5 Amazing Tips for Pro Tools

Here are 5 amazing Pro Tools tips that will totally improve your workflow.

It’s incredible how much these Pro Tools tips have increased my workflow and made life so much easier. So I’m just going to get to it.

1. Using Shift + Option

The first tip I have for you is to use the shift option button. I know this one is a very popular one but I noticed a lot of people still manually routing one track at a time. Using this will help so much, especially during the mixing phase.

Let me show you how it works. Say you have a group of tracks that you want to create a mix bus or sub master for. You can do this a couple of ways, first, create an aux and set your input to an available bus, then simply select the tracks that you want to be routed, hold shift and option and select that in your output. You can simply select the tracks you want to hold shift and option, right-click and create a new track. From there select an aux track and give it a name. 

2. Shift + Command and arrow keys to cycle through playlists

‍This one is a great tip that I just discovered. So, if you are familiar with comping with playlists you are probably familiar with using the arrow and building a comp right? Well, Say you are mixing and you noticed a wrong word or something.  if you don’t want to switch to playlists, just highlight the track, hold down Shift and command and cycle through with the up and down arrow. This is great if you need to change something fast.

3.    Converting Audio to midi

This one is a lot of fun. A few versions ago, Pro Tools integrated Melodyne into their mix and with that some new amazing features. One of my favourites is the converted audio to the midi feature. You can do this in a couple of ways. Take the audio track you want and right-click. Select convert audio to midi. The other way is simply holding the option and dragging the track to the midi or instrument track. From there it will map out the audio to midi and you can then add an instrument of your choice. 

This is so helpful to me. Especially when I want to create a unique organ or keyboard part. I can play something on my guitar and then drop it into the instrument track. Is it perfect no but it gets you close.

4.    Send to multiple tracks using the command

This tip is pretty helpful and I’m surprised I don’t see a lot of people use this one. So say you need to route to multiple places. Say you have a drum master that you want to route to the sub-master as well as a par comp. you could just use a send and it will work.  Or you can go to your output section to find the bus for the par comp and hold down the command button while selecting the bus. You will now see a checkmark beside it as well as a + sign beside your output. This means it is now routing the output of the track to multiple places. This is also useful for side chaining.

5.    Temp move in Slip mode using the command button

‍Finally, my last tip is when editing in grid mode, hold down the command button while moving the region. This will temporarily put you in slip mode so you are free to move where you like.

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