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.

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.

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.)

One of the best uses of home studio equipment that I’ve heard and seen recently is on YouTube in the “Shred” videos. Maybe a little outside the realm of this blog, but this certainly is creative music production if I’ve ever heard/seen it.

Essentially, the Shred videos are overdubbed guitar solos and other instruments that a guy (StSanders) synced up to a live video performance of a major artist (Clapton, Santana, Iron Maiden, etc.) The guitar solos match up with the videos so well and are absolutely hysterical, mainly because they’re so well put together (or not). Other instruments come in and out as they’re shown on the video…and those parts are equally hilarious.

Its ‘music geek’ stuff and your musician friends will probably laugh their heads off. However, non-musicians probably won’t appreciate it very much.

Here’s the Clapton Shreds video. Search for other Shred videos on YouTube’s site. I HIGHLY recommend the Santana shreds video as well!

And just when I thought Digidesign was going to “force” me to buy a D-Command mixing console… my patience has paid off. This past weekend at AES in NYC, Digidesign showed the new C|24, the replacement for the long-toothed Control|24. It looks pretty sharp and sleek, and brings tons of the D-Command style to the new design.

Here are a few of the features:
- 24 bankable channel strips with touch-sensitive, motorized faders
- 16 mic/line/DI preamps (we’ll see what they sound like)
- 8 x 2 stereo line mixer
- 5.1 surround analog monitor section (cool!)
- talkback mic and inputs for remote talkback and listenback
- tons and tons of buttons – mute, solo, select, input, record, EQ, dynamics, inserts, sends, and automation

It won’t be shipping for a few weeks, but I think I know what I’m getting for Christmas.

OK, Pro Tools 7.4 is just around the corner… looking like November release…and I’ll tell ya it’s got some cool new features for sure. Elastic Time. Nice. It’s pretty slick. And from what I could tell on the AES showroom floor, it sounds pretty good too.

Elastic Time is several time compression/expansion algorithms that enable real-time elasticity of audio regions. You can change the tempo and timing of any audio file… but that’s not new, except that you can do it in real-time now. You can audition audio files from Digibase and have them playback in sync with the session before importing them. When you do import them, they automatically conform to the session tempo.

But the coolest part is that you can apply quantization to the audio files VERY easily and you can use Warp track view and Warp markers to really mess up the timing/tempo of the audio files.

The Identify Beat command and Beat Detective will have MUCH less use now. Pro Tools has brought some of the best features of Ableton Live in and gave them their own Digi spin. I think it’ll be really powerful. I can’t wait to use it.

I’ve been using a ton of instrument plug-ins lately… and I feel like I have an addiction to them. I want to get all the ones that are available for Pro Tools. I’ve been very impressed with the stuff that Digidesign has put out under it’s A.I.R. division, including Xpand!, Hybrid, Velvet, Strike, and Structure. If you don’t have any of these, definitely get your hands on Xpand! It’s free and its really got some great sounds. There’s also a free version of Structure. Granted, Structure Free is pretty limited, but you’ll get a taste at least. If you’re an electric piano, Rhodes, or Wurli player, I highly recommend the Velvet plug. There’s something about that instrument that every time I play it, something cool comes out… either a new song idea, or a new part to the song I’m working on.

Digidesign is offering a boxed set of their A.I.R. virtual instruments - click here to check it out

What are you favorite instruments and why? One of my personal favs these days is Access Indigo. Although its been around for a while, its so robust, easy to use, and has so many cool presets that its hard to beat as my first call synth. For the music I make with my band, the arpeggiator on that plug-in rules. And, I CANNOT WAIT until Spectrasonics finally gets the Intel Mac updates for Atmosphere and Trilogy. I want to use those natively in Pro Tools without the VST wrapper. I’ve heard they’re close to releasing them. Go to http://www.spectrasonics.net/updates/index.php to check.

Talk to me about your favorite instrument plugs…