Basic Editing in ProTools

This tutorial will introduce some of the editing features available in ProTools. It assumes that you have a basic understanding of ProTools and already have a session with audio recorded. The setup used for the tutorial was ProTools M-Powered Academic and the FastTrack USB audio interface. To get started, open up your existing session.

Once your open the session, it is a good idea to go to the File menu and choose the Save As option. Type in a new name (although it doesn't have to be drastically different). This is a good habit to get into. At each major phase of your project, you should save a new version. This will allow you to go back should you decide you no longer like the direction things are heading. Because ProTools keeps the audio files separate from your session file, the amount of hard drive space required to do this is minimal.

This tutorial will focus on the edit window, so go ahead and bring this window the front and maximize it. To do this on the Mac, click on the green button in the upper left corner of the window.

The next thing you should do to better manage your session resources, is give your tracks descriptive names. If you did not do this before recording, your tracks probably have generic names like "audio 1" and "audio 2". If you double click on the track name, you will see the following dialog window appear:

Type in a new name for the track that tells you something about the audio found there. Also, take advantage of the comments section to include additional notes about the recording. When you are done click OK. My advice would be to do this for all of your tracks.

Now you will notice that this did not change the names associated with the regions of audio present in each track. These still say something like "audio 1_01". This is because ProTools names the regions at the time of recording based on the name of the track. This is a good reason why you should name your tracks before starting to record, however it can be fixed.

First you have to choose the grabber tool. I'll explain the different editing tools in more detail a little later in the tutorial, but for now just click on the hand. Next, hold down the Apple key while you double click on the region name. This will bring up the following dialog:

Enter a name here. You also have the option of naming just the region or also naming the associated file on the hard disk. I recommend renaming both in case you ever need to use the file outside of ProTools. When you are done click OK.

If you have a lot of tracks and regions, you have to repeat this process a couple of times to rename everything. Again, if you name your tracks before recording the regions will automatically use that name. You can therefore save some of this work by naming your tracks as you record them.

Above the tracks you should have noticed a several horizontal lines with numbered markings at regular intervals along the timeline. These are known as rulers in ProTools. Along the left hand side you will notice a description of the type of ruler being display on this line. Some of these will be more useful than others depending on the type of project.

The one highlighted in blue is your primary ruler. ProTools used this unit of measurement for various functions. You can change this easily by clicking one of the other descriptions. If you decide that you do not want seven rulers showing and would like to free up some screen real estate, you can hide them by visiting the View menu. Here you will find the Rulers submenu where you can uncheck the various ruler units to hide them. If you would like to hide all but your primary ruler quickly, just choose the None option.

Now lets look at some of the tools you have at your disposal in the edit window. Across the top of the window you will see many of the controls for these tools. Toward the left is a cluster of arrows that control zooming. The arrows that point left and right control zooming on the horizontal axis or timeline, while the first set of up and down arrows control zooming on the vertical or amplitude axis. Try these out and note how the display changes. Note these are not changing the sound at all, they simply adjust what level of detail you are seeing. The ruler at the top of the timeline should update with new scaling information as well.

To the right of the zoom controls are buttons for accessing the edit tools. The tool that is currently in use will be highlighted in blue. The following are a brief descriptions of what each one does:

1. Zoom er tool - Allows you to click and drag like you would when making a selection. Once the mouse has been released, the display will zoom in so that the selection fills the visible timeline.
2. Trim tool - Enables you to click and drag the ends of regions, thereby trimming the amount of audio that is played in the timeline. Useful if you only want to hear specific portion of your recorded audio. Also has a second mode that will compress or expand the audio to fit in the allotted time instead of trimming.
3. Selector tool - Provides the typical click and drag functionality to make selections within the timeline. Selections are usually made to perform some other action such as copying or processing a segment of audio.
4. Grabber tool - Allows you to adjust the placement of a region in the timeline by clicking and dragging. Use this when you want a specific sound to come in earlier or later.
5. Scrubber tool - The "scrub" behavior will play the audio under the cursor when you click and drag the mouse over a given region. A good way to use the aid of your ears when searching for a specific moment in the audio.
6. Pencil tool - Enables you to draw or redraw certain types of data in the timeline. If you zoom all the way in on an audio region, you can use this tool to repair (or otherwise alter) audio waveforms.

Let's do a simple exercise to demonstrate how we can manipulate the audio in our tracks. Start by soloing one of tracks in your edit window. You can do this clicking on the button with an S a the beginning of the track. When we solo a track, ProTools will play only that track and effectively mute the others. You may think of soloing as a kind of inverse function to muting. Note however that in ProTools, if both the solo and mute buttons on a track are enabled, the mute overrides the solo.

Next, choose the scrubber tool. Click and drag the cursor back and forth along the region and listen to the results. This should help clarify what I meant earlier by scrub. Find a part that is particularly interesting (such as a single word) and run the cursor back and forth at different speeds. When you are done, release the mouse button.

Now choose the zoom er tool. Click and drag over your "interesting part". When you release the mouse, it should expand to fill the timeline. Switch back to the scrubber tool and run over the timeline again. You should be able to hear the constituent parts of the expanded whole.

Switch to the selector tool and use it to click and drag, selecting part of the whole. If you are working with speech, try selecting the sound of single letter (such as "p" or "t"). Once you have made your selection, press the play button on the transport window. Notice that ProTools now plays only your selection instead of the whole track.

When making selections, you need to protect against the creation of clicks at the beginning and end of your selection, known as sample discontinuities. You can do this by beginning and ending your selection at a zero crossing, where the amplitude crosses the center line. In order to see these, it may be necessary to increase the vertical zoom. Your selection will look like one of these:

good		poor

The one on the left should not produce clicks as it starts or stops playing. The one on the right is very likely to produce clicks when it both when it starts playing and stops. You should get in the good habit of starting and stopping your selection at zero crossings. Unfortunately ProTools doesn't do this for you automatically, so developing this habit now will avoid many problems as you continue to use ProTools for editing audio.

After you have fixed your selection to begin and end at zero crossings, you can capture your selection for later recall. The capture is a means of organizing your selections so that they can be easily reassembled in new and interesting sequencing. To do this, go to the Region menu and select the Capture option. This will bring up the following dialog window:

ProTools will store your selection information into a new region and add it to the Regions List that you see on the right side of the edit window. Repeat this process a few times to capture several distinct small regions (if you were working with speech, try capturing some additional letter sounds). As you add multiple captured regions to the list, you will notice that they are not in bold like the regions representing your original recordings. ProTools does this to distinguish regions that represent whole recorded files from those that do not.

Once you have built up a list of regions for yourself, you are ready to try your hand at assembling them to form new sequences or sounds. To start, create a new track and solo its audio. Then switch to the grabber tool.

At this point, you'll also need to pay closer attention to the four edit modes found in the upper left corner of the edit window. These affect how the regions will behave as you arrange and move them on a given track. Briefly, with keyboard shortcuts in parentheses...

• Shuffle mode (F1) causes regions to butt up against each other as you add them to a track.
• Slip mode (F2) will allow you to place regions freely at any point along the timeline.
• Spot mode (F3) is used to enter a specific time for placing your region.
• Grid mode (F4) will only place regions at unit increments used by the ruler.

Start by choosing shuffle mode. Then drag and drop some of your newly captured regions from the regions list onto the track. Note that they are automatically placed side by side in the track for you. In this mode it is impossible to overlap regions or create silence between them. The upside is that it make stringing your regions together very fast and easy.

Try switching to slip mode. Now when you drag and drop regions from the list to a track, you will be able to space them out. You can also grab regions that are already on the track and adjust their position in the timeline. By switching back and forth between these two modes, it should fairly straightforward to do something like this...

The other two edit modes are a bit more specialized in there application. Spot mode is very handy for video applications when a sound needs to be placed at an exact time to synchronize with a visual event. Grid mode is useful for music, when coupled with a ruler that displays rythmic information such as bars and beats. Feel free to try these out on your own.

To summarize: this tutorial focused on the edit window within ProTools and introduced many of the tools used for editing and arranging audio clips. It covered how to organize your tracks and regions by giving them descriptive names and capturing smaller selections to make new regions. Finally, it showed how you can use the regions list to access available regions and sequence them within a track. There is a lot you can do with the editing tools provided by ProTools, but there is more to come.