takes, comps and colours

[Sunzate]

Hey everyone

I've been doing a lot of vocal comping lately, and wondered if you had any advice on coloring regions to speed the process.

If I have 10 takes of a vocal, I'd like all 10 regions to be a different colour, so that when I comp the track, I see where the original regions came from.

However, I haven't been able to get Pro Tools to colour each playlist differently, automatically. I have to manually color each region before doing my comp.

Is there a setting that will color each region with a different color?

Cheers
Adam

[priorytools]

You need to look at the playlist lanes. .

Select the track you're comping in the edit window. Make a new blank playlist. This will be your comp. With the track still selected hold ctrl + cmd, then use the left arrow to open the takes / lanes. Each lane / take will be a different colour. . To hear each individual take you solo it. .
It's a good method for comping. .
Read up on it in the manual. .
Good luck . .

[vinlance]

Good stuff!

I agree with priory tools. I believe when you use the playlist lanes, each take are different colors. But I wanted to share what has worked for me overall, in regards to the whole comping thing.

Everyone has a method that works best for them in regards to comping. I do a lot of vocals. The first thing I do is create 2 vocal tracks in the edit window, I color them GOLD because the vocal takes that I end up moving to these tracks usually are the final and best sounding vocal takes. I use two Gold tracks because of overlapping vocals. Then I create another track, the color will be orange (close to Gold but not quite), and this is the track that I record all Lead Vocals on. I label this track depending on where I am in the song. So if I am working on Verse two. I will call this track LDVoxV2R, which stands for "Lead Vocals Verse 2 Record." If I go to Verse 3, I just change the label to "LDVoxV3R." Very simple for me. Depending on the vocalist, on the first verse for example, we might do 35 takes of the first phrase in loop record, or quick punch, doesn't matter, and 20 takes of the second phrase, etc. When we're done I open the playlist drop down (remember I'm still using the orange "recording" track for this), and I start comping phrase by phrase, or sometimes word by word even. I solo each playlist, then when the artist/producer are happy with a phrase or word, i SELECT the phrase or word, and hit the arrow button and it promotes that particular selection to the top. I continue to move on down the timeline comping, until I have a full verse complete. I usually do all the clean up (crossfades, etc) after the fact, unless the comp is bothersome to the client. Remember, I'm still comping on the orange, and the goal is to get the entire comp up to the GOLDEN colored Vocal Lead track(s). When the entire verse is done, I just do a copy from the orange track to one of the two gold tracks. I'm very very fast doing it this way, but so are many other PT's guys doing it THEIR way. :) Just find out what works best for you. Hope this helps out a bit.