How to Prep a Pro Tools Session in 5 Minutes (Instead of 45)

The short answer

To prep a Pro Tools session in five minutes, you need three things: a mix template with fixed destinations for every instrument family, track presets that load plugins and routing in one action, and an automation layer such as Soundflow that fires both from a single button. Chris Shaw uses this combination to take a raw 24 track transfer from unlabeled WAV files to a fully routed, colour coded, plugin loaded, mix ready session in about five minutes. The manual version of the same job takes 20 to 30 minutes. On 60 to 80 track sessions, the gap is an hour and a half versus a few minutes.

That is the whole article. Everything below is how.

The dead zone nobody puts on the invoice

Here is the part of mixing nobody romanticises. The transfer lands. You open it. There are 44 tracks called Audio 1 through Audio 44, two of them are silent, one is a talkback mic somebody forgot to delete, and the overheads arrived as two mono files because of course they did.

And then you spend 45 minutes doing data entry.

Naming. Colouring. Setting outputs. Building busses. Dragging tracks into some kind of order. Instantiating the same four plugins you put on every kick drum you have ever mixed. By the time you hear the song properly you have burned the best hour of your attention span on clerical work, and the client thinks you have been mixing.

Chris Shaw has been doing this long enough to get properly annoyed about it. His fix is not a productivity hack. It is architecture.

Step 1: the template has to have addresses

Automation only works if there is somewhere to send things. Chris runs a roughly 80 track Pro Tools mix template built to swallow anything a client throws at him: two full drum kits, percussion, horns, strings, acoustics, electrics, samples, loops, lead vocals, stacked background vocals.

That sounds like overkill until you realise the size is the point. Every instrument family has a permanent address. The bass always lives in the same place. The overheads always land in the same folder. That is what makes a script possible, because a script cannot improvise.

He also stole one of the best navigation tricks in the business from a Carlos Santana session that arrived with 250 tracks and no folders. The engineer had inserted empty MIDI tracks named with rows of dashes, purely as visual separators in the track list. Now Chris does the same. When he is hunting for the bass, he does not read 80 track names. He reads six separator labels and jumps.

VCAs get a percent sign in front of the name, so on an S3 control surface everything beginning with % is instantly identifiable as a VCA. Small trick. Saves a thousand tiny decisions a day.

One more piece of housekeeping that is not really housekeeping: DSP hungry UAD plugins like Ocean Way Rooms, the EMT plate and the AKG spring sit at the very top of the session. Plugins load top to bottom, so the expensive ones grab their DSP first and you stop getting "insufficient resources" halfway through opening a session.

Step 2: track presets are the real workhorse

A Pro Tools track preset stores far more than a plugin chain. It stores the inserts, the sends, the output routing, the track colour, the whole state.

Chris has one per food group. Kick. Snare. Other drums. Bass. Electric guitar. Acoustic. Horns. Keys. Lead vocal. Background vocal. Select the track, press one button, and the track arrives dressed: tape emulation, console emulation, an EQ roughed in, sends to the right effects returns already in place but inactive, output pointed at the correct subgroup.

Worth repeating, because this is where people get precious about presets: these are starting points, not verdicts. Chris says it repeatedly. The preset gets you to the moment where you can make a decision. It does not make the decision.

Step 3: the button that moves the track for you

This is the part that turns 20 minutes into five.

Chris triggers his track presets from a Stream Deck. Press the button, the preset loads. Hold shift and press the same button, and Soundflow does something considerably more interesting: it applies the preset, creates a folder inside the correct group in the template, moves the track into it, deletes the folder, and answers the "do you want to keep the tracks" dialog for you.

The track just appears where it belongs. No dragging. No scrolling. No mousing across 80 tracks with a trackpad and the quiet rage that follows.

Drums, bass, guitars, vocals. One food group at a time, a few seconds each.

Step 4: the cleanup nobody thinks to automate

Two more scripts finish the job.

The first assigns every VCA to its proper group, which you cannot store inside an empty template because Pro Tools will not save a group with no tracks in it. The second identifies every track in the template that has nothing in it, no second drum kit, no percussion, no loops, no acoustic guitars, and offers to delete the lot. On the session in the tutorial that was 41 tracks removed in one action, turning an 80 track template into a tight session containing only what the song actually has.

The free toolkit you can steal today

Not all of this is proprietary. Chris built a package called Track Data Utilities, available free in the Soundflow store, and it contains the parts most mixers will use daily:

• Duo Mono to Stereo. Turns an overheads left and overheads right pair into a proper stereo track, offers to carry over plugin settings from whichever side you choose, then hides the source tracks. Do it once for overheads, once for near rooms, once for far rooms, and your drum session shrinks by six tracks.
• Copy and paste track data. Copies inserts, sends, routing and settings from one track and pastes the whole state onto as many destination tracks as you like. You spent 20 minutes dialing in the lead vocal, and the doubles inherit it in two seconds.
• Clear inserts and clear sends. Inherited a session from another engineer with opinions? Blow it all out in one hit.
• Cycle plugins and cycle sends. Steps through every insert on a track one at a time and skips anything inactive.

There are two more scripts worth knowing about. One replaces Strip Silence with something friendlier: select the dead air between two guitar hits, run it, and it cuts the selection and builds crossfades on both sides automatically. Zoom in, work fast, never end up with a click where a fade should be.

The other is spill sends at mouse. Put your cursor anywhere on screen, hit the key, and every send on the selected track stacks up right there. Anyone who has tried to compare four reverb sends while dragging plugin windows around a 27 inch display knows exactly how much time that returns.

What five minutes actually buys you

Chris estimates he gains about an hour a day. Across eight mixes that is a full working day recovered.

You can spend that day on a ninth mix. Or, and this is the more interesting option, you can spend it not mixing. Go outside. Eat dinner with someone. The point of building a fast workflow is not to work more, it is to spend your finite attention on the parts of the job that actually require you.

Because Pro Tools does not care how long you spent naming tracks. Neither does the artist. Neither does the record.

FAQ

How long should Pro Tools session prep take? With a template and track presets, a 24 track session takes about five minutes and a 70 to 80 track session takes closer to 15 or 20. Fully manual prep on the same sessions runs 30 minutes and 90 minutes respectively.

Do I need Soundflow to prep sessions faster? No. Track presets alone remove most of the repetitive work, and they are built into Pro Tools. Soundflow is what removes the remaining mouse work, such as moving tracks into a template and assigning VCAs.

How much does Soundflow cost? Around $10 per month at the time of writing, with a free trial available. Check soundflow.org for current pricing.

Are track presets bad for creativity? Only if you treat them as finished sounds. Used correctly a preset is a starting point that gets you to your first real decision faster.

Can I use someone else's mix template? You can, and it is a good way to learn routing. Chris makes his own template available with the tutorial. Expect to rewire half of it within a month, which is exactly what should happen.

Keep going

• Watch the full series: Chris Shaw: The Mix Template on Puremix
• Related: What Actually Goes in a Pro Tools Mix Template
• Related: Andrew Scheps: Updated Mix Template
• Get the full library: Puremix Pro