Your most useful PT skills?

[beatlefan1970]

After five years of fumbling around and keeping the PT manual (AKA, "6000 Ways to manipulate your audio that you will never need") on my desk at all times, working slowly has gotten to be a drag.
Mousing around works, I get things done. I know where everything lives, and the I know the slow way of doing what I want. But my time to work on my music is becoming limited (the nerve of an infant wanting to be changed when I'm working on a tune!), and I'd like to be more productive.
I'm curious what others in similar boats have found to be the absolutely most useful, gotta-have-'em-keeps-things-moving PT key commands. The ones beyond the tracking-and-editing absolute basics. I'm cool with the spacebar. Anything you've found you never knew you'd need but now can't live without?
Just throw 'em out there if you're inclined.

[Dakota]

r and t for zoom in/out

alt+shift+3 for for consolidate (triangle hand shape!)

ctl+shift+k for export audio

+ and - for nudge! Get used a lot! And setting up the nudge ranges for 1 sample (tight alignment), 10ms (reverb print pre-delay size steps), 16th note (rhythm syncopations)... the time gradations that get used more often...

Are a few good'ns off the top of the head - am always watching other engineers to learn more that I don't have the shortcut groove for yet....

[lyman]

Undo and save are my most common shortcuts, read into that what you will.

[beatlefan1970]

Thanks, y'all--I swear by all those mentioned except the Export audio, as I've never needed it. Z is definitely my good friend. Maybe I'm not as lame as I thought. I'll never be Fast Fingahs, though.

[Nick Sevilla]

I think for me, it is the ability to identify a crap part of a waveform.

Usually, once I hear a bad edit or a noise, I can zoom in and only change that part which is truly offensive. As an egregious example, the excessive (more than 12dB louder than the normal) scratch of nails on a nylon guitar. Usually I always find two to three of these which are extremely louder than the rest in a take, so I do tend to bring them down. It helps with the reverb not going crazy with those as well.

I am a huge fan of trying to keep as much intact as humanly possible.

If a take is 80% good, that is NOT good enough. For me to consider a take good, it has to be 95% or more there.

Otherwise, you end up in Edit Hell. And no one likes Edit Hell.

Plus, if you look at the time / cost benefit from a purely business standpoint, you will find that getting a better performance always directly affects the bottom line in a positive way. More time rehearsing a part, less time recording it, and less time editing always makes for a better product, a happier client, and a healthier bottom line for everyone.

Cheers
_________________
The Song. Nothing else really matters.

[Bro Shark]

[beatlefan1970]

*ahem*...*cough*...ah, Bounce to disk... uhhh...OK, I admit it. Yes. What ought I be doing? This is totally new and uncharted territory for me. Damn, just when I start getting self-congratulatory about how "educated" I am, shit pops up that I don't even know I need to know. Thanks for the heads up!

[Bro Shark]

We talk about this here a lot, but it bears repeating.

Bus your tracks to a Stereo Aux. Here you can apply a buss comp, and whatever other buss processing you like. Then send that to a Stereo Audio Track. Record your mix there.

Then you can "grab" the strereo mix, and ctrl-shift-K to export it to whatever format you like. (16/44.1 WAV, for example)

There are many benefits to this over Bouncing. For one, it's way more stable and less prone to cataclysmic crashing. Two, if you have to stop a mix in the middle and adjust something, you can pick up where you left off and sew the mix back together. Three, you're able to easily export to various formats and it only takes a couple seconds once you have the stereo mix.

[beatlefan1970]

I print submixes all the time--never even thought of printing a full mix. Duh. I guess I've been lucky, never having had any issues with BTD. Hell, I've never had any significant issues with PT, my Mac, my drives... I'm tempting the gods with that comment. Data loss imminent.
Thanks again.

[mwerden]

For me it's the shift, control, option, and command keys. At Blue Man I end up with track counts well past 100 so it's pretty necessary to route things quickly and efficiently.
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resume at mattwerden.com

[beatlefan1970]

I think those are the kinds I should develop ninja abilities with--I don't have high track counts necessarily, but still, mousing around to, say, set up a cue mix--putting a send on every track individually slows stuff down for no good reason. The option key gets me in trouble from time-to-time in that scenario--forgetting to hide the aux and sending it to itself will wake a man up right quick!
Where I'm slow as molasses is editing, especially drums. Tab-to-transient is a time saver for sure. Assuming I'm doing some fairly routine editing--I will never again ruin a perfectly good day with beat detective tightening all the life out of a good performance, no matter how the drummer begs--what moves speed things up for y'all? Pitfalls to avoid? Other than letting the drummer leave before he's put in a great performance, of course. I don't know which sucks more, his complaints of boredom and fatigue ("Jesus, we've been working for almost an hour!") or editing.
That might be a topic for another forum entirely.

[mwerden]

For drum editing:

-control click with handgrabber snaps front of region to cursor
-shift+cntrl+command click with handgrabber snaps rear of region to cursor
-add option to the above to duplicate a region forward or backward
-asdfg keys for region trimming and fades
-p and ; keys for moving up and down tracks
_________________
http://www.sonicbids.com/ASlowDeathandLoneliness
resume at mattwerden.com

[beatlefan1970]