Beginners Guide to Recording Vocals (Pro Tools)

So today we're gonna make recording those vocals in Pro Tools simple no more confusion no more overwhelm we're gonna make this easy let's dive in Oh see it's doing a little something so if this is our first time meeting I am Jordan eastler with my audio Academy in this specific video is extremely important to me because I will never forget whenever I first got Pro Tools this is about 10 years ago so I actually got the physical box of pro tools and I was so excited to get home and to start to dive into Pro Tools that filling of excitement and of enjoyment quickly turn to overwhelm and doubt whenever I actually opened up Pro Tools on my computer I literally had no idea how or where to get started it took me an entire three months before I finally had the courage to attempt to run a recording session in Pro Tools but lucky for you you're not gonna have to do that we broke it down into a very easy to follow step-by-step training and by the end of this video you're going to be recording them vocals let's go ahead and dive into a point number one which is going to be creating your session this is probably what it's going to look like whenever you get your Pro Tools screen set up so I've got create over here let's go ahead and name this uh the session I personally like to just do the local storage that's going to save it on your computer but right now we're not going to create from template but after this video after we create our template you will eventually start creating this for your template file type we're going to go wave bit depth we're going to go 24 uh sample rate we're going to go 48 and then we're just going to keep last use IO settings we are going to select interleaved and I personally like to use a prompt for location that way you're not risking losing all your your Pro Tools sessions trying to find them you know places where you don't even know where you saved them in these settings they're ultimately going to give you the best audio quality and it's going to give you the best computer performance across the board now that we've got those settings selected we're going to go to create and now we've got our Pro Tools session pulled up now I already know where your mind's going I know your Pro Tools session does not look like this there's going to be some settings over here that is not showing on yours we're going to go through that I promise just trust me on that this is honestly the portion of the training that I get 95 of my questions from beginner audio Engineers this is super important and basically what we're doing is we are adjusting your Pro Tools to effectively communicate with your personal setup so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to come up here to our setup window and we are going to go to playback engine and what we need to do here is we need to make sure that our interface is selected here and this training I am using a universal audio Thunderbolt and just for the sake of the video let's go ahead and click it go yes the next things that we need to adjust is our buffer size for the sake of time we're not going to break this all the way down but I think this is very important as you're just getting started if you've ever been in a recording studio or you've ever tried to record yourself and whenever you speak into the microphone you hear yourself back and it's like a delay more than likely the issue is going to be your buffer size is not selected appropriately the way that you fix this you want to adjust your buffer size The Sweet Spot for me is going to be 256 or 128 I would probably select 128 the only time that I will go to 256 is if your computer is a little bit older and it's having a hard time keeping up with you recording and you start to notice that Pro Tools is crashing that's when you may want to drop it down to 256 and then from here you can just kind of copy my settings and uh yeah the next thing that I want to cover here is we're going to come right back up here to the setup but this time we're going to go to iOS what we're doing here is just making sure once again just for kind of making sure that your computer and Pro Tools is operating with your interface appropriately so whenever you press record you actually have some kind of signal what we're going to do is we're going to first go over here to our input tab more than likely yours does not look like this but that's okay we're going to fix that so what we're going to do is we're going to come down here we're here input then we're going to click default unless you're using an Apollo twin just like I am yours isn't going to look like this yours is basically going to pull up whatever your audio interface's inputs are so same thing goes with the output and that's where we're going next we're going to go to output and then we're going to click default and then we're going to go to bus and here we're also going to click you guessed it default bam your approachable screen still does not look like mine so let's go ahead and go through exactly how I have mine set up and the way that I've got my Pro Tools set up is for maximum Effectiveness and efficiency whenever I'm recording vocals the first thing we're going to do is we're going to come up here to this little arrow right here and we are going to make sure these settings are selected and this is giving you a lot of different options to where you can quickly maneuver Pro Tools as you start to get more and more adjusted and used to Pro Tools so now that we've got that set up the next thing that we're going to do is we need to adjust some things within our edit window so yours is probably in Shuffle I normally keep mine in Grid the next thing that I want to do is you probably just want to go ahead and copy some of these settings that we have down here I like to have my smart tool selected how I got that is if you click a little bit above all three of these options it'll highlight all of them that way your cursor can do multiple things whenever you're editing different things in Pro Tools the next thing that we're going to go to is going to be our counter window I'm going to pull up bars and beats and how I do that is by clicking this Arrow you know the last thing here this is not super important it works for my workflow I personally like to have quick punch selected and I like to have Loop selected how I adjusted that would just right click and select all right this is not the fancy stuff but I promise you as we continue to go through here whenever you click record it's really going to be setting you up so just a couple more things here stay locked in and I promise you you're going to be glad that you did the next thing that I'm going adjust here is over here so what we need to do is we need to do I like to have comments just in case you know if you know I'm sending it off to another engineer I think that's pretty neat and then we're gonna go inserts a through e inserts F through J sends a through E I personally like to have uh sends F through j i o and I like to have my track color for whenever I color code things and just a very brief rundown of what's Happening here within the inserts in the sense basically your inserts are going to be your plug-in so you know your eqs your compressors things like that your sins that's a little bit more complex for the sake of this video but if you want to check out the difference between you know sintrax and aux tracks and things like that I will link that video down in the description I think that'll be super helpful as you start to learn Pro Tools to really understand what aux tracks are send tracks are and things like that but I think that really kind of keys us up to diving into something that's probably a little bit more interesting which is actually creating your recording template we're going to start adding some tracks to our session so clearly we can't do nothing with a click track that's basically just going to be our metronome we could honestly go ahead and mute that and then from here what we need to do is we need to add some tracks so how we're going to do that we're going to go up here and we're going to go to add new track and just kind of follow along with the things that I am adding and we'll kind of start to walk through that as we go through the training so we need one stereo Master fader I'm going to go over here and add another one we need one stereo AUX input and this is going to be our vocal bus we're gonna go five mono audio tracks and this is going to be where we're going to do some stuff with with our Hooks and then the next thing we're going to go five mono audio tracks and this is going to be where we start to work on the verse and then from there we're gonna go ahead and go to create and Bam now we're starting to actually look like a recording session right so what we're going to do is we're just going to go down here and label some things so you can kind of follow along here this is going to be hook recording track so the next thing that we need to do is we need to go ahead and color code some things so for the vocal bus I like to make mine red some type of red for my hooks I like to make all of my hooks purple so if you click here and hold down shift and click you can now adjust all these at one time so we gonna make those purple I purple and then we're gonna make this verse like a turquoise color color them however you want these are my go-to so that looks a lot better A lot easier to kind of follow along there and just a quick tip here this hook recording and what these recording tracks are doing we do have some uh training and tutorials basically explaining exactly the reason why we have a hope recording track and reverse recording track I'll pull that video up right now that should be popping up so maybe you want to click on it and put it in another tab or save it somewhere so you can go back and watch it it's a really cool trick or hack whenever you start recording your vocals that I think you'll really like the next thing that we need to do yes we do have our IO set up appropriately up here that we did in Phase One of this training the next thing that we need to do is we actually need to update our audio tracks and aux tracks to the appropriate inputs and outputs or iOS the way that Pro Tools to set up is you're going to have your inputs up here this is going to be the one on the top your outputs are going to be the one down here which is going to be at the bottom and we need to set up our inputs to the correct input on our interface so I know that I've got my microphone plugged into input number one on my interface so what we're going to do here is on all of our audio tracks so your hook recording all the way down to your verse ad-libs we need to adjust all of these inputs so now that we've got all of these selected what we need to do is we need to hold down shift and option and we need to click here which is our input and we need to go to interface and then select the appropriate input on our interface where a microphone is plugged into so we're going to go bam all you see how all of those changed right there now whenever we click this bam bam bop boom we got signal so we did it right so now that we've got our inputs adjusted there is a couple more things that we need to do but I want to briefly very briefly break down what this vocal bus is doing so ultimately what we're going to do with this vocal bus is we are going to take all of these audio files and we're going to send these out into one single vocal bus so think about it this way say you on all of your vocals it's like man all of my vocals are dull I need to add an EQ on there well you don't want to go here and add your EQ on you know 10 or 15 tracks and have to do it on every single one you want to do it in one central location if we throw this EQ on this vocal bus and we route all of our audio tracks out right so out here into a vocal bus what happens is anything that is routed into this aux tracker this vocal bus whatever Plug-In or insert that I add on this vocal bus it affects everything that's routed to it so if I add an EQ here it's affecting all of these tracks that are routed into this vocal bus so we need to set that up though so the first thing that we need to do is we actually need to make an input we're gonna go bus and we're gonna go bus one and two but we're gonna rename it so we're gonna right click here rename and we're gonna go vocal bus so now we've got something to actually route things out into so we need to Route these out into the vocal bus we've got all these selected again we're going to hold down shift and option we're going to go here to our output instead of going to interface like we did with input we're going to go to bus we're going to select vocal bus so now all of these tracks are now routed to the vocal bus so whenever I turn this down it turns all of my vocals down instead of having to go down here and adjust all of these settings we ain't got time for to do all that come on man the last thing that we're going to do here is we're just going to make sure this is routed out into the same output as our Master fader and I think we're about ready to rock and roll now like I mentioned a little bit earlier we could spend hours talking about inserts and plugins and things like that that's going to be more so for another video we've got other trainings and things like that available on our YouTube channel But ultimately the goal today is to get you actually recording some stuff within Pro Tools which is what we're gonna do so what I have done is down in the description I have linked some of our recording templates so some of these are free some of them's paid and ultimately what that's going to do is you're going to get access to some recording templates it's already got pre-made plugins you know your eqs your compressor some Reverb and stuff like that that way you're not having to figure that out on your own we've already kind of created that for you but I know there's another group of you out there that likes to really kind of understand what's happening I got to let you know about a brand new training that we just came out with the record radio ready vocals training it's a 60 Minute in-depth training taking you from point A to point Z basically covering everything that we've we're covering today but just in a longer form video not only are you getting the video training you're also getting some PDF guides some templates all kinds of other bonuses so if you click the link down in the description it's going to be titled the record radio ready vocals course so like you've seen in the beginning of the training instead of just creating it from scratch like we did this time around now you're going to be able to create it from a template and you're going to be able to shortcut all of this stuff so how we're going to do that is we're going to go to file we're going to go to save as template and the category you could add your own category you don't necessarily have to but you could for this we're just going to go YouTube training and then you can title it you know whatever you want recording template so now whenever you create your your Pro Tools template you're going to be able to create it from your own personalized template so we've made it we're finally going to create your song so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to walk you through some basic things you need to know before you start recording those vocals so the first thing you probably need to do whenever you are creating your song is importing your beat right you got to import your instrumental unless you're doing some acapella stuff you just go to file you're going to go to import you're going to go to audio and you're going to find the beat that you want to use we're going to go here then we're going to go to convert then we're going to go to open open one more time and Pro Tools is going to start rendering it and bringing it into your Pro Tools session I'm going to click OK and yeah you've got your beat imported so how do we actually start to record our vocals crazy enough it took me a couple days to figure out how to start recording vocals and Pro Tools because there's a couple things you need to do every single time that you record vocals so there's two parts the first thing you need to do is you need to show Pro Tools which track you're looking to record on basically what you're going to do is you're going to come over here and we're going to record on our recording tracks so we're going to go bam and that lets Pro Tools know hey I'm going to be recording on this track and then whenever you're ready to start recording you're going to go here then you're going to go here up here and you're going to click play [Music] now obviously there's a little bit more in-depth training about how to record your your vocals and things like that in this video you should be seeing it pop up right about now this video is going to give you different tips and tricks on how to really maximize your recording sessions and then last but not least what we got to do now is we've got to export our songs so say you've got all your recording done we've got to export Our Song in a certain way so what we're going to do is in Pro Tools we're going to go to file we're going to go to bounce mix we are going to you know name it whatever we want to name it these scenarios I'm just going to export a MP3 you're going to make sure you've got the appropriate output selected I normally just go output and select the output that I've got selected on my master fader here and then I like to go 44 1 and we're just going to save it to our desktop and we're gonna go bounce and then we're going to go okay so at this point there's clearly two types of people there's people that's about to click off the video then there's others that have enjoyed the video but want a little bit more in-depth training if you want a little bit more in-depth training we've got the record radio ready vocals Pro Tools training that's linked down in the description but if you're the kind of person that just wants to know the basics you just got all the basics hey if you have not yet I would highly suggest considering hitting that subscribe button because we're coming with all the heat we're gonna keep pumping it out helping you become the audio engineer that you desire to be along your journey we cannot wait to catch you here soon but until then I'm getting out of here [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: MyAudioAcademy

Views: 53,780

Keywords: pro tools, pro tools tutorial, pro tools for beginners, how to record in pro tools, how to record vocals in pro tools, how to record vocals for beginners, how to record rap vocals in pro tools, how to record pop vocals, how to use pro tools, avid pro tools, pro tools recording vocals, pro tools for beginners 2022, pro tools 2022, pro tools recording, how to record on pro tools, how to record pro tools, how to record on pro tools for beginners, how to record on pro tools 2022

Id: M_vwTAJkUdM

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022