Pro Tools first is the free version of the industry standard Pro Tools and in
this pro tools first tutorial I'm going to show you how to get started with it
as a beginner I'm going to go over setting up your audio interface creating
new projects locally on your computer recording electric guitar recording
writing and editing MIDI using effects and arranging your clips in the timeline
plus I'll look at using loops and samples in Pro Tools first and then
we'll get into exporting your song so you can share it with your friends and
family I'm Zane and on this channel I do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and
reviews to help you conquer the tech and unleash your creativity there's a link
to Pro Tools first in the description along with any equipment I might mention
in this video now let's jump into Pro Tools first first let's make sure we
have our audio interface set up correctly so go up to setup then click
on playback engine now in this playback engine area here make sure you have your
audio interface selected then you may have the option to change the sample
rate here you can choose whatever you like
typically 44.1 is CD quality and most audio players use 44.1 so that might be
something you want to go with to start but 48 is for video DVD that sort of
thing so that's what I choose for this because it's going in my video and once
that's set up you can click OK and if you need to adjust your latency
at all you can go to hardware and then you'll have your ASIO control panel open
up it might look different than this because every audio interface looks
different and you can change the buffer length the smaller the buffer length the
shorter the latency but you may run into some errors later on so you can play
around with this and see what works best for you you can always change it later
on if you need to
so now we can start a new session and if you have this create from template
checked uncheck that as we want to create a new blank project also I'm
going to uncheck the backup to cloud as we're going to save this project locally
on our computer you can always change this later on and back it up to the
cloud if you want to but for this we're just going to save it on to our computer
now give your project a name and click create now if you need to change the
tempo the BPM you can just click right there and type in whatever BPM you want
so first I'm going to look at recording electric guitar into Pro Tools first if
you have the m-audio edition of Pro Tools first you actually get the 11 rack
which is a great guitar amp sim but if you don't have the m-audio version
you're not able to bring in your own third-party plugins unless you purchase
them directly from the avid marketplace so you can either mic up your guitar amp
or you can use a pedal like this one it's the zoom G1X Four it has
amp and cabinet Sims built right into it but if you're recording acoustic guitar
or vocals or any other instrument you really won't need to worry about that as
Pro Tools first does include some great plugins for most situations just not an
amp sim in my case so let's create a new track go up to track click on new and
this is going to be a mono track as a guitar is a mono source and it is audio
and you can give it a name here another feature that you might be interested in
is the comment section so if you are using an external pedal like I am or if
you're miking your amp you may want to put the settings from your amp or your
pedal in here so you can go back and remember them if you want to edit it
later on now under the i/o section you want to make sure you have your input
selected and by default it's on input one but I'm going to be recording to my
input 2 on my audio interface so I'll select that
and before I record I'm going to create a click track and this is like our
metronome so go up to track new and then you want to change audio track to
instrument we're going to call this click and then in the insert section of
the click track click one of these open areas here go to plug-in instrument
click and now we have our click track which is our metronome and remember when
you're mixing down your track be sure to mute this later on and you could also
mute it once you're done recording and everything and you no longer need that
click track but in the beginning of your song it's great to have that click track
open now we're ready to record so press the arm for recording button here and
you should see your levels here now and if your levels are too hot or too low
you want to adjust them on your audio interface not in the software and when
you're ready to record you go up to the top here press this record button and
then press the play button
if you're enjoying this Pro Tools first tutorial so far please give it a thumbs
up I really appreciate it as it helps the channel out so much now let's get
back into the pro tools first tutorial you now have an audio clip and if you
have this grabber tool selected which is the hand here you can click and drag
this all around your timeline you can copy and paste it by right clicking copy
and then right click paste or you can use the smart tool by clicking on this
outer ring here and you see all of the tools go blue now if you hover over
certain areas of the clip you'll notice that the cursor changes and this does
various things so if you hover over the edge here you can trim the clip same
thing on the other side if you hover up here you can make fades and the same
thing on the other side and if you want to use that grabber tool to move it
around you just hover near the middle click and drag as needed so that's
recording audio in and it's a similar process for any audio that you might be
recording in not just guitar make sure that your levels are set up correctly
and you should be good to go now let's get some MIDI into this project and
first I'm going to record some MIDI in using my MIDI keyboard and then I'll
show you how to draw a MIDI in by using your computer mouse and what we want to
do is create an instrument track so you go up to track new and we're going to
make this a stereo track and instead of audio we're going to go to instrument
and we'll call this one drums and now we need to put a drum instrument into our
drum track so just click into one of these open inserts
go down to instrument and we want the XPand! 2 instrument and this is a great
plugin that comes with Pro Tools first and it's so versatile it has drums in it
base pads leads you name it it's in there you can do so much with XPand! 2
so you may want to load that up on various tracks in your project to load
up one of the drum patches you just click here where it says factory default
and then you scroll down to where it says drums
and we'll just choose pop kit it's right there
now hit a key on your MIDI keyboard see if you have anything going in looks like
I have some signal going in if you don't you may need to go up to set up then
MIDI input device and just make sure your MIDI controller is selected in here
and just like before we want to arm this track for recording by clicking the arm
button here then go up to the top hit the record button and make sure you have
your cursor a little bit before where you're actually going to be recording
just to give you some time to get set up once you hit play we're going to hit
play right now
and we now have our MIDI clip here and you can click and drag this around you
can copy and paste it just like you can with audio if you want to go in and edit
your MIDI a little closer than just on here you can double click on your MIDI
clip and you'll see the piano roll gets brought up at the bottom here and you
can expand this so it's a little bit bigger
you can click and drag your notes around
if you want you can add in some new notes by double-clicking wherever you
want to add some new notes or you can delete notes you can click on
a note and then press the delete button on your computer keyboard or you can
right-click on it and go to clear or you can double click on the note and it will
go away if you use this pencil tool up here you can draw in your notes as long
as you like so that's recording your MIDI notes in
now what if we want to draw some MIDI notes in using our mouse let's go up to
track and create a new instrument track again this one's going to be stereo
we'll call this one bass let's add another instance of Xpand! 2 and this
time we're going to choose a bass preset and what we want to do now is go up to
the pencil tool here and if you just click anywhere in this track you'll see
that it kind of brings up a mini piano roll
and you can draw notes right in this area here
or you can click on the MIDI editor button down here and you'll bring up the
piano roll and we can just draw and here however we like and if we want this to
be a MIDI clip just like this you can just go over here where it says notes
and click on clips and now we have a MIDI clip that we can move all around
copy/paste whatever we need to do with it
and if you want to create a new clip you would just go back to the pencil tool
click anywhere over here draw a note in if you like and then you
can go back to notes clips and you have a clip here and when you're ready you
can arrange your clips in your song however you need them to be arranged and
eventually you may want to do a little bit of mixing so let's open up our mixer
view now and you can either press ctrl + the equal sign on your computer keyboard
or you can go up to window and click on mix and what we're going to do now is
look at adding effects and you can actually add effects in the Edit view as
well you can go back to the Edit view click on one of these empty inserts and
add an effect if you go back to mix view you can see we now have that effect
there so you don't even need to use the mix
view if you don't want to I kind of prefer using it when I'm mixing but
whatever works best for you if you want to change a defect or get
rid of it you can just click on the name of it here you can go to no insert to
get rid of it or you can just go to plug-in and change it to something else
so that's adding effects and going to the mix screen and now let's quickly
look at the channel strip that we have here you have your inserts sends which
we're not going to look at in this video maybe that's something we'll get into in
another tutorial but you also have your pan or your balance on stereo tracks and
you have your solo mute arm for record and you have your gang control fader
here plus you have your comments at the bottom if you want to enter your
comments down there now let's go back to the edit view so let's say you like to
work with loops and samples while Pro Tools first makes it really easy to work
with your own audio or they actually provide you with a large library of
loops and samples that you can use so you want to click on these three dots
here then go to sound base and in here you'll see that there's different
categories that you can click on to narrow a search down so let's say we
want bass we could narrow it down to bass and you can even narrow it down
even more if you like and in here you can press this play button to audition
the track and if there's a piece of audio you like you can create a new
track you want it to be stereo because a lot of these are actually stereo we'll
just create a new track now I'm just gonna zoom in here so we can get in a
little bit further and you can zoom in by clicking the plus sign down here and
that zoom out by using the negative sign or you can drag this little slider here
to zoom in however you like alright and if you want to bring in one of these
pieces of audio you would just click and drag and now we have it in there you'll
notice some of these have their own tempo so if you click and drag it in
like this it's going to have its own tempo but if you click this button right
here and click and drag it in you'll see that the size is the length
is different because now it's taking on the tempo of our song so you want to
make sure this is green right here if you want the audio to match your songs
tempo now what if you have your own sounds and you don't want to use the Pro
Tools sounds well you would just click on volumes here and you would locate
wherever you have your loops and then you can just easily drag them into your
project like that you can also drag and drop audio from a Windows Explorer
window if you want to and that's a quick look at using loops and samples and of
course you can split these here just click wherever you want to make the cut
right click separate and now you've cut it in two and you'll notice when I'm
dragging Clips around the timeline they're staying aligned perfectly with
the grid if you want to move it outside of the grid go up to the corner here and
click on slip and now you can move your audio wherever you want it's not aligned
to the grid but if you want to pack on the grid just click it again and your
snapped back to the grid so let's say this is the song we recorded and we want
to now export it so we can share it with our friends and fans what you want to do
is click up here and drag so you have your whole song selected so if you have
space at the beginning that's not used or maybe other parts somewhere in here
that aren't part of the actual song make sure you're just highlighting the actual
song parts that you want to share with your friend and once that's done go up
to file
go down to export audio mix and then in here you would choose whatever you want
it gives you two options WAV or AIFF and you can choose the sample rate the
bit-depth whatever you want there choose the directory that you want to save it
to give it a name and when you're ready click export and you'll hear your song
playback as it exports click here to check out even more free das or click
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you'd like to see more videos from me thank you so much for watching
for simple greentech I'm Zane keep creating and we'll talk soon