You have probably heard the old adage that any publicity is good publicity. While that may apply to “good” as well as “bad” I have always leaned towards the former as the preferred option. That being said I would like to show you a simple and fun way to help promote yourself as a Pro Tools operator/engineer/producer and it only costs a little bit of your time.

When working in the studio I always seem to have the best intentions to take a few pics of artists I am working with to throw on my website, etc. but I invariably concentrate on the workflow, which is always the priority, and forget to take them. However, a few months ago I was tracking some solos on a project with producer Remington Rafael, artist Missoni Lanza, and guitarist Andy Timmons. Andy is a good friend and a phenomenal musician on Steve Vai’s label Favored Nations. (www.andytimmons.com) We were laying a solo in my control room with Andy’s amp remotely wired when I thought, oh yeah, I should take a picture to immortalize the moment. I pulled out a lo-end digital camera, turned around, and instead of taking a still I decided to shoot a short video clip of him soloing at the end of this tune. No biggee. I watched it later and thought “well, it sounds pretty horrible from the little mic in the camera, doesn’t really look all that great, but I am still glad I captured the moment”.

I eventually finished the project and on that cut we opted to keep it in more of a “single” runtime format and hardy used any of the vamp out in the final mix. :-(
Later I remembered the video clip and thought it might be fun to extend the mix out and find that solo take and marry it to the clip. Simple enough.

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First I imported the clip into Final Cut and made a little “music video” style credit, exported a .mov file, and then imported that file into Pro Tools. It was easy to sync it to my session by zooming in on the waveform displays of the existing tracks and the reference audio from the .mov file and nudging the video and ref audio until it was “in phase” with the current session tracks.

Next I searched through the guitar tracks and found the take that matched what Andy played on the video clip. The only automation I needed to change was to extend the “fadeout” to the end of the vamp and then print a mix to a stereo track in Pro Tools. (I always prefer mixing to internal tracks over using the “bounce to disc” engine).

Lastly it is a simple step to export a new quicktime .mov file with the new mix by going to to the “file dropdown menu, then to “bounce to” and then “QuickTime Movie…” (make sure that your “bounce source” matches the output channel of your stereo mix) and thereby create a video clip that sounds way better than the “camera audio”. If you need to make the file smaller in size you can always use an inexpensive program like 4Media Video Converter to compress it to a different file format. Then it’s just a matter of placing it on a social network or two, or your website, or just email links to the file to help spread the word about what it is that you do and it’s a great example of you “doing it”. Bottom line, any avenue that you can travel to help promote yourself is a good thing.

So long for now and Happy Mixing.

Johnny Marshall
producer/engineer/Pro Tools instructor