Behold, the ‘best solo I never sang’ effect! Rating And LabelingĪs you start to utilize playlists even more, you’re going to want to keep careful track of how you feel about each take, what its purpose might be, and more. Either way, when you’re done, you’ll have your FrankenTake assembled into a playlist and (hopefully) will be happy with the result. The philosophical debate encompasses both approaches, and really it can depend on the artist and their performance as to which method works better. Obviously you can start with an entire take, and just drop in a few phrases here and there, or you can truly assemble a ‘best of the best’. Now the fun begins!įrom here, you can feel free to assemble your best Frankenstein’s monster of a vocal track by copying and pasting the BEST parts of each vocal take into your ‘comp track’. Collect three or four ‘keeper’ tracks that you’re happy with. Have them sing the entire song and use a new playlist with every ‘pass’. Say you’ve got a vocalist in the studio ready to nail that perfect lead Vox track. Editing your takes and creating new composite, or, ‘comp’ takes is a big part of using playlists. Keeping track of alternate takes may be the most obvious feature of playlists, but it certainly doesn’t end there. This will allow you to create a new playlists after you’ve already recorded something, switch between previously recorded takes, delete unused playlists to save on disk space, or utilize the ‘target playlist’ which we’ll get to when we talk about comping. It’s more efficient in terms of CPU power, it’s smarter in terms of workflow, and it saves valuable screen real estate for tracks that you’re actually working with.Īccess the playlists menu by clicking the little drop down arrow to the right of the track name in the header. Now you can have a single track, all of your effects queued up, panned properly, volume set, and simply swap between the various playlists to play back all of those ‘takes’ through that same single track. Gone are the days of making tons and tons of alternate tracks to keep a lot of guitar solo options or something similar. Playlists are an incredibly powerful way of managing multiple takes of your recordings. Let’s get the basic idea out in the open right away. Here’s how to get going using playlists to make sure you’re not missing out.

While many DAWs handle alternative takes and audio files in myriad ways, the playlist function of Pro Tools has been refined into an organization and workflow masterpiece. I don’t know whether it’s out of habit or ignorance, but I find that playlists are a too-often underutilized feature of Pro Tools.

Pro tools use