Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 Tutorials
Audio Recording Basics / Using Click Tracks
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Subtitles of the Movie (Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 / Audio Recording Basics / Using Click Tracks)
In this movie, I will show you how to implement click tracks so that you can stay in tempo. Pro Tools is used to record and mix pretty much anything from recorded books to songs and music, all the way up to motion picture fully sound effects and orchestration. For those recording something musical, it's important to stay in tempo from the very first track of your multi-track recording. Pro Tools offers a useful tool called the click plug-in. I was going to cover plug-ins in more detail later on in this tutorial but I will go ahead and break the rules a bit for now just to show you this one because this is the perfect place for it. To find out much more about plug-in usage, check up the later chapters on using plug-ins. To use this plug-in, I will create a new track typically an auxiliary track. So I will create a mono auxiliary track from the new track dialogue box. An auxiliary track is like an audio track but without the associated audio waveform. At first you might think this is purposeless but auxiliary tracks give you incredible power and efficiency in your mixing. I will cover auxiliary tracks in detail later on in the tutorial but for now just realize that we can add the click plug-in to this auxiliary track and that it will transform this track into a click track. A click track is something used by almost all recording artistes in order to maintain consistent tempo and to stay in tempo with what's already been recorded as they lay down more musical instruments. I won't go into all the details of it here but music is divided into periods of time called bars and these bars typically contain either three or four beats called quarter notes. The tempo of a song is typically considered by how many of these quarter notes occur during 1 minute of playing. The default tempo for Pro Tools LE is 120 quarter notes also called beats per minute. We will be able to see that when we bring up the tempo ruler. Currently it's not visible but we can make it so if we go to this little button right here, this graphic and hold down the mouse button and choose tempo. We see here the default is 120 beats per minute and this happens to be a quarter note. You can also bring up this tempo ruler by going to the display menu and choosing ruler view shows tempo. I find it easier just to use this graphic. To actually hear these 120 beats every minute, I can insert the click plug-in into my auxiliary track and hit the space bar to play this recording. There are no audio tracks yet so I should just hear what this click plug-in does. I will normalize the volume on this auxiliary track's fader by holding the option key on the Mac or the Alt key on the pc and clicking on the fader, that will set it to the zero position and now when I playback, there's our clicks. Let's turn the volume down just a little bit so it's not quite so oppressive and we will play it again. You can hear that the plug-in has two different sounds. It's normal click or unaccented beat sound which you can adjust its loudness or level and then there's one that happens every four beats which is called an accented click or beat. We can make it louder or quieter as well. The unaccented clicks are there to help you keep tempo and the accented ones are there to help you maintain the bar or measure based structure of the song overtime. I will go ahead and setup a stereo audio track and arm it for recording using the click track which I can hear in my headphones while I am playing my guitar. It's important that I use headphones during playback so I don't accidentally record the click track into the audio for my guitar. This click plug-in puts the accented note on the first beat of each measure or the down beat which to my ear seems kind of intuitive so I just wait 2 beats so that the accented is on the third beat of each measure which is where you typically hit your snare drum in a 4-4 bar. Now I will lay down a base line while listening to both the guitar and the click track. Again, I am using headphones to avoid sound leakage or spillage from one track to another. This way, each audio track will represent one and only one instrument with no other sounds present. This will give me more flexibility later on when I mix all the tracks together. Now let's listen to these two tracks that I just recorded without the click track in place. As you listen to this, try to imagine how difficult it would have been to get the guitar and the bass to be as tighter as lock step as they are tempo-wise if I didn't have the click track as a tempo reference. This need for a click track becomes greater as you add more layers of sound you are recording. Without a click track, many tracks will seem to jump ahead of the bar or lag behind it in a way that takes away from the lot of the excitement and the musicality of the recording. Pretty soon the beat of the song turns to mush. The only other thing you really need to know about the click plug-in for now is that it becomes inactive when you place Pro Tools LE in its low latency monitoring mode. The fact that this click plug-in is now highlighted or blue like this means it's inactive. It's not able to playback. There are ways around this limitation though. Try assigning the click plug-in to a spare audio track instead of an auxiliary track. The only problem with this is that you have to sacrifice an audio track in its associated voice which are in limited supply at only 32 whereas you can have a 128 auxiliary tracks. Another option is to leave the click plug-in on the auxiliary track but to use a digital output labeled S/PDIF on your interface. It's also called S/PDIF. Of course, if you do this you will have to have a piece of equipment like an outboard D/A converter that can receive that S/PDIF signal and turn it back into analog audio. This is actually the method that I resort to in order to get around this low latency monitoring limitation. Here outputs 9 and 10 are the S/PDIF outputs and I have reassigned my hr824 output to be rather to be S/PDIF output on my 002Rack. And now you can see my click plug-in is available again. If you would like to learn how to change the tempo setting of your song, I recommend you look at the chapter on MIDI, specifically the movie on tempo and meter.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 |
| Author: | Nathan Dickson |
| SKU: | 33599 |
| ISBN: | 1-932808-46-9 |
| Release Date: | 2005-02-25 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 101 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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