The DAW All Media Composers Must Learn

there are three certainties in life death taxes and pro tools now when i was a whipper snapper about 10 15 years ago when the whole world was starting to adopt pro tools you would go into dubbing theaters and they'd use systems like pyramix or sadie nuendo even but gradually over time pro tools has become the dominant force all roads end at pro tools and whilst there may be alternatives for your workflow there will be a point at your career in which you will be sat in front of pro tools i guarantee it i often when meeting students say that of the multitude of things that you can learn i would say pro tools and doing business plans are absolutely crucial now many of you have noticed that i've got a new screen and that's because i've got a new computer so i thought i'd take you through my workflow using this new environment but also how i synchronize logic pro tools and work between the two doors the mac i've now got is one of these bought for me by spitfire i may hasten to add and she's a chunker that's for sure now the reason why spitfire wants me to have a very powerful mac pro is they want me to push the boundaries of the possibilities of sampling so our libraries become as future proof as possible so this is very much a business investment have i noticed a market improvement in performance i would say not to be honest but i am working on quite a large chunky template you'll see the number of instances of contact that i have so i guess the main difference for me is it's really weird as someone who has grown up as computers and doors have grown up that it just doesn't kind of grumble at any points whatsoever the screen i'm using it's just a tele and it's one of these sony kd48a9 48 inch i wouldn't go any bigger than that you can see that i've got well maybe you can't see but i've got clear sight lines to both my speakers it's going to be problematic when i convert the studio to 5.1 later this month because i'm going to have to put a center speaker above it so it is a little tall for my studio what i do love about it though is it's the best of all worlds it gives you this kind of ultra wide sensation but also you've got your full depth of field being used and i'm someone who was used to working on multiple screens but i've actually really enjoyed working this way i've just this minute sent off first pass of this feature length score with this new workflow and i have to say i'm absolutely delighted about it what i like about it is it's an accurate representation of our jobs the underling here is actually the work of a composer i work and write and orchestrate and produce in logic and that all seeing eye the sauron that is pro tools is basically responsible for us as heads of department everything i do gets delivered on pro tools everything i work on gets mixed on pro tools and there are alternatives as i said before two pro tools as something to run your picture and your cues and your temp and your dialogue and all of that kind of stuff but there will always be a point whether it be you sitting at a dub where there will be a music edit that needs to happen and if you don't know how to use pro tools you'll have to rely on other people who may not be music editors to edit your music so how does it work well basically pro tools is synchronized to logic if we look at my audio midi use an iac driver in midi studio and i think that it's just it's in there i think i i didn't create it from what i can remember and what we're then doing is if we just go to our synchronization setting we've got midi and it's just one of these things that you can pick out here and yes i have got a ssl 5 midi thing which i'll talk about in another show so basically i'm sending midi clock mtc out of the isc driver bus and you just need to make sure we're working this is film so in the uk we work at 24 frames per second and we just need to make sure within pro tools that that is also set up as well so we've got our time code set at 24 there and if we go into our peripherals synchronization we can see we've got an isc driver selected there just put it into synchronization here and just hit play here there's a little lag off it goes now why do i love working in this system well pro tools is fantastic at handling multiple reels so we have real ones starting in hour one real two and hour two etc etc what i love about having it synchronized and not having just like a separate door session that you load your cues into is that i can as you as you heard there the outgoing queue when we're checkerboarded so let's have a look here so this is the outgoing queue [Music] and there's the incoming queue and conversely if i'm going out and into a queue i can hear the incoming queue i control my dialogue and effects and i've got my temp score down here but also if we click on the all group i can then also change between different cuts to cross-reference them we're working on a locked picture fortunately on this one so got the picture up here got the pro tools mixer up here if i just want to adjust the level of dialogue but i just tend to work with dialogue as master and i never ever move this knob off this nominal position that i like monitoring at which is um i would say the loudest scream in the film will be just on that verge of uncomfortable to the ears as it would be kind of in in the cinema i keep it on that one volume so i have a sense of relative levels and this is what's great with working with pro tools in this manner is it really does give you a visual and sonic sense of the narrative arc of the entire piece so we're not just tucked into individual cues in extremis we're thinking about the whole picture and by holding this down to the same volume i really get a sense of well i want this q to be the loudest q this needs to be this is early on this needs to be a quiet uh cue and what's great about having pro tools here and directly above is i can cross-reference um different cues different bits of music quickly polish up on a chord sequence that kind of stuff because i don't read music and i don't really have a good sense of music theory now with using this screen something i've also experimented with is spaces which you access via mission control and this takes me to my dashboard which i can actually just click on by going between the various applications if i want to go into the finder that flips to this and i'll just take you through this so this is my composer window so these are the different logic cues and when i update them myself i go up a point value and when the director has comments i go up a whole version number and you'll see that i've not basically the director hasn't had a look at this so every time i go up a version i put the old ones in olds there which really does build up these these kind of logic monoliths are absolutely enormous so what i simply do is bounce out eq and i do it in real time so that i can use my external reverbs i'm using a tc6000 on this score and then it goes into the bounces folder and then i copy it across on into the pro tools folder so i'll often purge the bounces and these will just be the current audio files within pro tools and then it's just simply a matter of importing audio this has been moved over already and where is it the red caps attack version 1.2 i think i'm working on add and then that then simply spots in boom back to my dashboard we've got my composer land um logic file we've got my pro tools land the hod land so you see i've got my dialogue effects and temp scores here's some outputs i've just made of the film so the movie's gone to the director and the wavs have gone to the various heads of department and this very important is a cloud backup and i just every time i update a file i back it up to the cloud and pull the old one into olds there and finally last but by no means least is the spotting notes these are just spotting notes at the moment it hasn't been fully formed into a cue sheet which then becomes an absolute it's my kind of bible for the production so when i'm working on one offs short form or say for example inside number nine i'll work solely on logic and we'll have the convenience of being able to scrub around the picture and hit cuts that kind of stuff but the minute i go into multi-episodic or feature film which is multiple reels i will switch to the overlord that is pro tools to help me with this overarching narrative arc i think it's absolutely crucial but moving on pro tools then becomes this absolute beast you'll see if we go down here we've got all these tracks so everything is pre-rooted within logic to basically create multi-tracks and also playback stems and then these will go into this master session but as separate playlists so basically eventually we'll have a list of playlists which will match these queue numbers here with all of the multi-tracks in and the reason for doing all of the multi-tracks into a kind of master session is to keep it absolutely consistent so whenever year a piano it's coming out of that piano track and then basically what you do is divide it into separate cues and basically import the midi file from logic so that you've then got the tempo and meter information within pro tools it's quite a complicated process so about this film uh it's very exciting it's the first film that spitfire audio has actually funded the score for and in return we're able to really deep dive into how i've gone about creating the score so do subscribe to my channel and ding that bell if you want to be notified the next time i put a bell up this is going to be a major new it's almost like kind of virtual ghosting sitting in watching how a score is made from start to finish including all of those complicated processes that i described at the end of creating the score within logic and how we get it into pro tools so if you do have any questions stick them in the comments down below and i'll endeavor to answer them i'm looking forward to a lot of you going it's rubbish you don't need processes you can do it with this that and the other i promise you in the professional domain you will come in contact with pro tools and you don't want to be a fish out of water when that happens what i like about working with pro tools is it means that i really can kind of use it to a fairly proficient level and if i need to jump on whether it be in a dub or whether it be in a session i'm not a fish out of water i can actually handle the beast that is sauron pro tools see you next time

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 55,864

Rating: 4.7003021 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: YLayIcGWsDQ

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021