Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 Tutorials
Sessions / Creating Audio Tracks
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Subtitles of the Movie (Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 / Sessions / Creating Audio Tracks)
In this movie, I am going to be adding audio tracks to this my new song session that I have created to go along with the existing one right here. Since this is the edit window, we are actually seeing the audio waveforms here. Let me zoom in on that and we will see it closer. I am going to be adding more of these audio tracks. This one happens to be a stereo audio track. I can tell because there are two waveforms within this one row of audio. This one entry right here. This is considered one track. In this case a stereo track. Let's add a few more. To do that I can either go to the file menu and choose new track or I can use the keyboard shortcut on the Mac Shift+Commnad+N or on the Pc Shift+Control+N. I prefer using the keyboard so I will do it that way. We are presented with the new track dialogue box and this is what it looks like if you are using Pro Tools 6.0 all the way through Pro Tools 6.4. If you have upgraded to 6.7, you will see something a little bit different which we will look at just a minute. Here we have three choices. How many tracks to create, whether they are going to be mono or stereo for the audio based tracks and of course which kind of a track we are going to create. So we have mono and stereo right here and we have the four types of tracks available here. Audio track, auxiliary input track, master fader and MIDI track. For now we are just going to deal with audio tracks. So we can choose the number of tracks and whether we want them to be mono or stereo. A nice keyboard shortcut you can use in this new track dialogue box is to hold the Command key on the Mac or the Control key on the Pc and use the left and right arrows to select mono or stereo and use the up and down arrows to select audio versus aux, master or MIDI. Here's how the dialogue box has changed for Pro Tools 6.7. The first three fields are identical but now we have this thing in-samples or in-ticks. We won't bother with this just yet but I do want to draw your attention to this plus symbol. If I click this plus symbol, I get a second row or even a third row of criteria. So I can create more than just one kind of track at the same time. For example, I could create one mono audio track, two stereo auxiliary tracks, one stereo master fader and so forth. Let's go and create three mono tracks and we will see what that looks like. Pro Tools has named these new tracks audio2, 3 and 4 and they happen to be the exact same height as that stereo track even though they are mono tracks. Notice too that there is this bar right here. It kind of has a greenish tint and there are these two bars right here; two of them and they are narrower. This is the level and peak meter for the edit window for this track. There are two of them for this track because it's a stereo track. One for left, one for right. Down here there's only one because this is a mono track. In preparation for recording session, let's go ahead and rename these tracks so that they are not named audio and then a number. It's not very descriptive. To do that I can just double click right on this name right here and it brings up this audio 1 dialogue box and I can name this track anything I like; guitar and I can either hit the OK button or I can hit the next or previous keys to go forward or backward through the tracks. I will click ok and you can see what changes here. Notice the title bar for this track changed right here where I double clicked. It also changed over here in the show-hide bin. We will look at that in just a little bit. Notice however what did not change namely the title for the waveform files out here on the track itself and over here in the audio bin, it's still named audio1_01. We will get to renaming and managing waveform files a little bit later. For now let's just go ahead and rename these other tracks. I will do that by double clicking on audio 2. I will call this `VOCS1' because this is my lead vocal, `VOCS2' or maybe a backup and then `TAMBO' for tambourine. Now to show you the significance of putting these names in place before you start recording, I will go ahead and record a small vocal to go along with the guitar. Ok, well I more hummed than sang but you get the idea. Notice however, there is a new item over here in this audio bin called vocs1_01, same as the name of the track. If we scroll back over here, we see the same thing which makes sense because this is this. You can immediately see the benefit of naming these tracks before you record.
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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