Life or Death Pro Tools Tips: Tracking Day

You’ve made it to tracking day, and assuming that you read our first “Life or Death Pro Tools Tips” article—The Tracking Template—then you’re ready for anything that could possibly happen. Today we’ll explore some tips for keeping the forward momentum going and sticking the landing.

Know Everything Ahead of Time

OK, it’s an impossible task to know everything ahead of time, but the more you know about the artist’s, producer’s and musicians’ past works the better equipped you’ll be to make decisions.

Know what style and vibe you’re going for, and listen to any demos, references or work tapes that have been sent so that you’ll be able to make creative engineering decisions ahead of downbeat. Once everyone is in their chair and it’s time to begin, open your tracking template and get cracking.

Getting It Started Right

When you first open your session, be sure to enter the tempo, meter and key signature into the session.

In a digital world, we’re always sending sessions for overdubs and there are a lot of hands touching the project. By entering the key and meter changes accurately you ensure the person tuning, timing or overdubbing on the project will have the information they need.

By entering key, time signature and meter correctly (and also printing it onto the click as shown) you ensure anyone who deals with the tracks after you will have all of the pertinent information they need.

An extra step to ensure this information makes it to anyone who doesn’t use Pro Tools is to print the output of the click track to an audio track that is named with pertinent information (i.e. “120=Tempo 6.8 G=Key”). This track and audio file will be a guide that follows the session and also a handy place to type tracking notes in the comments field.

If there are loops or pre-production to import on the day-of your tracking session, you’ll have to be careful to make sure they line up to the Pro Tools grid. Sometimes transients from an exported loop will be slightly off, so zoom in far and iron out any issues.

After importing a loop, it’s a good practice to put the track in tick mode. If you need to repeat the loop, you can highlight a range of beats (i.e. 2 bars, 4 bars) and use OPT+R to repeat the loop as many times as you need. By highlighting a time range while the track is in ticks, you ensure that even if the loop length is a few samples off your grid, it will loop accurately and stay locked to the grid.

If the pre-production or loops are importing into a weird place in the song change the timecode mapping options to “Maintain Relative Timecode Values” before importing. Carefully consider what you want to import before pressing okay. Sometimes you don’t need plug-in assignments, etc.

Manage Files From The Get-Go

It’s necessary to start with good file management and end with good file management. The last thing to do before hitting record for the first time is to open up your “Workspace” window (OPT+;) to ensure that only the drive you’re recording to is setup as a record drive.

In workspace, you’ll see that there’s either an R, T or P next to each drive. Clicking on the letter allows you to change between these designations. Record drives, designated “R,” allow files to be played and written. Playback drives, designated “P,” allow playback but not writing. Transfer drives, “T,” will allow neither writing nor playback.

If all of the drives besides the record drive are designated as “transfer” drives, then you’ll be prompted whenever files are found outside of your drive ensuring all your samples, loops and imported audio follow the session.

It’s also advisable to verify your “Disk Allocation” settings before recording. Never use “round robin” or “custom disk allocation.” These options are leftover from the early days when multi-tracking required multiple hard drives to supplement limited RAM. There are several ways to spit audio files into the wrong place, and the worst callback you can receive is from a worried producer who gets a “missing audio files” prompt after leaving with the session.

Drop Descriptive Markers

As you’re recording it’s important to be able to navigate quickly in case there’s a repair or a song edit that needs to be made. If you’re in grid mode (F4) and have your grid size set correctly (perhaps to half notes in case there’s a 2/4 bar or dotted-quarter notes on a 6/8 song) then your markers will snap to the beat.

Where applicable, the markers should reference the same chart the musicians are working from. Here in Nashville, that’s a “Nashville Number Chart”, but it may also be simple bar numbers or just general song sections. Your markers should be frequent; I try to have one at least every four bars or a minimum of one-per-line.

With good markers, someone on the floor can ask to punch a very small section and you can click on a marker and navigate forward or backward a bar by just hitting the number “1” and “2” keys on the numerical keypad.

Using this form of navigation, you can punch into a chorus with ease by clicking on the chorus marker, quickly keying back two or four bars for pre-roll (depending on tempo) and then punching in. Everyone benefits from not having to wait on you to search for the punch, so be sure to use a system that you can navigate quickly.

Some people jot the Pro Tools bar numbers straight onto the chart. This way, they can navigate without dropping markers, and just use the sheet music. This can still work in the absence of a click track by simply jotting timecode or minute and second onto the chart. Whichever way you decide to navigate, don’t forget to communicate with the musicians and let them know how much pre-roll they will have.

Advanced Pro Tools users sometimes use the Track Punch feature (CMD + SHIFT + T), which is a record mode that allows tracks to be punched in or out just by clicking the track’s record button.

In track punch mode, tracks start off unarmed. By control-clicking you can toggle these to an intermediate state of record-ready (denoted by a blue record light) that won’t punch in—even in record—until you click them again.

Track punch isn’t something to try for the first time on a session. Play with it first in your free time. You may not use it frequently, but quick-moving sessions sometimes benefit from the ability to punch tracks in and out at separate times.

Listen, Listen, Listen

Yes, of course you need to be paying attention to the sounds—this goes without saying and is your first responsibility—but you’re also responsible for listening to what the people around you are saying.

You need to keep your head on a swivel if you’re operating Pro Tools, utilizing your ears and any sight lines available. If the producer, artist or musicians ask for something you need to be able to get there quick.

It’s a good practice to have the artist’s mic in record ready if you’re stopped in case they have something to say from the booth. Facilitating good communication in the control room is important to keeping the momentum, and session flow is extremely important to staying focused on the music.

Don’t Overextend Yourself or Lose Your Cool

If you’ve worked a session before, then you know how often gear goes down or something quirky happens. Nobody will know you’re stressed out unless you show it, so keep your cool in tough situations. It’s hard to stay relaxed when issues arise, but you’ll be quicker on your feet if you go into problem-solving mode and skip all the panicking. Making decisions with this in mind will help you out.

It’s always better to capture the basics extremely well than to do a so-so job with a hat full of tricks. It’s okay if your drum set up is basic if it allows you to execute better. Many young engineers overextend attempting several things they’ve seen before.

I subscribe to a “rule of three” to help with this. I don’t allow myself to try more than three new things on a single session. It might just be changing out a compressor in one of the chains I know, or adding an EQ. This allows me a few things to play with, but doesn’t put me in a situation where I am missing the fundamentals—the kick, snare, overhead, etc.

You’ll have to find your own threshold, as music generally demands the engineering changes slightly to fit each song, but being ready to capture the basics is most important.

Stick the Landing

The only tangible things that leave a recording session are the hard drives containing your day’s work. (And who knows how much longer that will be the case.) So, to leave things on a high note, remember to delete unused tracks from your session as you close each song—this prevents “import session data” from doing funky things to anyone in the future. Also, be sure to create safety copies of your recordings.

Someone once said of digital recordings, “if it doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist.” That’s not a bad rule to live by. In addition to the master drive, you should backup to a safety drive frequently. If you have a backup utility program that you know well, such as Synchronize Pro, you can do this in between songs and in the case of a hard drive failure you’ll be covered up to your last break.

A good practice—in addition to maintaining an up-to-date safety hard drive—is to bring your own personal drive to catalog all your sessions. In the previously mentioned worst-case scenario that you get a call from a producer who’s missing files, you can start from your own personal drive and try and make it right.

Another way to get your third copy is to upload to a cloud storage source—although anytime a sensitive recording is entrusted to an outside source security should be a concern, so use this at your own peril.

Be wary of automatic backups such as Apple’s Time Machine with recording drives. These services are wonderful, but oftentimes try to access hard drives even when they’re in use, leading to AAE and phantom disk speed errors.

Victory Lap

With your task accomplished, you can leave the studio and assess your work. Take your copy home and pull it up in a familiar environment.

Now is the time to make decisions about the success of those little tricks you took a chance on this time and make plans about what you might do next time.

If you are able, document your input list, charts and anything else that might be helpful later. Get some brownie points and send these in a follow-up email to the producer or client.

Once you have a good picture of how the session went you can get back on SonicScoop and decide on your three new tricks for next time!

Josh Ditty is an audio engineer who works in Nashville, TN.

Please note: When you buy products through links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission.