Producing With Pro Tools

Hi Folks. Digidesign has announced a new virtual instrument that looks totally cool… Transfuser. It’s a “real-time loop, phrase, and groove creation workstation” and looks like an awesome tool for working on electronic, dance, and hiphop music. Digi’s got a free trial download of it with 200MB of sounds available now (the full product will have over 2GB of sounds/loops).

There are a couple of demo videos on Digi’s site… check them out here:

LINK TO TRANSFUSER

From the looks of it, Transfuser might be really easy to integrate into some of the M-audio MIDI instruments, such as the Axiom line, Trigger Finger, and even the Xponent with Torq because of its ability to map effects to knobs and samples to pads. As I’m on vacation at the moment, I have yet to download and play with it, but if any of you do, please feel free to post your comments here to this blog. I’d certainly be curious here what you think. And if you have some suggestions on things to fix, I can pass those along to Digidesign too.

Hey Folks -

Here’s the second half of my NAMM report… where I get the lowdown from Diego Stocco from Spectrasonics about their new AMAZING synth, Omnisphere. I can’t wait until this is out in September ‘08! I also talk with Dan Boatman at IK Multimedia about their new cool Stomp box. Awesome stuff. Check it out:

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One of things that I’ve witnessed so many times is Pro Tools users who upgrade to the latest operating system, only to find out that the upgrade is not compatible with Pro Tools. Then, they have to reinstall their previous operating system, often taking many hours to do so. Yes, the latest features of the most recent operating system may be attractive, but have patience young padawans!

We’ve all been looking forward to Pro Tools becoming compatible with Leopard (Apple’s OS 10.5), and Digidesign has released the first step… Pro Tools HD (not LE, M-powered, or Academic) is compatible with Leopard. But not just any Leopard. You can only use Pro Tools 7.4.1 with OS 10.5.1. Click here for more details on Digidesign’s site.

Please, please, please… save yourself some hassles. Turn off the automatic software update feature on your Mac. And, wait to upgrade your OS until its officially supported by Digidesign. You’ll avoid a lot of headaches and be much more productive.

Cheers!

NAMM – the winter wonderland of music gear. I’ve been going to NAMM for 5 years now and I must say that this year’s show was the most uneventful yet, in terms of being blown away by new gear offerings. However, there was one shining exception to the last sentence… Spectrasonic’s new Omnisphere synth module. That thing blew me away. I watched the demo 3 times. I was at the Spectrasonics booth so much that I ended up on their Omnisphere promo video several times. Check out that video here.

I also interviewed Diego Stocco, one of the developers for Omnisphere as well as a friend of mine from NAMM years past. I’ll post my interview with him and his demo of Omnisphere in a separate post here as soon as the video gets edited.

While at NAMM, I filmed interviews with several of my favorite manufacturers… and had some of their reps talk about their new gear.

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By the way, the background music to this video is a new song from my band… visit us on Myspace by clicking here.

Hi Folks! Hope you’re enjoying the new year so far.

I’m about to enjoy it even more than I already have been. I’ll be in Anaheim for the annual NAMM show this coming weekend. If you’re going to the show and want to meet up, email me at dfranz@berkleemusic.com and we’ll try to work it out. I should be there all day on Friday and Saturday.

If you don’t know what NAMM is, check out www.namm.org. NAMM is the National Association of Music Merchants and the show consists of every musical gear manufacturer showing off their wares. Its like a giant toy store for musicians. Plus, tons of famous artists make appearances there to hype the products that they endorse. And there are parties. But, mostly its about the gear… tons and tons of the latest coolest gadgets, instruments, and anything else music-related.

I’ll post some more blog updates after the show about the cool new gear I saw.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the new Berkleemusic.com online semester starts today, Jan 7th. You can still sign up for classes. I’ll be teaching sections of three different courses:

1. ‘Producing with Pro Tools’ - a class based on my new book (Producing in the Home Studio with Pro Tools, 3rd Edition) where we focus on recording, editing, and MIDI production techniques, for novices to intermediate Pro Tools users. Here, we do many real-world projects using Pro Tools for music creation and creative editing using audio and MIDI.

2. ‘Recording and Producing in the Home Studio’ - a class where you start with a demo song (your own or a clients) and over 12 weeks we take that song and produce it… in pre-production, we examine the song structure, lyrics, etc and rework anything that should be reworked… in the production phase, we re-record the tracks… and in the post-production phase, we edit, mix, and master the song. By the 12th week, we will have taken your demo and turned it into a fully produced and mastered recording.

3. ‘Pro Tools 101′ - the Pro Tools beginners class, designed by Digidesign. A guided start to learning the basics.

Get the most out of your studio equipment and new holiday toys. Go to www.berkleemusic.com to check out these courses and sign up to join me in class.

I saw this today and had to post the link… this dude, Alex Lelievre, is writing an app that enables you to control playback of Pro Tools with your iPhone. I don’t know enough about the technology to tell if it’ll work that well and I personally doubt the projected $150 price tag will stick, but it looks way cool if it does work. And if it works well, I’m definitely buying it… oh wait, I need the iPhone first. HEY SANTA! HOOK IT UP!

This app will be in beta next week… check out more info about it by clicking HERE

Want to help Pro Tools and your MIDI controller interact really smoothly when using a MIDI Learn-enabled virtual instrument? For example, want to use a knob on your M-Audio Axiom to adjust a frequency filter on an XPand! synth patch? Use the MIDI Learn function.

In all A.I.R. products from Digidesign (Xpand!, Hybrid, Strike, Velvet, and Structure) and a few third-party virtual instruments like Stylus RMX, you can use the MIDI Learn function to map the knobs and sliders on your MIDI controller to the parameter knobs and sliders in a virtual instrument.

Check it out. First, open up a virtual instrument, e.g., Digidesign’s free XPand! plug-in. Then, right-click or Control-click on a parameter that you’d like to have control over and choose “Learn” from the menu, as in the screen shot. Turn the knob, slider, etc. on your MIDI controller and the parameter in the virtual instrument will follow your movements. The continuous controller number that you assign to the parameter (e.g., CC25) is displayed in the menu. You can change the assignment using the “Assign” menu item or delete the assignment by choosing the “Forget” menu item.

Pro Tools will remember and enable you to use that knob, slider, etc, on the controller to adjust the parameter until you change the instrument’s patch, take that virtual instrument off of the track, or close the session without saving. If you save the session, Pro Tools will remember the controller/parameter map for the next time you open the session. However, if you change the instrument’s patch, you’ll lose the map. So, I recommend saving the patch once you’ve got the controller/parameter map assignment, using the “Save Settings” or “Save Settings As” commands from the plug-in menu, as in the screen shot below.

As of now, I don’t think there’s a way to copy a controller/parameter map from one patch in an instrument to another (which would be totally awesome), but if I’m wrong, maybe one of you can tell me how… I’d be much obliged.

OK, so I admit that I don’t use DigiBase (Digidesign’s built-in database browser in Pro Tools) all that much. Seems like I’m not alone in this fact. However, I did just learn about a couple of features that will make reaching for DigiBase a lot more frequent for me.

1. Unmounting Firewire drives. It always bothered me that I couldn’t unmount/eject a hard drive using my operating system as long as Pro Tools was running. Well, there’s a way around that. From within Pro Tools, choose Window > Workspace to open the Workspace browser window. Click once on the hard drive that you want to unmount/eject so that the name of the drive is selected. Click the little toolbox button in the upper left corner of the Workspace browser window, and you’ll get the menu shown in the figure below. Choose “Unmount” and there you go! That’s weird, wild schtuff.

So many people have complained about how Pro Tools requires you to use an interface with the software. Well, that still is the case, but the Mbox2 Micro makes it a lot less bulky to carry one with you.

Throw this in your pocket with your iLok key. Take your laptop with Pro Tools LE anywhere. Edit drums on the plane or mix on your roofdeck while looking at the stars. This is smallest interface I’ve seen… so minimal it only has an 1/8 inch jack on it for headphones and a volume wheel. No inputs on this thing. When I get one, I’ll post another update. (It’ll be out mid-November.)