- How to record in Pro Tools.
Yes, I mentioned it, Pro Tools.
Now I know I have been an Adobe Audition user for decades
but I thought right about now at this point in my career,
maybe I'm having a midlife crisis,
It's time to broaden my horizons and look at other DAWs.
And Pro Tools is one that's come up time and time again,
including in my radio career of many, many years.
That's right, I was forced to use Pro Tools,
and I never particularly enjoyed it.
But can I enjoy it now with hopefully
a little more wisdom in audio editing?
Well, let's find out, you and I together.
This is a bit of a journey.
I'm gonna do a mini-series
on some of the basics on Pro Tools.
And let's get started right away with the dashboard
you are greeted with when you first install Pro Tools.
It gives you a getting started guide
and it's kind of user-friendly for you and I if, well
we're beginners to Pro Tools and we just want to record.
So it's asking you what do you wanna do?
There are templates here.
There are learn opportunities as well.
You can create beats.
If you're a singer-songwriter you can make a whole song.
And they even have stuff for podcasters
to record and edit their podcasters.
Now I'm gonna go straight in
and I'm just gonna click Create.
I'm gonna start from scratch.
I'm gonna call the template, Mike.
And we'll just get started.
Let's look at all of this.
This is going to local storage, good.
I'm working on my hard disk here at home.
I'm working with WAV file audio,
sample rate of 48 kilohertz, that's fine.
Bit depth 24, that's fine.
I could go to 32 if I want some more headroom,
but that's fine.
IO settings, input and output, I'll leave as last used.
It all seems pretty logical to me.
It even tells me where I'm saving it,
and that is my Document's folder.
Yay.
Wow, okay, let's see what happens here.
So this is what I'm greeted with
when I first start Pro Tools.
That's overwhelming, right?
Well, hopefully we can get into it.
I'm, first of all, I'm gonna expand out this window
and I just want to get recording.
That's what I want to do.
So the first thing I'm gonna do is go to Set Up
and make sure my playback engine is all good.
Yes, I'm using my Universal Audio Device.
It's good, it's connected, it's working,
so that should be great.
Now, if I wanna see some other controls,
yes I can see Play and Record up here,
but I can actually go to Window here and I can,
I have the opportunity, if I'd like, to show my transport.
Command + 1 or Control + 1 on a PC.
And boom, I've got a bigger sort of control area here
to see time and everything else.
Now I wanna record.
I can't just hit record, it doesn't work like that.
I need to set up a track.
Now, this first track that appears here,
this is a click track.
Essentially it's a metronome set presently at 120 BPM.
So Pro Tools very geared up for music production
and that kind of stuff.
But I wanna just add a track for voice recording.
So Track, New.
You can also do Shift + Command + N, or Shift + Control + N,
and it's gonna be a mono track, an audio track.
Let's call it "Mike Voice" very simply, and Create.
Okay, now we've got a track here.
And you can see over here the top right, it's my interface.
This is my mono microphone input.
It's already selected, so I don't need to change that.
What I might need to change is where
this output is going to, so how I hear it back.
And rather than mix bus I want to output it
to my left and right stereo channel on my audio interface.
Now that's all good.
Hunky dory, hit record.
Hello, hello? (echoing)
Oh, and I can hear myself.
Okay, maybe I will send no output.
Yeah, let's do no output for the moment
just so I'm not distracted.
Hit record.
And of course, audio track one can't be enabled
because I haven't selected input and output.
So we'll go to the mix bus again.
That seems pretty reasonable.
And we've got the line in there, the mic in, record.
Hello? Yes, I've got audio there.
Right, let's get recording.
And it's really easy.
I can click Record down here.
And it doesn't start recording until I hit Play as well,
or hit the space bar on my keyboard.
Let's do that.
Hello, this is Mike Russell recording
into Pro Tools for the very first time.
I'm pretty excited to see and hear exactly
how my audio will turn out.
And I can hit Stop or I can hit space bar.
And there we go.
My very first recording.
Let's switch off recording on that track.
Similar as a multi-track in Adobe Audition, I guess.
And then I'm gonna output this to my audio interface.
And I'm actually gonna use the Zoom tool up here
just so I can zoom right in on that waveform
and see exactly how it looks.
Look at that.
I can select parts to zoom to if I want.
I can do this like that. There we go.
"Russell recording into Pro Tools for the very first-"
Let's actually zoom right here and play from this section.
"Russell recording into Pro Tools for the very first time."
Seems pretty good, doesn't it?
I can use my time selection tool, which is this one up here,
and I can just like select parts of it.
Now, notice at the moment it's kind of snapping to the grid
so I can choose to enable or disable that if I want.
Snapping can be a handy tool if you are working,
say for instance, with music.
And then I can use the hand here
to move this around in time.
So at the moment I'm moving it in time
and I can do all that good stuff with it.
I've got the ability to use this as well
to maybe trim this audio down to here,
and then put my selection tool back
and play the audio back I'm recording.
"very first time-"
There we go.
"very first time-"
It's all there.
It's sounding great.
It's pretty easy to record and get going.
Very, very simple indeed.
And I can highlight bits, I can delete bits
I can do all that kind of stuff.
This is the basic way I'd get up and running in Pro Tools.
Insert a track, select my microphone,
select my audio outputs as well,
arm it to record, hit the Record button, press Play,
and away you go, you're off.
And of course Pro Tools is specifically designed
to take multiple inputs at the same time.
So I can have a microphone here,
a guest microphone on another track.
I could have music microphones as well.
I could have all kinds of other inputs.
And as you can see to start with,
I'm working in bars and beats
but later on we can change that into time, decimal time,
It's probably quite handy for a traditional
voice-first editor like myself.
But there you go.
That's how to record in Pro Tools right now.
And I'm really interested in what you think
about Pro Tools and if you have any questions
and what you think of this whole mini-series.
I'll be releasing more videos in the future about Pro Tools.
So do make sure to subscribe to my channel
if it's the first time you've watched a tutorial.
I've also got stuff on Adobe Audition,
Audacity, and other DAWs as well.
Well worth checking out.