Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 Tutorials
Audio Recording Basics / Punch Recording
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Subtitles of the Movie (Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 / Audio Recording Basics / Punch Recording)
In this movie, I will show you an easier way to fix recording mistakes. Here's a scenario that happens all the time. You are recording a vocal take and you or the artiste you are recording messes up a phrase or maybe hits a sour note. Sometimes the mistake is left in to personalize the piece. But more often than not, something needs to be done about it. You could record the entire take over again. But it's more time efficient and easier on you or the artiste to just record that one phrase that was messed up during the first take. Pro Tools has an answer for you using punch recording. Let's take a quick listen to me hitting a very sour note. This is the vocal we are going to fix in this movie. Humility begins for me right now. When I hit must, it was like nasty. In order to record just the phrase that I messed up, I want to begin recording not at the beginning of the song like we have seen so far but instead right here where the waveform for this phrase begins. Actually just a little bit before it just to give the waveform some breathing room. I want my new recording to begin here and go until here or just after the phrase where the sour note ends. To do this, I will use the selection tool which I can get by clicking on this tool in the header of my edit window. Notice my cursor changes to this vertical `I' bar similar to what you would see in a word processor for selecting text. With this new tool, I can select any portion of the waveform of this track just by clicking and dragging with the mouse. If I begin my selection just before the phrase begins and end just after the phrase ends, I have then set my start and end points also called in and out points from my punch recording. If you look up at the time ruler for this edit window, you will see blue arrows; one down arrow located at the start or end point of my selection and one up arrow located at the end or out point of my selection. Watch these arrows go from blue to red as I arm this track for recording. I have just set punch recording in and out points and if I were to record something right now, it would begin at the in point and end at the out point. I didn't really have a chance to get in the groove of the music so I wasn't really prepared to sing at the right moment. Let's undo this take. Look at that, my first take is still there and unharmed. This time I am going to set up something called a pre-roll and post-roll. What this will do is begin playback at some point before my punch in point and end the playback sometime after my punch out point. This will help me figure out the groove or the feel of the song so that when the punch in point finally arrives, I will be all ready to sing with it. To set up the pre-roll, I can click on the pre-roll button in the transport control window. I actually have to give it some amount of time to play before the punch in point. I will set that to 4 seconds. I can set up the post-roll which for the sake of me getting in the groove is not totally necessary but it's still nice to hear what comes after the punch out. To do this, I can simply put a number of seconds here for the post-roll and you can see that it automatically activated the post-roll. It would have done this for the pre-roll as well. Now that my pre and post-roll timings are set, I will go ahead and record my vocal again. I will disarm the track and we will listen to the results. Notice how playback still used the pre-roll value even though I am not recording anything. I can disable that by turning the buttons off in the transport control window. I will create another track and show you something kind of cool. If I switch to the hand tool from the tool buttons here at the top of my edit window, I can grab a hold of this waveform block or audio region that I just punched in and move it to this new track. I will hold the Shift key while I move it so it doesn't change its place on the timeline. Notice how there's a gap now on the original recording. What happened to my first take here? Well, it's still there because we are performing what's called non-destructive recording and editing. I will go into detail about what this means a little later. But for now, just rest assured that as long as this destructive record many option in the operations menu is not checked like it is now, then nothing you record will erase anything already recorded. Again, make sure this menu item does not look like this. There are times for destructive recording but not right now. So we will leave this off. One more thing, there are two monitoring modes you can use when recording. They are both available from the operations menu. The first is the auto input monitor mode and the second is the input only monitor mode. Which one should you use? Well, it depends on what you want to be hearing when you are recording. The reason I bring this up now is that it is most useful to set this correctly when doing your punch recording although it's useful at other times as well. If you want to hear yourself or the artiste making their new sounds only during the punch in portion of the recording, set this to auto input monitor. This will let you hear the first take vocal during the pre-roll and the post-roll but will automatically switch to the new sound being recorded only during that little punch period. This is useful to hear how the punch is blending with the existing material and can help you when the artiste is in a separate recording room from where you sit. This is the method I used during my punch earlier. If however, you want to hear the new sound during the whole pre-roll punch and post-roll part of the recording, especially if you are recording just yourself, you can switch this over to input only monitoring. This way you will be able to hear yourself warming up before the punch in so you are more confident of the way you blend in with the other tracks when the time comes to record the punched in part. It also limits that jarring sensation of suddenly hearing yourself on the headphones when the punch in begins.
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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