Pro Tools Carbon is an all in one tracking solution for anyone wanting to record bands. With its combination of features specifically aimed to solve the ever-present issues which tracking with native processing based systems inevitably involves - principally latency when tracking.

However, Carbon has been thought through and from the inclusion of a talkback mic to the provision of four headphone outputs, there is more to Carbon than just the Hybrid DSP engine - though that is very cool so check it out if you don’t know about it already!

In this free video, Julian Rodgers illustrates one of the less obvious ways Carbon helps bring the hardware and software together - Its use of colour. Managing and controlling four headphone mixes from a 1U front panel could involve 4 volume pots but the Carbon has one encoder and uses colour to make it really clear which one you are adjusting. Useful when you might be inadvertently hurting someone’s ears.

Monitor Control

It uses this colour driven approach to offer a rudimentary monitor controller for up to three pairs of monitors too. Three might sound like a lot but it offers a way to either drive three pairs of monitors, one pair could be in the live area so you can talk to the band when they inevitably all take their headphones off ant the end of a take making your attempts to talk to them over talkback over the headphones futile!

The coloured labels over the monitor and headphone outputs in the IO window display the status of those outputs in the hardware window. The pictures in the slideshow above show the status of the Hardware window and the IO window together at the same time, something you can’t do in Pro Tools.

You can see how the monitor and headphone outputs only get coloured labels in the IO window when they are set up as variable monitor outputs or have headphone outputs, which mirror the main outputs.

Impedance and Inputs Status

Another place where colour is used to reflect the status of the hardware is the input selection. Inputs 1&2 have Instrument inputs available, 3-8 have a choice of mic and line. As can be seen in the images below, the choice of input the gain setting for that input are colour coded:

• Mic - Green

• Line. - Yellow

• Inst - Orange

There are five different impedance settings available for the instrument inputs:

• 1M ohm - White (default)

• 230k ohm - Cyan

• 90k ohm - Blue

• 72k ohm - Violet

• 32k ohm - Fuchsia

And three different impedance settings available for the mic inputs:

• 5k ohm - White (default)

• 50k ohm - Cyan

• 1k ohm - Fuchsia

The effect of input impedance varies depending on what you connect to that input but the frequency response of passive mics like dynamics and ribbons are affected and the sound and feel of passive electric guitars and basses is affected by impedance. Experimentation is the key here.