Digital mixer pro tools 9

What does this mean? We asked six producers, engineers and working musicians — some of whom could barely contain their excitement — to break it down for us. I tend to write, produce, engineer and mix as I go via nonlinear sequences, and the ability to go back and change things within Pro Tools when necessary is unbelievable.

Which means I can toss my laptop into my tour bag, hit the road and record, produce, engineer and mix from anywhere in the world. I foresee it saturating every aspect of my workflow, whether that be sequencing the beginnings of an idea on my laptop backstage at a show in Tokyo, to tracking final vocals in my home studio in Minnesota, to handing off a mix session to an A List mixer and letting him put the icing on the cake… Pro Tools is a tremendously inspiring environment that allows my music to write itself, and like a wonderstruck fisherman, and all I have to do is stand on the shore and wait for something big to happen.

Now you can wear anything and everything in between. For me, the main thing is that it opens up the flexibility of Pro Tools to integrate into a far broader range of music production situations. It also makes the recording industry much more competetive because essentially a teenager with a little bit of knowledge has the same chance of creating a hit song as a professional doing it for years in a million dollar studio. But we use Pro Tools as our main platform and I love, love, love it.

One of the biggest aspects for me is mobility. I can be anywhere now: working on a mix, doing some editing, anything that I need to do with only my laptop. With this ticked, Pro Tools 9 will use the Session settings just as it has always done. To force Pro Tools to use the system settings, you need to untick it. When moving Sessions between systems where one is running Pro Tools 8. When moving Sessions amongst different systems that are all running Pro Tools 9.

To make this possible, Pro Tools now has two types of buses: internal mix buses, which work as they always did, and the new Mapped Output Buses. The new Mapping To Output section of the Bus tab makes it straightforward to reassign mixer outputs to physical outputs on your interface. Avid have introduced this additional set of buses in order to differentiate between physical outputs and routing settings, so when you select an output in Pro Tools 9, you are actually selecting a bus.

It might help to think of this as analogous to using a patchbay on an analogue desk. One of my clients regularly has problems with Sessions 'not playing' depending on what system the Session was last opened on. The new system in Pro Tools 9 makes this easier to manage even if you tick the Session Overwrite box when opening such a Session.

Hey presto: sound! So what would happen if I passed this Session back to a studio that used a different output pair as their main outputs? Well, it depends on what version of Pro Tools is in use there. In Pro Tools 9, it would be a simple matter of changing the Mapping To Output column to the appropriate outputs. In Pro Tools 8. This enables you to temporarily see the last saved setup from the original Session. The new system also makes it possible to map any internal mix bus to an output, should you wish to do so.