Absolute Beginner's Guide to Focusrite Protools on a Scarlett

hello and welcome my name is Steve and this is a beginner video super beginner video for anybody who has just purchased any of the products from Focusrite I've just recently purchased the scarlett 2i2 generation 2 and I have installed the hardware and the software on my desktop and I'm getting ready to do it on my music laptop for obviously for mobility purposes and everything's fresh in my mind I'm gonna go ahead and tell you right now that this seems like it would be an intuitive process but because this piece of equipment ships with so much bundled software it's a little intimidating and a little hard to figure out what's what you've got a couple options in terms of what software you want to run for example this one it has access to both Ableton Live and Pro Tools for my purposes here I'm going to be skipping Ableton and I'm gonna be installing Pro Tools and then incorporating a lot of these plugins into Pro Tools and that's gonna be my primary focus now reason for this video is because all of the stuff it took me a couple hours to figure all this stuff out so I figure if I can make a video that's a few minutes long and save you a few hours of watching all the videos and all that kind of stuff on the website hopefully I could help some people out I - I'm a beginner I'm figuring all this stuff out myself but like I said I just ran through it so hopefully I can save you some time first things first take your focus right you've got a red cable you're gonna want to plug the USB into the back of the Focusrite it's pretty self-explanatory where it's going to go it's pretty much kind of well you'll figure it out there's a little USB symbol back there the other end of the USB cord is obviously going to be going into your laptop or your desktop so let's get started here first thing you want to do is go to focus write calm and you're gonna want to create an account so up here there's the little dude you click on the little dude and I have already created an account so you're gonna obviously want to go to create an account you click on that I am NOT going to bore you to tears so filling in all the stupid little fields that's for you to do I trust that you can read in fill in for that pleat that that piece is pretty self-explanatory when you do that you will probably come back and see something to the tune of this it'll say welcome your name and all this kind of stuff right here with now so so the first thing if you don't have a serial number and a bundle code right here you're going to want to register your product so go ahead and click on that so the first thing you want to do is you want to choose your brand hit the down arrow I've got a focus right next down arrow I've got so me personally I've got a scarlett 2i2 second-gen I believe the third gen is out now it should say on your box but just go ahead go under current and pick whichever one is yours and then you hit submit you will end up back at this page right here and essentially where I'm at is on that customer not focused right comm slash my - hardware if you're having a hard time finding this page so basically what we've got to do first is we've got to install the drivers for the piece of hardware make sure your piece of hardware that red cable is logged in the back of your focus right product and also plugged into your computer and you're gonna want to go and the first thing you're gonna do is go and click on drivers if you've got a Mac there's no driver required if you've got Windows you just click on the second download if you click on the first download that's the release notes if you click on the second download it goes pal and I'm running what am i running here Chrome so Chrome is gonna pop up down here on the bottom left-hand corner and what's it doing is it downloading yeah it's downloading done downloading already I'm gonna click on it and I'm just gonna follow the directions yes next boom boom boom and it installs okay so once the drivers install it basically the window just goes away it doesn't really tell you much that's one of the confusing things that I couldn't really figure out there was at least when I did it there was no indication whatsoever that the drivers had installed properly or anything like that but at some point I just decided to just give up on it and move forward and everything worked fine so I'm and I was able to also see that I have the most up-to-date drivers installed another thing that was ambiguous to me is that if you're unfocused right calm and you go to interface interfaces there's a drop-down for software and if you click on it you get these kind of pieces of software and all that stuff looks really cool and all that kind of stuff but it's a little confusing because if you if you're on this page on your welcome page and you go to my software actually everything looks a little bit different and it's just kind of confusing but the question is where in the world do I start if you make the mistake of starting at the top with this red plug-in suite you're gonna download the red plug-in suite and you're gonna get very very confused because you're not gonna be able to find anything and the reason why you're not be able to find anything is because you have to choose either Ableton Live or Pro Tools and actually install that software and this red is a plug-in for that software so you really can't use this until you've installed that if that makes sense so check this out here's another thing that tripped me up I'm on a page called software I didn't know I I'm at least note that I need to get my Pro Tools downloaded first so it says discover Pro Tools I click on this and then I'm looking for a download button here's download it now but if I go to discover Scarlett I just have an opportunity to find out more stuff about Scarlett okay alright go back go back press on the other button go to your account and I'm back on this page so that tripped me up as well so what I want to share with you before you and you before you end up in an endless loop like I did is you'll figure out that ProTools is by a company called Avett and if you go to a vidcom you can go straight to this page right here and you can create an account now I don't see the button for create an account because I've already created an account so I've got a button for sign in here okay so what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna you're gonna a vidcom and you're gonna want to create an account and then once you've done that once you've filled out all this forms come back to Ava comm and you'll have an opportunity to sign in okay if you did not see a button for create an account go to this URL right here my dot Ovid comm slash account slash orientation don't forget the question mark web source equals Avett and this is orientation and here you've got an opportunity to create a master account now for me I already have an account that was actually also accessible right here in the sign in I can click on that and that's essentially what I want you to do you get to the same you get to the same page I'm gonna go ahead and log in and once I do once you create your account you're gonna end up back here okay so the question the question is how in the world do I get my pro tools and for the pro tools I figured out that you've got to go to my software and you've actually got to go to this page right here and somewhere down at the bottom which doesn't make sense to me I would have it at the top is the pro tools first creative pack and it says get pro tools first so this is actually going to take us to the Avett website when we'd click here to redeem and it's going to have your redemption code and everything like that and it's gonna go to your products and it just kind of continues you continue to go down this whole rabbit hole of different pieces of software and what's what so what I'm just gonna say is go to my products go to pull Pro Tools first and click on that and then again not intuitive it took me a couple of seconds to figure it out but if go ahead and hit show you get a whole bunch of software pieces right here okay so now Pro Tools first it's like the fifth one from the bottom for Windows so I'm just gonna go ahead and click on this I'm gonna start here and this is a big file it's 2.7 gigabytes I've got pretty fast internet and it looks like it's gonna take 15 minutes to download okay so I'll come back when that's downloaded okay so once the file downloads it's probably gonna end up in your downloads folder I've already moved it into a special folder called music this is the zip file which means we need to basically unzip the zip file I have moved mine from my downloads folder to a folder that I've labeled music it's no big deal you can do it straight from the download folder alright what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click and you probably have some unzipping software WinZip or something like that that's native to you know chips with windows - 7-zip so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to extract here and it's going to put them in a folder this is gonna take a couple minutes so I'll go ahead and speed up the film so as soon as the extraction process is finished you'll have a new folder called Pro Tools first double click on that and you have the friendly little setup button double click on him and here we go I think English is a good choice go ahead hit install alright so after a few minutes of this window popped up right here so I'm just gonna go ahead and click Next I'm gonna accept the terms because I've read them all very very thoroughly and I'm gonna hit next and install ok so several minutes later we are presented with this finished button we're gonna go ahead and click it it wants us to restart our computer which means I gotta shut everything down which is wonderful I'm gonna go ahead and do that okay so once Pro Tools installs on your computer you're going to see two icons on your desktop the eye lock license manager and pro tools first and what I want to do is I want to take each step in a linear process if you if you click on the eye LOC license manager that's just going to confuse you so let's go ahead and click on Pro Tools first and see what we see dialogue box as to which one you want to open I've already got a couple of them in here you might end up you'll probably end up at a page that looks like this where you can create one from a template I just selected rock and that's where essentially this one came from so opening up rock and boom we're in so this Pro Tools right here and if you're wondering yourself hey Steve unit that wasn't that wasn't really difficult why are you making this thing to seem so difficult the reason why it's difficult don't forget you got a window behind the window the reason why it's difficult because we don't have any of that other stuff yet all of that other stuff that's bundled and our focus right package none of it is here and if we try to go and select a plug-in we don't really have any plugins so we've got kind of the basic stuff that ships with Pro Tools first but we really don't have very much to choose from at all so so what I did wrong was I started at the top I started here and started downloading all this stuff before I ever even got to Pro Tools which is all the way down at the bottom that was a significant amount of confusion for me however if you load Pro Tools first and you understand the fact that all of these are plugins it's kind of like a no duh but this video is intended for the absolute beginner who who may be a musician but isn't necessarily a computer guru and for those of us who are not computer gurus this is not really that intuitive so it's like well what do you do from here what where do I go from here what do i what do I do but let's go ahead and move forward with getting some of this other cool stuff that we can incorporate into our Pro Tools and here's the softube time and tone bundle obviously I've lured out my code here but this is really just a link and I'm going to click on the link and essentially what I'm going to need to do which I've already done because remember I've done this on my desktop is it's going to take you to softube comm and it's going to have your license information there so that you can create an account so what I want you to do is I want you to basically I'm seeing sign in here because I've already got an account you'll probably see something along the lines of create an account so create an account and then sign in you can go to my account and now we've got all this cool stuff here I've got a saturation knob all these other things right here tube delay full license full license to all this stuff so what I want to do is I want to go ahead and I'm gonna go ahead and click on the download button for Windows so I just clicked it he I just click here it's an executable so let me click on it and I have read all of this at nauseam and memorized it when I did my desktop so I'm gonna say I agree and here we go we got a new icon called soft tube central looks like a wind is getting ready to pop up here here's that I lock licensing component thing again so I'm gonna go ahead and say install and I read this one to memorized it I agree with it go ahead and say next go ahead and let it put it it's putting it in Steinberg VST plugins' which is good that's default let's go ahead and install and we'll say finish and we're ready to start using soft tube central we're gonna hit start so let's go to the not installed and there they are go ahead and install all these guys all right so all of them Excel installed successfully let's go back to my focus right go to my downloads go to my software come down to the softube stuff there's my bundle there's my number I'm gonna dis time I'm gonna highlight it and I'm gonna copy it and I'm blurring it out because obviously I don't want everybody in the world using it who sees it on YouTube and come back over here and I'm gonna pop it in and I'm gonna register it okay so once all of them have indicated that they're installed I'm going to go over this little happy face here it says you've got two lice license activations avail for the product click on that oh you should actually click on activate and this is the laptop that I'm on so I'm gonna say activate and boom icon changes let's go to this one say activate alright so now I should be able to log back into our Pro Tools and we should be able to see some of these softube items in our list of plugins okay so now the difference is that when we go down here and we try to incorporate one of those new plugins we can actually search for the plug-in and let's see one of them was called Tisa RT SAR and boom there it is there's reverb right there one of them was called tube something or another tube so there's the tube delay stereo tube delay mono and basically those plugins are now part of our plug-in library and they are there for our use whenever we see fit and one of the things that we can do is we can get a bunch of let's let's do some easy ones alright so some of the easy ones are the ones that are native to a vyd so if we go to a vid and we log in to our a vyd check this out we can get a bunch of easy ones let's go to Pro Tools first and we can go to product and download look links and let's see what we've got here so let's go ahead and grab the sci-fi installer and it's it's a zip file that's loading down there let's come down and grab the 11 light installer for Windows let's grab in tune 12 point oh let's get the 11 effects bundle for Windows not sure what this one is right here but let's go ahead and grab this one too and as you can see these are all zip files let's go ahead and start with sci-fi we'll click on it and accept the terms and say next and say install all right so now if now if we come back over here and we look for some of the things that we just typed in what do we do we did sci-fi so there's a sci-fi right there the top one uh-huh but in tune there's in tune okay so we've just installed those two plugins that have the word 11 in it and let's go ahead and search and we'll find it right here you know e 11 hey check it out it's not there a major problem we've installed the plugin but yet we can't find it here in the plug-in and the plug-in repository this is a problem that plagued me for hours looking and reading and researching and let me go ahead and just try to save you some time right now the reason why I just installed the 11 plugins and they're not here I'm pretty certain is because I had Pro Tools open when I did the installation of those particular plugins so let me go ahead and kill Pro Tools completely just make sure that it's not loaded at all it is not so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to open my downloads folder and here's this Avett 11 light and a vyd Alette 11 effects so let me just click on light and I'm gonna reinstall it I'm reinstalling it and this time Pro Tools is not on on my computer and it's good and I hit finish and now I'm going to relaunch Pro Tools we come down here and we hit search and when we come down here and hit search there's eleven light right there and there's our amp this is a really cool plugin by the way this really gives you some serious distortion to your guitar sound so there's 11 light and that little trick right there saved me I don't know how many hours of frustration not being able to find my plugins once I install them all right so if we go back to downloads we go to my software and we kind of go back down to the bottom alright we've got that one we've got that one let's go ahead and do the red get the red plug-in sweet make a notation of this right here but I'm gonna obviously I'm gonna hide it so that click to redeem now it says red plug-in sweet right here go to software there it is make sure you don't download it from Mac make sure you download it for Windows select download what's an executable file it's already ready for us click on it and say next and the green cuz we do next no sports putting it it's putting a VST plugins' and not exactly sure which ones of these I want so I'm just gonna go ahead and include all of them we come back in here we go like this we search there's our red two and our red three all right so once again he's an activation code and now this is ready we're going to take a look at what all of the stuff does in future videos but obviously there's just gazillions and gazillions of things that you can do with Pro Tools so we'll go ahead and kill this one here there's the red to search for the red three the reser and we don't even need to UM re we don't need to do anything for that one we now have access to both of them so we're just kind of moving along the list here alright so I'm working from the bottom we've got Pro Tools we now have soft - well we've got the red plug-in let's see what we got here create drum loops and backing tracks all right so I'm back in my downloads folder and I've got this latest download right here which I'm going to go ahead and extract right here all right so the extraction is getting ready to wind down here and it is huge it looks like there's several thousand things in there there they all are okay so there's probably a better way to do this than I'm getting ready to do right now but if I go to file and then I go import I'm actually in the folder it's I can actually go to say the Blues Keys click on that let's do it in let's do it in a and go ahead and select it and boom and it creates a track and it puts it right there so and then you can go ahead and listen to it there so that's one way to do it alright so as we continue we've got some focus right drum tracks let's go ahead and grab these click to redeem it's a zip file go ahead and show all this is very similar to what we just had we're gonna unzip it go ahead and take all of these guys right here highlight them drop them in the drum pack and then we can access those the exact same way that we accessed the other loops as well so we now have several gigs worth of samples that we can get from the loop masters and the drum tracks and if we go into Pro Tools and we go to window sound bass there is a neat methodology for which to be able to find those samples easily and basically divide and segregate this stuff in whatever methodology you see fit now right now I don't have any of this stuff done I just put everything in the user for I put everything in my let's see on the desktop and music here's the drum stuff so I go to the drum stuff I'm go to further down going to heavy and just sample the stuff that's playing through the limited speakers of the laptop and then of course if I go to loop masters here's the loop masters all that loot master stuff I mean just find something so there's all the samples and obviously you can do with them whatever you choose to do with them and and and categorize them and organize them however you see fit so pretty neat little thing here alright so we've got the drum tracks this right here the B station is not supported with Pro Tools Ableton is a different piece of software that is another da W like like Pro Tools come back in okay now that now we're getting further up towards the page we've got this audio or any stuff this audio or T is actually for a 50% coupon on an individual and a 15% coupon on the bundles but they don't have any free stuff here so move up one more all right so it looks like in this particular one this is an offering for two free petals including a distortion pedal so let's go ahead and redeem this so it looks like I need to go to a website and I'm gonna go ahead and fill out all this information and you can fill out the information too and I'll I'll see you at the login okay so once you fill out the form you'll get an email when you click on the email you'll actually end up on their website here's their homepage right here login and then you're gonna end up going to user area and then after you go to user area you go to redeem and it says inter your redeem code now you gotta remember you got to go back to your focus right you'd go back to focus you got to go back to your focus right my software page and here's your redemption code right here oh this one's mine it's grayed out so that everybody doesn't use it and I'm gonna go back to audit audio tour and it says insert your redemption code here go ahead and paste it in I'm gonna go ahead and submit so it looks like I'm gonna get a couple cool pedals here and I went to my plugins and it looks like I got here they are right here I'm gonna go ahead and grab the win installer looks like it's zipped I grabbed the distortion pedal and there's both of them they're both a zipped files so I want to go ahead and show all and I'm gonna actually go into the folder and I'm gonna unzip them here so there's one and we have to remember that we've got to do the other one as well we made the decision to start all the way down at the bottom and start downloading this stuff working our way up and we're actually at the very very top of the list right now which the only thing that's left is this Excel and audio addictive keys and we can redeem our codes here's my code right here I just click on it okay so the first things first we're going to get to the Excel and audio website and you're gonna have to register I've already done that so you'll go ahead and select register I'm gonna go ahead and login because I've already done the registration portion and um after you finish that I'll meet you on the login and say here we go and then of course you can go to my account you can view your account first thing that you're gonna want to do is from my account you're gonna want to register your product key which is gonna take you to the screen right here and just and just cut and paste that in now so I'm gonna go to install and we've got to download a installer and it's a zip file so when I have a zip file I definitely want to go to show all this is a Chrome and then I want to open up the folder because this is dumped it into my downloads and then from my downloads I want to right click and extract here and here's the Installer xln and I'm gonna be installing it for 64-bit so I'm gonna double click on that so now there's the whole create account you got to create an account with xln as well obviously just click on create account and follow the follow the prompts for that I'm gonna go ahead and log in and once you log in you'll see this screen say good to go and here we go so when I logged into Excel and audio and I hit my register product looks like I've got Excel and cloud sync addictive keys addictive drums something called Fairfax and it says click to install five so and it's two gigs of space so let's go ahead and click alright says it installed five bucks I'm gonna go and say okay everything looks like it's up to date looks like there's other things that I can add as well all right so now that we've got the addictive drums and addictive keys let's go hit the Start menu go ahead and fire up addictive drums there they are right there and once they fire up go over here click on beats and we can basically test beats just by double-clicking on them and hitting the play button now these are coming through the earphones so I'm gonna go ahead put your phones by the microphone and see if those well play it off see if I can turn it up a little bit there we go and essentially what I'm gonna do with these is once I find one that I like move it over I can drag it here boom and there it is so obviously there's a million more things that you could do with those the both of these pieces of software but I'm a beginner myself and need to get a little bit more up-to-date on them before I even make any attempt whatsoever to try to demo them for you which I probably won't do for a while the primary crux of this video is installation only and basically trying to guide you through the perils of installing things in the wrong order installing them not being able to find them or and to the most basic of all basic concepts knowing what each and every single one of these things does and how essentially you can use it so I am going to be spending a lot of time in Pro Tools auditioning all of this different software be checking out all the guitar pedals and seeing what I like and how I can incorporate them into my music and sharing with you as I take the journey but for now I've accomplished what I wanted to accomplish was basically getting all of the software loaded so that you can use it alright so for those of you who are paying close attention you will realize at this point that I glossed over the eye lock the reason for that is because if you get an I lock early there's nothing to look at an eye lock and it's just essentially confusing but I've waited till the end when I lock it when I log into I lock it has all my activations and it basically is just kind of a nice way of keeping track of what software I have whether it's activated or not and what machines it's on because these licenses they vary in terms of how many machines that you can put them on so this is kind of a nice neat way of tracking licenses and I would also imagine that if there was an unauthorized if they were unauthorized use of one of your licenses it would probably pop up on here as well so that's essentially what I lock does ok so that's pretty much it that is every piece of software that ships with a focus right and we got everything installed and we can keep track of everything obviously it's a much a longer journey to learn how to use all the various and sundry pieces of software for our own personal benefit I'll be getting into all of that at some point obviously I need to get a good control on the software itself before I would ever try to go and demo it for anybody else alright that's pretty much it for me hopefully this video is beneficial to you saved you from some of the trials tribulations and pitfalls that I landed in as I was trying to do all of this stuff I think I mentioned a couple of times that it took me a couple of hours to do all this stuff now looking back on it I I think it took me a lot of hours to do all of this stuff so um that's pretty much it I'm Steve please like subscribe comment and are you people out there who have been using this software for a long period of time if there's a glaring error if there's something that could be done easier than the way I did it please feel free to speak up in the comments otherwise I am looking forward to generating much more video content as it pertains to digital recording of music music in general and everything music related so stick around I'm Steve see you later

Channel: My Guitar Journey

Views: 79,189

Keywords: Focusrite, Protools, Scarlett, Digital Music, digital recording

Id: VqVm2SXAr3M

Length: 35min 50sec (2150 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019