hey how's it going I'm Ben Lyndell and
today I'm gonna be showing you how I
named organized and color-code every
single session I work on now sometimes
you open up sessions with a hundred plus
tracks and there's nothing's named
there's no color it's just stuff is all
over the place can be complete chaos
which as you can tell it makes me pretty
angry now whether you're the engineer
producer or the client you can save
everybody a lot of time and money look
more professional and keep everybody
sanity just by doing a few things I'm
going to show you today so let's get
started speaking of chaos this is what
about 95% of the sessions that I receive
look like as you can see they recorded a
lot of instruments called audio 14 and
audio 22 not very descriptive are they
I'm pretty sure somewhere in here
there's some drums bass guitar keyboards
I just have no idea where they are so to
fix this situation I'm gonna have to go
through and listen to each one of these
tracks in solo and give them a better
name so let's start off with audio
fourteen
all right that sounds like a distorted
bass next track sounds like an Oregon
now as you can see this is a pretty
painful process and we have about 50
tracks in this session so we're gonna
fast forward it and save you some misery
alright so that happened now all my
tracks have appropriate and descriptive
names and I know what I'm dealing with
but now am i routing and affect sense
are still kind of unclear they say
things like bus one to bus five six and
I have no idea where they're going so to
fix this
I could go to setup io and rename them
here except the problem is I have no
idea which is which so I'm going to show
you the way I like to rename my busses
so I come down here to my drum subgroup
and I right-click on bus one two click
rename and name it drums go to my guitar
subgroup right click rename guitars you
get the idea
all right now all my tracks and buses
are names and the chaos is slowly
shrinking so I'm gonna start moving
tracks around in a way that makes sense
to me so I can easily find things as I'm
working so for instance I like to put
all the drums at the top of my session
followed by any percussion or loops
followed by the bass guitar keyboards
since and then I put the lead vocal
background vocals and finally any aux
returns this is the layout that I do on
every single session now you don't do it
exactly like me but you should find a
layout that makes sense to you so you
can remember to do it consistently when
you use the same layout on all your
sessions you're gonna find that you save
a lot of time and believe me it'll make
your life a lot easier so now that our
tracks are laid out in a more logical
order let's throw some color on them in
a big session even though it's well
organized it can still be difficult to
find your lead vocal or bass track so if
you throw some color on them that's
distinct it can be a lot easier to spot
them when you're scrolling around the
easiest way I know how to do it is to
double click on the color bar either at
the bottom or the top of the track this
brings up the color palette which allows
you to
paint your session then express yourself
as an artist now the top of the color
palette there's a couple options there's
this button which turns on/off the
colors for the whole track give your
saturation and you have brightness for
me I prefer to have my drums dark brown
my percussion and light brown my bass in
red synth bass and like a reddish pink
now each guitar I like to give a little
bit different shade of blue so it's
easier to see which ones are which
keyboards and synthesizers and pink and
purple
now this track is a little unique in
that it has lots of different lead
vocals so I'm gonna color all of my lead
vocals red and all my background vocals
Orange and finally I like to color all
of my subgroups yellow and my aux
returns green which happens to also be
the default in Pro Tools and voila all
my tracks are named organized and
colored in a way that's familiar to me
and now I feel very comfortable with
this session let's get back over to the
Edit window as you can see all my track
colors carried over here but over in the
main part of my edit window all the
regions are just colored whatever
produce actually has a great option if
you go to setup preferences down here in
the default region color coding you can
select track color and watch this voila
now all my regions are color coded the
exact same way as my tracks it's even
easier to see where I am I can obviously
tell this is my base my lead vocals
background vocals drums percussion this
is fabulous alright so now we know where
things are in our session but we don't
know when things are so I'm going to go
through and add markers for each section
of the song that way later on when the
producer asked me hey can you skip
forward to the second course I know
exactly where that is so to do this on
Pro Tools on a Mac you press ctrl and
you click on the marker line or if
you're on Windows
it's start click I always start at the
top of the song and work my way down
call it top okay I'm gonna go through
first verse first course second verse
second chorus instrumental bridge
breakdown and last course that's it
we've renamed our tracks in our buses we
organize them in a way that makes sense
we color-coded our tracks and our
regions and we put down markers
throughout the whole song now this is a
great habit to get into and it's really
gonna save you a lot of time and just
make your life a lot easier in the long
run
now even though our song may not sound
any better yet it sure looks a lot
better so until next time
[Music]