A very helpful blog post came across my Twitter feed yesterday morning. 10 Pro Tools Tips For The Newbie. It must have been a popular post, as it spawned This addendum. If you’re an avid, excuse the pun, Pro Tools user, or an experienced daw operator in general, some of this is old hat, but there’s some little gens in these posts that most people aren’t really aware of. I felt inclined to do a post of my own, because I feel like there are a great deal of shortcuts that are still unknown to most PT users. I say shortcuts here not only to denote shortcut keys, but time savers. So many times have I been in a session and gave a set of instructions to an engineer and was met with 2 minutes of mouse clicks before the deed was carried out. Allow me to cut your click time down to a bare minimum. Use these shortcuts, and much time will be saved in your sessions.

Using the * for quick transport.

It blows me away how many people don’t know this exists. 99.999 percent of engineers I work with do everything in grid mode, but never pay attention to measure numbers. In result, when you want to get somewhere, they are pressing the rewind or fast forward buttons in the transport, or dragging the playhead with the mouse in order to find where the client has requested to go. There went 2 minutes I’ll never get back. All on the numpad, press the Star key. Then, enter 21.1.000 followed by the return on the homerow. This will take you to Bar 21, beat 1, tick 000. As an engineer, it’s good to get familiar with certain key points of the song on the grid so you can get back to them very quickly. Obviously, you’ll want to put markers throughout the session such as verses, choruses, etc, but if you needed to recall a place that wasn’t marked, the above keystrokes would do the trick.

Speaking of markers.

Since we’re on the topic of markers, let me run through some little known tricks to get the most out of this awesome feature. Most people know how to drop a marker. It’s simple, hit enter on the numpad and a box pops up with some parameters showing marker name, number, etc. Press return, and there you are. What most people don’t know is how to move from marker to marker. They literally use them as visual signposts in the session, instead of using them to command the transport. Obviously, you can hit the next and previous buttons in the transport window, but there’s an even easier way. On the numpad, press period, 1, then period again. This will take you to your first marker. Hit period, 2, period, to go to marker 2, etc. Want to select from marker to marker? It’s easy. Hit period, 1, period, to get to marker one. While holding down shift, hit period, 2, period. This will make a selection on your desired tracks.
You’ve got 999 locate points. Lets start using the higher numbers to further break down the song. Lets say you’ve got an occurrence of “Oh Baby” in each chorus. You want to hear each one in succession in order to figure out which one is the best one to fly if need be. Lets also say that your choruses are on markers 2, 4, and 6 respectively. What we’ll do is drop a marker right before each occurrence of “Oh Baby,” but this time, we’ll tell PT what marker number we want to use. Go to your first chorus. Find the “oh baby” phrase. Just before it, hit period, 20, then enter, all on the numpad. This will drop marker 20 right at that spot. Repeat the steps for each chorus, adding a 0 at the end of it’s respective marker numbers. This allows you to break down the chorus in chunks so you can hear things in quick succession to get a good sense of context. What you’ll be able to do is hit period, 20, period, period, 40, period, and period, 60, period, to hear all 3 “Oh Baby” phrases. Find the one you like, and fly it to each of the choruses if need be. What I suggest is to quickly drop these markers in while you’re doing an initial listen to the tune, so that when you go to cut the vocal, you can really have this tune broken down. If you’re really wanting to edit phrase by phrase, go ahead and drop markers at the beginning of each phrase in verses and choruses. For example Verse 1 is marker 1. Then, phrase 2 of verse one is marker 12, 3 is 13, 4 is 14, etc. Chorus is marker 2. Phrase 2 is 22, phrase 3 is 23, etc. Not only will you become familiar with the tune so you can edit with ease, but you now have some awesome punch points for when you cut the main vocal. When a vocalist says, “Can you punch me in right before “Oh Baby?” You will be able to do just that, and in seconds flat.

Using the / to edit the from, through, and length fields.

We all know that the start, end, and length fields help us determine what is selected and how much. But were you aware that you can edit said fields without even moving the mouse? On the numpad, hit /21.1/25.1 then press return on the homerow. Now look at the start, end, and length fields. You should see start, 21.1.000 End: 25.1.000, length: 4.1.000. With 2 quick steps, you’ve created a selection on the ruler. If your insertion point was in a track, that track would now be selected with the above parameters. Every time you hit / on the numpad, you move the cursor to a field on the ruler. Hitting / would take you to the start field. Hit it twice to go to end, and 3 times to go to length.
Speaking of the Length field, allow me to point out one more very important shortcut that, in my mind, makes pro tools one of the fastest editing platforms out there. Most engineers use the Length field as a simple readout of how many bars/beats or minutes/seconds have been selected in the timeline. However, the length field is editable. Whatever you place there determines how much will be selected on the ruler, or on any tracks that have the insertion point. This allows you to select data in 1 easy step. Lets say you have a chorus vocal you want to fly into another chorus. You know that your chorus is 16 bars long. Here’s the quickest way to select it. With your insertion point in the vocal track at the start of your chorus, hit ///16.1.000 on the numpad and press return. Instantly, you have selected 16 bars and are now ready to copy and paste it into the subsequent choruses.

Well, there you have it. A small arsonal of some of my favorite Pro Tools shortcuts. To many advanced PT users, this may seem like old hat. However, I’m surprised how many seasoned engineers are not aware of these tricks for very quick and efficient navigation and editing. I hope this has proven helpful to you, aiding you in the process of increasing the speed and efficiency of your tracking and editing sessions. My deepest thanks go out to Slau for teaching me these tricks at the beginning of my Pro Tools experience. This has made my life much easier, allowing my sessions to run quicker and smoother. Thanks so much for reading.