How to Use Pro Tools: Grouping

One little, a little something that we are going to share with you here is setting up groups when we mix. Now basically what that means is taking two tracks or 20 tracks, whatever it is, and grouping the faders together. So first is if we take a look at our screen here, you see we have a room left in the room mike. Now, these are the room mikes on the drum kit. So, we have two faders but we want those faders to be even in it together because the sound is equal, right, and we really want them pretty much balanced at all times, so let us set up a group and we are going to show how to that. We are going to highlight the tracks that you want into one group, so if you click one and you shift click the 2nd one, I see that they are both are on now, right. Now you could click as many as you want to be in your group. We are just going to pair-up the room lights here. So, we click room left, shift-click room light and we got apple G for group and that pulls-up the front new group. So, we will call this rooms, makes sense, yeah. Now, as you can see here this gives us a little group letter and, so one of the faders controls both, exactly, in this way they are both equal; equally louder, equally low. And, mix groups also applies to other groups, you could have your mix groups set up and your other groups set up now. I will give you a little 1st scenes of that and where that really comes in to play. Let us say, we want to edit, let us say we will just take the room lights for example and let us say we want to trim the room light for whatever reason and we have more than one track that we want to edit the same way if we have a group, if you take a look at our screen here. Only high light and highlights all the tracks that we have grouped to do whatever it is we need to do. This way, we do not have to sit and keep editing one track at a time, instead of a time saving device, very time saving device. So, really efficient way is to set up groups in editing and mixing. In this way again, if we let say we have 20 tracks of background vocals. We do not have to sit and you can just set them into groups, to the background vocal, and they will move all together. That is really, really great thing that we want to share this grouping.

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