Pro Tools: Organising Your Sessions

Naming and colour‑coding your buses will help you identify signal paths at a glance.

Organising your Pro Tools sessions will help you work faster and more efficiently.

Many of us put a lot of effort into learning how to get around our DAW of choice quickly. Encyclopaedic knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, EuCon control surfaces and Stream Decks with custom SoundFlow macros all help propel us towards power user status, but the biggest gains in productivity are made before we hit Play, by making each session a comfortable and familiar place to be. In this month’s column we’ll look at some standard advice, and also at how some of the newer features introduced to Pro Tools can help with session navigation.

What’s In A Name?

We can’t discuss any of this without first talking about naming everything. If you are organised when you create your Pro Tools sessions, this will probably have already been done, but if you’re in the creative flow during a writing session you might not want to interrupt things with housekeeping. If you are recording your own material you’re probably naming tracks as you go; and because the files and subsequent clips inherit their names from the track on which the were recorded, the link between audio file, clip and track is consistent by default. However, if you drag a clip from the clips list onto an existing track, you’ll break the link between track name, clip name and file name.

If you’re importing audio that hasn’t been helpfully named, the Import Audio window lets you audition files before bringing them into your session.

A common way you can end up with unhelpfully named tracks is by using the (otherwise very useful) double‑click track‑creation method. If you don’t know it, here’s how it works: double‑click some clear space below the bottom track in the Edit window, or to the right in the Mix window, and you’ll create an new track of the same type and width as the last created track. You can create audio, aux, instrument and master tracks using modifiers, and if you use combinations of modifiers you can create multiple tracks of different types simultaneously. For example, hold Command, Control, Option or Shift while double‑clicking to create, respectively, an audio, aux instrument or master track.

Returning to the link, or lack thereof, between track, clip and file names in your session, giving clips custom names can be very useful: just right‑click in the timeline or clips list to rename. It doesn’t matter what name you choose as long as it’s descriptive, but the most common issue we face around naming of tracks and clips is when we’re faced...