Welcome back for another quick tip! I want to show you today how I label my tracks using short abbreviations and in some cases even symbols so that all of my tracks are quickly recognizable so that I can work as fast as possible and as efficient as possible.
so if you like videos justlike this with tips on pro tools and howto be a better engineerand also videos on how to grow and buildyour career in the audio business thenplease hit the subscribe button it’dmean the world to meand make sure you hit the notificationbell so that you don’t miss any of myuploads coming to youevery single week alright so let’s divein the computer and check this outokay so here’s uh my film and tvtemplate for a stereo mix and i alsowant to note that i work with a c24control surface which has 24 fadersand scribble strips that are kind ofsmall they don’t take a lot ofcharacters sothis process came to me from the need towant my scribble strips on the c24to be easily read i don’t like it whenthe scribble strips start to abbreviatethe words you know if i havedialogue master it’s like d-g-m-s-t orsomething weird that means nothing to meyou know or you know overhead left is ovl f t or something weird i don’t digthat sowhat i’ve done is i found the minimalamount of characters possibleto label my tracks so that i understandwhat’s going on i don’t care aboutanybody else i’m the one working so itneeds to work for meand the best way to do that is to createa system and use it over and over andover again so i don’t think about itanymoreso let me just kind of walk you throughthis a little bit and then i’m going toshow you some other things that i’vedonethat to me make my life a whole loteasier and help me be as efficient aspossibleso dx1 simply dialogue that’s myshorthanddx1 i’m using three characters four ifyou include the spaceso super super concisenext all of these dialogue tracks go toa vcaall of my vcas begin with this star so imentioned i use symbolsi think if i’m using the symbol inconjunction with a colorit’s just one more thing for me to seeand immediately knowexactly what it is that i am looking ati don’t need to write dxand then vca so instead of writing vcai have my star and i know i don’t careif anybody else knows i’m workingright this has to make sense for youwhoever’s working the project has to bethe most comfortableso figure out your way for me star meansvcx i didn’t figure that out on day onei just decidedi’m gonna pick some symbols and this iswhat i landed on underneath that i’vegottwo reverb uh returns andall of my effects returns and sendsi don’t even know what these things areguys can you tell me what’s that littlelikethat sideways essie thing anyway it’slike uhit’s like under the escape key so againnot very scientific rightbut for me again so all of my returnsfor effectsare green and instead of me writing outreverb i’ve gotv and this one is just the first one dxagain so i know it’s correlating todialogueand instead of writing anything morelike effects i just know it’s thislittle squiggly thing so i knowand also you see here on my send righti’m sending to that little squiggle okayand it’s over here as well all right sothat’s one thing i douh effects for tv and film again we gota lot of effects sofx m1 m is just mono right and numberone is the first one in the chainand then instead of uh mono i’ve got stfor stereoall right and number one again and onceagain you see a starfor my vca for my effects and we’re downto foley foland underneath that we have another starwhich is again vcaamb is ambientonce again star with the vca once againthe little squiggle thingfor uh my effects returnor my send and then let me get down herea little bit moreum where are my buses here are my busesso my buses all have this likearrow pointing upward again i don’treally know what they are called and idon’t honestly really careum i just know that this is a bus and irealize iactually wrote this out you know whati’ve got another template where i don’tactually write this outjust this it’s just um without the busthat’s funny i think i pulled up an oldtemplate and you’ll see you know thesends againthe little arrow so i know see just likethis it’s just going to dx i know it’s abus because it has the arrow here’s mydmei know it’s a bus because it has thearrow so you know it’s just a smallthing but i know everybody uses thecolors and i do tooand i think that’s fantastic i don’t seea whole lot of people using the symbolsi know it’s kind of out there but itreally really helps meand if you want to get really kind ofcrazy you know what i realized lately ihad somebody send me an mp3 recentlyto work on and i loaded it into protoolsand i didn’t realize the time but had anemoji in it so you can actually putemojis in here i don’t really know if iwould do this personally but like youcould go over here andi don’t know you want like an octopuslet’s grab an octopusthere we go how about it maybe youroctopus is uh your dialogue trackwhatever you want to do i’m just sayingtry it out see if it fitsit’s only going to work if you do itrepeatedly because you need tounderstand again and again what thosesymbols areum but you know any kind of shorthand oranything that kind of condenses i thinkis goodso this is what i came up with i wantedto share it with you let me know whatyou thinkwhat’s your process for labeling yourtracks so you can be efficient are youusing symbolsare using shorthand what’s yourshorthand um what have you figured outthat juststreamlines the process i want to knowshare it with everybody elselet me know always love hearing thecomments make sure you subscribe andremember to hit that bell so you don’tmiss more videos just like thisevery single week and i’ll see you rightback here on the next one thankstalk to you later bye
Adam Clairmont 