tips will help.
In this article, Damian Kearns helps you wrap your mind around Preference settings in Pro Tools by explaining how he uses them in his audio post-production workflow, by focussing on 5 key Preference tabs in the Pro Tools Preferences window.
This article focuses on the creative potential within the recently released Pro Tools feature, Folder Tracks. Usually, Folder Tracks are used for session organization; however, with powerful viewing and routing options found within Pro Tools, we can turn this unsuspecting feature into something incredibly creative and powerful.
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.
Eventually your carefully crafted work will have to leave Pro Tools and benefit the world by fulfilling its intended purpose. This article highlights the faster, more convenient alternative to bouncing to disk which, depending on your needs might be all you need.
What is it and what can you do with it? Elastic Audio has been around for over a decade and we take for granted the fact that you can manipulate pitch without affecting playback speed and playback speed without affecting pitch.
How can you know the current parameter value at which your cursor is hovering? You can but, although its in plain sight, most of us don’t pay attention to it. Here’s how it works.
It’s not unusual to open an old Pro Tools session, hit play and see the meters dance but hear no sound. Here are the 3 things you should check first. Actually check you monitors are on your volume is up first, but after that check these things first.
To place a clip exactly where you want it you can use Spot mode or cut/copy and paste but there is another way which is quicker and more convenient. Watch the free video to see it in action.
It might sound like a silly question but there are a few options when it comes to muting content and I’m of the opinion that in this case there definitely is a “best” option.
Check out this tip in this free Pro Tools video tutorial. In this free tip, Pro Tools Expert Team member Julian Rodgers demonstrates a useful way to set selections by auditioning the audio using the Scrub Tool.
Fast Forwarding and Rewinding isn’t as important as it used to be in the days of linear media (that’s tape to most of us) as in a DAW we can just click and play from anywhere on the timeline. That’s fine as long as we know where we need to be in our sessions but playing through tracks faster or slower than real-time while hearing the audio can be useful for all sorts of reasons. Shuttle lock is a really useful feature which allows you to do just this.
In a recent tutorial, we looked at gain staging in DAWs, a subject that lots of people are talking about and on which opinions vary significantly. One area in which managing gain properly definitely makes a significant difference is proper matching of gain into and out of plug-ins. Not because of the effect it has on the sound but because of the effect it has on the listener.
Strip silence can semi-automate the process of removing spill from tom mics. In this free tip, Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers shows how using as high a Strip Silence Threshold as possible with the clip end pad control and batch fades, the cure doesn’t have to be worse than the disease as is so often the case when gating toms.
Harmonic Tremolo mode is a simple effect and I thought I would be able to create something similar using stock Pro Tools plugins. It turned out to need some lateral thinking! See what the problem was and how I solved it in this free tutorial.
The difference between multichannel and multi-mono plug-ins in Pro Tools isn’t very significant if you only work in stereo. However, as soon as you start working with more than 2 channels, you find the number of plug-ins available as multichannel plug-ins starts to tail off rapidly. This free tip demonstrates a way to quickly access all the channels in a multi-mono plug-in at the same time, which is especially useful if you have unlinked the parameters.
When editing automation you might often want to create an extra breakpoint at the same value as either the next or previous value. This is easy, just click in the playlist with the Grab tool while holding these modifiers
Did you know you can drag a file or clip onto the tracks sidebar and a new track will be created in the same way as dragging onto the timeline? Why is this useful? Because in a busy session there usually isn’t any blank space visible in the edit window. I use this all the time.
When working in grid mode with material recorded to a click, dropping new clips into your session in time is easy. When editing material which doesn’t have a meaningful grid to quantize to things aren’t as easy but they are still very simple. A really easy way to drop clips to the right place is to position your cursor and then use these shortcuts to place them at the cursor.
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.
Many people use the Suspend Groups shortcut (Control+Command+G on Mac or Control+Start+G on PC) when they find they need to tweak the relative levels of the tracks in a group of tracks. Although this works it isn’t the only way, why not try this instead, you might find it works better for you.
Apart from the first obvious step to get around this, that being increasing the H/W buffer size in the Playback Engine, what other steps can we take to improve the stability of Pro Tools? Luckily there are many little things we can do that combined make big improvements in the overall performance of our Pro Tools studios.
No sound from Pro Tools on your Mac? Here are somethings to try to get things working, in under a minute.
Selecting all the clips on your timeline should be simple but unlike many pieces of software, using the standard CMD+A (Control+A on PC) doesn’t select all the clips on every track, it selects all the clips on the track your selection point is currently on.
Pro Tools expert Team member Julian Rodgers shares a free tip which makes managing the record status of groups of tracks much simpler by using VCAs.
In this tip Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers shares a simple but indispensable tip in what is probably his shortest video to date.
Pro Tools expert Team member Julian Rodgers shares a free tip which makes using clip effects much more convenient by assigning presets to a keyboard shortcut.
In this 10 minute video tutorial we quickly demonstrate 20 top Pro Tools mix window workflows that will help you to work faster, smarter and more creatively the next time your mix a track in Pro Tools.
I’ve seen many, many Pro Tools systems but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one using anything other than the default waveform views. What can you change and why might you want to?
In this free video tutorial we show you how you can get your DI bass guitar tracks to sound massive and industrial with plenty of low-end sub and fuzz for interest using parallel processing in Pro Tools.
Many of these tips were inspired by community members who requested we cover these topics. Please let us know if there are any particular tips you would like us to cover in future free tip videos.