Digidesign’s new Pro Control is going to be the envy of all other control surfaces. Finally there is a way to control Pro Tools sessions that makes a project studio environment work like a world class digital recording facility.

Over the last couple of years, Pro Tools has become a more and more powerful tool for record production. The problem was that Pro Tools was thought of as a power piece of outboard gear rather than the central focus of the recording environment. Most studios that you walk into had a console, some tape recording machines, and a Pro Tools system. When asked about how the Pro Tools system was used, the answer was that after recording to tape, material was transferred into Pro Tools, edited, tuned up, noise reduced, time stretched, and then transferred back to the tape machine. When it came time to mix, the tapes were played back through the console using the console automation for level control. The major complaint when trying to use only Pro Tools for recording and mixing was that it was too hard to make quick changes to eq or set up stereo headphone mixes, or perform final mixdowns with a mouse.

During the Fall of 1997 I helped Bela Fleck record an entire album using Pro Tools. The recording, editing, overdubbing, and mixing were done entirely within the Pro Tools environment, so now we know that it can be done. The only thing lacking was a professional control surface to make the recording process feel more like a standard recording environment. Enter Pro Control.

Pro Control Setup

I recently got my hands on a Pro Control and connected it to my Pro Tools d/24 system. Pro Control requires Pro Tools version 4.2 or higher to enable the remote control functions of the Pro Control. The connection from your host computer to the control surface is via Ethernet. After connecting the cable and updating my software, I enabled Pro Control in the new Preferences menu. Instantly the names of the tracks in the Pro Tools session showed up on the scribble strips above the touch sensitive moving faders on the Pro Control. A blue border surrounds the track name on the Pro Tools screen telling you which tracks are being controlled by the Pro Control. Total time to get the whole system connected and running was less than 10 minutes.

The Surface

My first impression was that Pro Control looked and operated like one of the million dollar digital consoles that I mixed an album on just a few months ago. The basic Pro Control system consists of a center section with controls and functions that are common to all tracks, and an eight-motorized-fader section that contains the track specific controls such as fader level, mute, record enable, pan, solo, mute, insert select, automation mode, and scribble displays above each fader. The scribble strip displays the channel names, send levels, fader levels, and channel delay. Above the moving 100 mm fader is a rotary control with LED indication of knob position. These knobs are used for send levels, pan position, and I/O assignment. Eight stereo peak meters are included in the fader section. I must mention here that the 100 mm fader controls audio level with 1024 steps of resolution. This amounts to 1/10th dB steps through 90% of the fader travel. None of the low cost digital consoles have that high degree of fader resolution.

The center section of the control surface provides the command center for the Pro Tools session. The DSP edit area provides eight rotary controls with LED display area for assigning and editing Plug-Ins without going to the computer display screen. Just turn a knob to select a Plug-In, press one button to load it, and then all of the editable parameters are displayed for easy tweaking. If you do decide to perform your edits on the computer screen, there is a built in track pad and shuttle wheel to help you perform your edits, and the results are simultaneously displayed on the Pro Control. You can never get lost.

Six monitor level meters and monitor switching gives you complete control over stereo and six channel surround mixes. Bank switches let you switch among virtual banks of tracks so that you can control as many tracks as you want with the number of physical faders in your configuration. That is, if you are dealing with 128 tracks you can page through them eight at a time with the basic Pro Control configuration, or you can page through the tracks 32 at a time if you have added the optional three additional eight channel fader packs. If you are going to be doing big mixes, then the 32 channel setup will be well worth the additional cost.

A New Outlook

When you go into a world class studio with a digital console, the first thing you see is the control surface. A huge expanse of faders and dials laid out to help you massage your music to fit the final delivery medium. You also notice one or more computer screens, sometimes mounted in the console, and sometimes located off to the side. You are used to some type of computer monitor associated with the console because of fader automation systems that have been a part of studio mixing for the last 15 or so years. You view the package as an audio console primarily, with a computer to help with the more complicated aspects.

With large digital consoles, audio comes nowhere near the control surface. In a separate room there is a giant rack filled with computers, disk drives, A/D and D/A converters, MADI to AES converters, sample rate converters, synchronizers, SMPTE readers and generators, and power supplies to make everything work together. The big console in the mix room is connected to the central processing rack by either an Ethernet or fiber optical connection. The only electronic pulses flowing in this connection are the commands from the control surface telling the processing rack what to do, and the responses to the control surface that tells a knob to move or a display to change.

Pro Tools started out as primarily a computer program with displays on the screen, and hardware hung on the computer to get the audio in and out digitally. Since 1988 when the first Sound Designer software was released, the user has been primarily dealing with the computer to get the work done. When Pro Tools was introduced, third party vendors designed hardware boxes that would control things within Pro Tools, like fader movement, but they were not motorized faders and you still had to focus most of your attention on mixing by mousing around on the computer screen.

When you first start using Pro Control, the feeling of "Computer With Stuff Plugged In" is quickly replaced with "Digital Hardware Console With Computer Support." What you have is a high end control surface with a remote rack of processing gear and I/O interfaces. In this case the gear in the rack happens to be your Mac computer, 888/24 I/O boxes, ADAT I/Os, USD synchronization interfaces and disk drives. The beauty of all of this is that you can add functionality as you need it. I needed extra tracks, so I added a d/24 expansion kit. I needed more on-line storage, so I added another 9 gig hard disk.

What About The Multi-Track Recorder

So far I been talking about the Pro Control, but Pro Tools is more than just console environment, it is a 24 bit digital multi-track recorder. The only other place you can go to record 48 tracks of 24 bit audio is with a tape machine that costs more than $250,000. That will buy a lot of fast hard disks and backup drives. And try to do complex edits with a tape based digital machine. I just finished working on a song in Pro Tools that ended up with over 20,000 edits. The Pro Tools session document was 1.6 megabytes.

Pro Tools Bonus

I almost forgot one very important advantage that a Pro Tools system has over the high end digital consoles (besides price.) Software plug-ins. If you decide you want Focusrite EQ, then just dial it up from the Pro Control, and ta-dah! Drawmer gates, Auto Tune, Aphex Aural Exciter, TC Tools, Apogee UV-22, Lexiverb, Dolby Surround Encoding, Q/Sound spatial enhancement, and many other high quality digital audio plug-ins are available for Pro Tools, but you are stuck with what is built into the expensive digital consoles.

Pro Tools 4.2 Peek

I mentioned that a new version of Pro Tools was required to support the Pro Control, but that’s not all you will find in the 4.2 update. Aux sends are now stereo! Yes, you heard me correctly, STEREO. When you activate a stereo send, you get an additional little fader above the primary fader on the screen, along with a meter display and pan position indicator. It is now easy to set up a stereo headphone mix for overdubs. As a mater of fact, if you have a mix you like on the main faders, you can just copy it to the aux sends. Cool, huh?

The next new feature I noticed was the increase in available tracks. With one d/24 card you can have 32 voices and 64 tracks, and with the d/24 expansion kit you have 64 voices and 128 tracks of audio at your disposal. You are still limited to 64 channels of I/O, but I find that I always need more internal tracks for things like alternate solos, or additional vocal attempts that need track space, but don’t compete for I/O.

Conclusion

The Pro Control has taken the Pro Tools environment from a hard disk digital audio recorder with some mixing features, to a full fledged hardware digital recording console with built-in multi-track hard disk recording. Digital audio production will never be the same again.

I still enjoy working at world class studios with high end gear, but at home I can now have the same recording capability, and enough money left over to buy a small island country in the Caribbean. I just have to think of a name for it. How about Tortuga De Musica, or TDM for short.