3/14/2024 0 Comments Pro tools smart tool tutorialThere’s nothing wrong with this, but it is much faster to select it with the Smart Tool by clicking and dragging in the top half of the clip, separating the edit selection by hitting B, then grabbing it from the bottom half and dragging it to its new location. If you wanted to remove a section of a clip and move it somewhere else you might select it, cut and paste it. Denoted by a hand with a little pair of scissors, this Grab tool automatically separates an edit selection when it is grabbed. The first of these is the Separation Grabber. The two other alternative Grab tools are, in my experience, rather overlooked, but they both usefully extend the basic functionality of the Time Grab tool. Gift Of The GrabĪs the name suggests, the Separation Grabber automatically divides clips at edit selections. There are tools and techniques for even the most basic operations that can help you work faster and more efficiently in Pro Tools. The Trim tools adjust the beginning and end points of the clip (of course, the Trim tool does far more than this, but we’ll leave that aside for this article). The Time Grabber selects the entire clip, and if you click and drag, it moves it. The Selector makes Edit selections, probably while linked to the timeline selection so you get the familiar ‘what you click is what you play’ behaviour. This combination of tools gives you the familiar and most intuitive combination. By default, you’re probably combining the Selector tool with the Standard Trimmer and the Time Grabber. There is only one Selector tool, but there are four Trim tools and three Grab tools. In fact, the Smart Tool can potentially bring together 12 different combinations of other tools. However, one thing which gets overlooked is that the Smart Tool itself isn’t always the same. Depending on exactly what you do, you might find the Scrub tool useful (there’s an example of this later in this article), and for zooming duties I’m very much of the opinion that there are more efficient ways to zoom than using the Zoom tool. In MIDI workflows, for example, the Smart Tool is OK, but you’ll probably get further faster using the Pencil tool. There are some really good reasons for doing so, though. So useful is the Smart Tool that some users rarely switch it off. The Smart Tool is a hugely powerful invention, and I certainly consider it one of Pro Tools’ crown jewels. At either end it’s a Trim tool, and in the top corners or where two clips meet, it handles fades or crossfades. Over the bottom half of the clip it becomes a Grab tool. It’s simplicity itself to use: position it over the top half of a clip and it acts as a Selector tool. The bar across the top of the ‘big three’ edit tools - Trim, Selector and Grab - rolls them all into one super‑useful tool which will meet your needs 90 percent of the time. However, once the initial confusion over questions such as “Where are the scissors?” (there aren’t any) and “Where is the sample editor?” (again, there isn’t one) has subsided, many users quickly settle into editing using the Smart Tool and stay there. Lots of DAW mixers are very analogue in feel, notably Reason’s SSL‑style console, and given the lack of proper 4K support for PC users using Pro Tools, the monitor issue today is that, for many users, screens are too big not too small! One area which it took me longer to appreciate, however, is the power of editing in Pro Tools.Įditing in Pro Tools is a massive subject, of course, too big to cover here in its entirety. Those points don’t count for much in 2022. Another was the fact that you could drive Pro Tools from just two windows - a big bonus at a time when typical monitors were CRT and maybe 800 x 600 pixels. For someone used to an analogue console, the Pro Tools mixer felt very familiar: a lot more so than the Cubase or Logic mixers of the time. When I started using Pro Tools in the late ’90s there were a couple of features I was drawn to. The Smart Tool might be smarter than you knew! The Grab tool comes in three variants: the Object Grabber, the Time Grabber and the Separation Grabber.
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