0
Here's the first of a series of Tips & Tricks for us Pro Tools users. I encourage you to share your own too! Be sure to start them in a new thread, titled similarly, so I can add them to the index sticky.
Trust you'll find them useful, and I look forward to discovering what neat tricks or tips you've implemented into your sessions.
Mixer Colour Coding
This is apparently an undocumented feature that appeared sometime around v7.0, and is extremely useful to assist in maintaining your bearings when flicking between the "Arrange" and "Mix" windows.
In my situation, with over 40 available MIDI channel sources and over 40 mono and stereo audio channels, aux sub groups, instrument tracks etc., things soon become a pain to locate the desired channel in a hurry.
(Fig1. Mix window showing less-than-a-third of the mixer's total number of available channels)
To somewhat assist the problem, you'll notice there's a small tab of colour on each channel strip:
(Fig2. Channel Strip, from the Pro Tools Reference Guide)
As per the Pro Tools Reference Guide, clicking on the colour tab loads the colour selection pallete window. This is normally used to select the colour you'd like to use to fill that small colour tab on each mixer track.
(Fig3. Mixer Colour Pallete)
Looking at all the v7.0 promotional images in magazines, the screenshots proudly display colour-coding of the entire channel strips. But how did they do that? There was nothing in the manual about it. It seems this is a 'hidden' or undocumented feature, yet a godsend for those large sessions:
(Fig4. Mixer revealing around 25% colour coding)
To access it, one must bring up the colour coding pallete again (see Fig.3) and this time:
1) Hold down all three modifer keys (ie. on a Mac, it's Control + Alt + Apple).
2) Click on the colour pallete and keep the mouse-button pressed.
3) Then scroll the mouse up for more colour, down for less colour.
(Fig5. Mixer revealing 100% colour coding)
At full intensity, it's probably a bit much for most, I'm sure. I typically run mine more like the first image with around 25% or so tint.
All my MIDI tracks are coloured as per the gear they represent (eg. Yamaha AN1x = Dark Blue; E-MU Proteus 2000 = Medium Green; Lexicon MPX 500 = Medium Blue).
Audio tracks set out similarly (eg. Mono Tracks = Light Blue; Stereo Tracks = Dark Blue; Sub Groups Aux Returns = Light Red; Master Fader = Dark Red etc.)
Makes for a very logical, at-a-glance, mixer configuration. 8)
This post has been promoted to an article
Back to top
