tool thursday, with jed hackett...

Hello everyone! I have been asked by the powers that be to head up a weekly column on the esession.com blog called “Tool Thursdays”. I’ll be talking everything Pro Tools... editing tricks, session management, how best to format your audio when sharing files with musicians and engineers through esession.com, etc. Some articles will be targeted toward the musicians and artists using the site. Other articles may be more useful to you engineers out there, so keep checking in weekly and I’m sure you’ll find something useful. Most importantly, this should be a collaborative effort. I’m just a fellow engineer working in the trenches. Everything I know comes from either finding things out the hard way or advice from friends in the business, so please write in with any useful information or commentary you may have on a particular topic. The first few articles are going to be about session organization with respect to using esession.com. Hopefully they will help you all save time, hassle and maybe even money when working through the site. Once I get through some of the basics with esession.com I’ll get more into tricks of the trade type stuff. That said... here we go!

Let’s talk first about how to format your files when you are using esession.com to send them to a musician for an overdub. The simpler you make things, the easier it will be for the musician you hire to download the files and get moving with your overdubs. That will save the musician time and hassle, and save you money in the future because the musician will know on future projects that you have your act together and they won’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you sent them.
When sending files to a musician through esession.com, make some submixes so that the musician has a little bit of control over what they hear yet they don’t have to doanload and import every one of your tracks. Not all of us may have a blazing fast internet connection and we don’t want to be uploading and downloading things for an hour.

Note: Make sure you read and understand all of this clearly or you may accidentally erase your files!

1)The first thing you should do is save your session under a new name like- “Song Name” for John Doe ODs. That way you won’t mess up your session and lose all of your hard work. I can’t overstate how important this step is!! Don’t follow the rest of these instructions until you have done this!

2) Set up a rough mix as you like it, then create new stereo audio tracks and label them Drum Stem, Bass Stem, Guitar Stem, Keys Stem, Vocal Stem etc. Obviously the Bass could be mono. Make it as few stems as you can while leaving the musician a little room to tweak things as they want to hear them. Also, ask the musician if they have a preference as to how you set up the stems. For example, I work with a percussionist here in Nashville that likes to have the acoustic guitar printed separately from everything else.

3) Bus the drums to the drum stem track, guitars to the guitar stem track, etc.

4) Print the tracks. By making your stems this way, all the musician will have to do is place every tracks’ volume at zero and they will get your mix, yet they can adjust things if need be.

5) Select every track in your session that is not a stem track or the click and delete them from this new session that you created. You will be getting rid of all of your original tracks, leaving just the stems and click.

6) Delete all unused playlists from the session. In the playlist menu next to one of your track’s name select delete unused to clear out all unused playlists.

7) Remove all unused audio from the session. In the Regions menu within the Edit window choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove. If you choose “delete” instead, all of your files will go into the intergalactic bit bucket, never to be heard again.

Note: You should now be left with only your stems and click within this new session.

8) Cut and paste the first click from the click track to every stem. On a few occasions I have found this useful when for some reason the audio time stamp gets messed up. As a last resort your musician can use the click at the top of each track to line up all of the tracks in their DAW.

9) Consolidate all of your stems with the click at the front, making sure you do so from the same start point on every track. To do this, in the edit window, highlight every track from the same start position to the end of the song and choose Consolidate under the Edit menu. It may also be helpful to do so in grid mode if you are using a grid.

10) Remove all unused audio again from the session. In the Regions menu choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove, not “delete”!

11) Create a new folder on you drive entitled Esession Stems for Musician, or something like that.

12) Save a copy of your stem session, with the audio, into that new folder you just created. In the Pro Tools menu, under File, choose Save Copy In. When the copy window opens up, next to “Where:”, find the folder you just created, check the box under Items to Copy labeled All Audio files. If you don’t check that box, your audio files won’t be copied along with the session. Click Save.

Note: When the musician sends you back the tracks they recorded for you, have them place the same click at the front of their overdub tracks to ensure you have a fail-safe incase the time stamp is off. I’m sure we all have forgotten to spot a track at least once in our careers.

You should now have a very neat and orderly session with only the audio that you intend to send to the musician. If they are using Pro Tools, you can send them the entire session folder and they are good to go. If they are on another DAW, you can send them the audio files in the audio files folder and all they will have to do is import them into a session, spot them to the correct time stamp location and start overdubbing. No Hassles! No irate phone calls or e-mails!

I hope this is helpful to everyone. Please write in if you have any other comments on this subject.

Take care,

Jed Hackett
etalent engineer (editing) esession.com/jedhackett