Jon Connolly is the most sought-after Pro Tools instructor in the world.
Having been with Avid since the company first started out as DigiDesign in the early ‘90s, he quickly became their Product Specialist in Los Angeles, offering Pro Tools installations, training, and support to major studios like Warner Bros., Universal, Capitol, The Village, Record One, Westlake, and more.
Today, Jon is a Pro Tools Master Instructor for Avid, travelling the world and training Pro Tools users of all levels. He also teaches at the world-renowned Berklee College of Music. In this lesson, he demonstrates the advantages of using track groups in Pro Tools!
Grouping tracks in Pro Tools is the best way to give yourself level control over multiple channels all at once. As Jon shows us, it works great on drums or other any other section of similar instruments.
The basic idea is this: once you’ve set up a nice level mix amongst the drums, you may need to adjust their overall level according to the rest of the mix. Rather than moving each track up or down individually, you can group them by selecting all of the drum tracks and hitting Command G.
Once you’ve named and confirmed your group, all of the drum tracks can now be controlled using any one fader in the group. This maintains the relative levels on the drum kit, but lets you adjust the entire section to the rest of the mix. As you can imagine, this could work on a pair of rhythm guitars, a horn section, or just about anything else where relative levels should be stable.
If you need to go back and turn a single track up or down again, you can hold down the control key to temporarily disable the drum group while you adjust the fader.
Another way to do this is to suspend all groups by using the Shift Command G keyboard shortcut. Using this shortcut again will reenable groups session-wide once more!
