Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

One of the most tedious tasks in the game audio world is re-naming a large number of files to conform to a set format. Something like “fs_male_gravel_01.wav” and “fs_male_gravel_02.wav”, etc. There have been many batch processors over the years but there are times when you might be away from your main audio workstation and you want to rename the files from within ProTools.

This is a fairly easy task, but some of my students have been surprised at the results they get. Understanding the way in which Pro Tools will apply the new names can clear up the confusion. Here we see a simple session with four edited footstep regions.

One might assume that a renaming command would name these files from top to bottom in the tracks view. However, Pro Tools doesn’t look at the track order when renaming, it looks at the order of the regions in the Region Bin/List! If we were to rename these 4 regions the naming order from top to bottom would be 3, 1, 4, 2 based on their order to the left in the region list. If you sort your region list by a known parameter you can force the renaming to operate in the way you want. Watch what happens when we sort our list by name, like this :

After we run the Auto Rename function we get this :

Notice the order on the regions. If you look at the track view only you see the rename function ordered the regions 1, 3, 2, 4. Take a look again at the original and then how the regions were ordered in the region list. I hope it makes sense now!

Using the PT ordering function you can effectively order almost any region list to obtain the sort of functionality you need on your project. In this example you can see that I’m sorting by Timestamp :

Which in turn, makes the rename function order the regions in the track view as 3, 1, 4, 2!

I used to always export my regions/files for renaming functions in other applications, but given ProTools fairly robust functionality, the need for that is less. Just keep an eye on your region list and it should all start making more sense!

It always seems to happen at the worst possible time, and it isn’t just Pro Tools, it happens with every single application I use everyday… Mail, DP, Word, Filemaker Pro you name it. There are just times when the application, inexplicably, is not very happy about running a session, the very same session you ran the day before! In Pro Tools land there are a few very good troubleshooting steps to take when things seem to go astray.

FIRST - RESTART YOUR MACHINE. Yes, I’m shouting at you. I once had someone working for me, in another room of a facility. He called me and said, “Jeanine I can’t do…” I said. “Hey, that sounds weird, why don’t you restart the machine.” An hour later, I wander by the room he is using and I say, “How are things going?” He says, “Ok, but it is a bit slow since I can’t do…” I make him stop, save and restart. Guess what? Once rebooted the machine and PT were very happy. So rather than waste the two minutes it takes to restart, my lovely assistant spent an hour working around an easily fixable problem…

SECOND - On the mac, repair permissions. The UNIX undercarriage of the Mac OS X system carries a lot of capability. Sometimes a thing known as “the permissions” for a file can be set incorrectly. It is a simple process to fix, go to your Utilities folder (inside the Applications folder) and open up the application called Disk Utility. Click on your drive in the left hand column and click on the First Aid tab in the top center of the window. Then click Repair Permissions and let it do its thing. Wonders will commence…

I’ve taught the PT101 class for many semesters now and there seems to be a question that comes up frequently. How to use Reason as a sound source for a PT session. While I am risking sounding ancient, this is an age-old question. I remember back in the day…. before Pro Tools could talk MIDI and before Performer (yes there was an application before Digital Performer!) could talk audio (or Vision before Studio Vision for that matter) we used to have to set up communication between many applications on our systems to get our work done. One application would handle the audio files and another would handle the MIDI sequencing. This is the history that leads us to being able to use sound sources, i.e. Reason, with another audio application (in this case PT).

Enter ReWire!

Setting up that communication used to be very arduous, but today it is streamlined through the ReWire plugin. If you think about sequencing and DAW operation there are three main protocols which must be dealt with.

First, we want to have our MIDI sequencer be able to trigger external sound sources. We want to be able to sequence a MIDI track in PT in order to make a device in Reason make a sound. So we need MIDI communication.

Second, we want to pass audio from the sound source into the DAW application. So we need audio communication.

Third, in a perfect world we would also have a relationship between the linear timeline of our main application and that of any ancillary applications so that any play/pause, meter, tempo, etc would be mirrored regardless of which application we were looking at. So we need tempo and transport communication.

ReWire provides all of this functionality which makes the possibility of using Reason instruments inside of a PT session a very real possibility. On campus, our MIDI systems course deals with just this topic for several weeks. To get a glimpse of how we use this functionality take a look at the following handout which steps through all of the configuration and operation uses when utilizing Reason within a PT session.

Using Reason with Pro Tools

Once you’ve mastered this protocol you will open up a whole new world of sounds to use in your productions!

We’re very fortunate at Berklee to have many successful industry professionals visit the campus. Today was one of those days when I was able to attend a wonderful presentation, this time by Grammy award winning producer Michael Powell and his current engineer Quentin Dennard.

Mr. Powell has had an incredibly diverse career, he started producing music in 1979, he has worked with (and continues to work with) great artists such as Aretha Franklin, Anita Baker, R. Kelly and more. The thing that was amazing about today’s presentation was that the conversation kept coming back to the music. Sitting in the studio, with a gaggle of music technology students asking questions, it could have very easily turned into a Pro Tools master class, but that didn’t happen! The conversation began and ended with the music. There was a lot of talk about production techniques, musical structure, and working with performers in the studio. These concepts haven’t changed that much from the days of analog consoles and today.

There are times that we get caught up in the next best piece of gear, or an anticipated upgrade to our favorite application, but in the end, none of it matters but the music. Something Mr. Powell said, early on, set up the rest of the conversation this morning. He talked about the fact that the music we are all creating today, if it is good, will still be listened to in 100 years. In 100 years our toolsets will be very different but the goal will still be the same, to create, capture and distribute great music!

As someone who teaches music technology and audio engineering I was heartened by Mr. Powell’s frankness and experience and also by Mr. Dennard’s many statements about using the tools you have to make a great record. When asked about a favorite mic for vocals he said he would use the best mic available and that it is his job to make it sound great. Now, that isn’t to say either of them were technophobes, quite contrary! Rather, they use the tools they have to fulfill their unique musical vision.

That is exactly what I try to convey to my students both on campus and online. Your goal should be to train yourself, be the best musician you can be, start listening, really listening, and learn your tools so well that they fall away. You don’t want to struggle inserting plugins and routing to busses, you want to intelligently and musically assess what your music needs and know how to get the sound you are looking for. You’ll be amazed what a freeing experience it is to be in a studio and just know how to accomplish a creative vision. It’s kind of like the first time you realize you actually can play that scale or sight-read a chart, because afterall, it IS all about the music!

In Lesson 3 of the Pro Tools 101 course, the students step through an exercise where they investigate how files are stored when recording into a session. It is always a good idea to know where your files are and Pro Tools makes it easy to keep everything organized. One of the tasks in the lesson though, demonstrates what happens when you’ve recorded audio and then neglected to save! The good news is, as long as you didn’t UNDO the recording it will still create and store the new audio files for you. That’s great news for someone to hear! Especially if they’ve just recorded an incredible, once in a lifetime take!

After the initial “Oh thank goodness that audio file exists somewhere” sigh of relief, the next question is always, “Well, how do I get that back into my session?” There are two basic ways, the labor intensive manual way and the sleek and smooth automatic way. The labor intensive way requires that you manually add the audio back to the session and then play around in slip mode and/or with nudge as you try to make the audio play in sync with the initial recording. This can be very easy to do if you started the recording at the beginning of the session or on some known bar line or timing reference. Just drop the sound file back on Bar 2 beat 3, or at 1:00 into the song and everything is ready to go!

But what if you just punched into record when you felt the time was right and you don’t know where your recording should sit in the timeline? That is where Pro Tools’ timestamping function comes in handy. Pro Tools is watching your back, without you perhaps knowing, the application actually kept a record of where you recorded that audio! Using the SPOT mode available within Pro Tools you can simply import the audio into a session and place it back in a track at the same point that it was recorded at. Take a look at the dialogue box that appears when you drop a file on the edit window while in Spot mode:

Notice how the program knows where the file was originally recorded. By pressing the triangle button to the right of the original time stamp Pro Tools will set the start point of the spot mode to match the original time (in this case Bar 5 Beat 4 Tick 955 will replace Bar 9 Beat 2 Tick 444). Also notice that you can, during the course of editing a project, create a user time stamp, and then use that user time stamp as the reference for Spot mode. The timestamp function is found in the Region bin menu inside Pro Tools.

So this all sounds perfect, right? Well, as in all things that have to do with computers saving you time, there are some catches. The timestamp does not always travel between different DAWs and sometimes not even between audio files created with the same program.

The timestamp function is one that is implemented in a few different ways. Some audio files themselves can carry their timestamp with them via an area known as MetaData, but not all. There are times when you will import a sound file that does not have timestamp information. In those cases you will need to revert to your ears and your own musicality to place your audio in the right position, but it is always worth the effort to see if the file can tell you where it was recorded, this trick alone has saved me from hours of manual placing and nudging on many occasions!